Night and Fear

I

Jack Hollinger, U. S. N., up from Yokohama on a forty-eight-hour liberty junket, said, “Shoo!” he swung his arms wildly in a mosquito-squatting gesture. He was squatting cross-legged on the floor in a little paper-walled compartment of the House of Stolen Hours, which was situated in one of the more pungent alleys of the Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s tenderloin. Before him were an array of thimble-sized saki cups. All of them were empty, but Hollinger hadn’t worked up much of a glow over them. A warm spot that felt no bigger than a dime floated pleasantly but without any particular zest behind the waistband of his bell-bottomed white ducks.

He tipped his Bob Davis cap down over one eye and wigwagged his arms some more.

“Outside,” he said. “Party no good. Party plenty terrible.” He made a face.

The geisha ceased her stylized posturing, bowed low and. edging back the paper slide, retreated through it. The geisha who had been kneeling, to twang shrill discords on her samisen let her hands fall from the strings. “Me, too?” she inquired. And giggled. Geishas, he had discovered, giggled at nearly everything.

“Yeah, you too,” said the ungallant Hollinger. “Music very bad, capish? Send the girl back with some more saki. And try to find something bigger I can drink it out of!”

The slide eased back into place after her. Hollinger, left alone with his saki-cups and the dancer’s discarded outer kimono neatly roiled up in the corner they seemed to wear layers of them — scowled at the paper walls. Presently he lit a cigarette and blew a thick blue smoke-spiral into the air. It hung there heavily as if it was too tired to move against the heavy staleness of the room’s atmosphere. Hollinger frowned.

“Twenty-four hours shore-leave left and not a laugh on the horizon.” he complained. “What a town! I shoulda stayed on the of battle-wagon and boned up on my course on how to be a detective. Wonder if I passed the exam I sent in from Manila?”

The racket in the public rooms up front, where they had been playing billiards all evening, seemed to have grown louder. He could hear excited shouts, jabbering voices that topped the raucous blend of phonograph-music, clicking roulette-wheels, rattling dice-cups, and clinking beer-glasses. Somebody had started a fight, he guessed. Those Japs sure lost their heads easy. Still a good fight might take some of the boredom out of his bones. Maybe he’d just— Nix. He’d been warned to stay out of trouble this trip.

They were taking a long time with that saki. He picked up a little gong-mallet, and began to swing it against the round bronze disk dangling between two crosspieces. He liked the low sweet noise.

There was a sound of feet hurrying across the wooden flooring now, as though a lot of people were running from one place to another. But it remained a considerable distance away, at the front of the big sprawling establishment.

Something whisked by against the outside of the paper screen walling him in. Like the loose edges of somebody’s clothes flirting past. The light was on his side, it was dark out there, so he couldn’t see any shadow to go with it. Just that rustling sound and the hasty pat-pat of running feet accompanying it. Whoever it was, was in a big hurry—

The pat-pat went on past until it had nearly died out, then turned, started back again quicker than before. Then it stopped right opposite where he was. There was an instant’s breathless pause...

Then the slide whirred back and a blond girl stumbled in toward him, both arms stretched out in mute appeal for help. He was on his feet by the time she’d covered the short space between them. He got a blurred impression of what she looked like as she threw herself against him, and stood panting and trembling within the circle of his arms.

She was all in. Two or three flecks of red splattered the front of her gold evening gown — even her dress was out of place in a spot like this. She hadn’t any shoes on, but you always had to leave your footgear at the door when you came in. Her blond hair made a tangled shimmer around her head and her attractive face was contorted with sheer panic. Her breathing was the quick, agonized panting of a hunted thing.

Hollinger looked down into her eyes — and whistled. He could tell by the contraction of the pupils that she’d been drugged. An opium pill, maybe, or morphine. He couldn’t be sure whether it hadn’t taken effect yet or she was just coming out of it.

Sound suddenly broke from her lips and she sobbed against his shoulder. “Say you’re real. Tell me I’m not seeing things!” Her fingers pressed against his chest. “Hide me! Don’t let them get me! They’re after me but I didn’t do it... I know I didn’t do it!”

He had squared off toward the opening in the slide, because the trampling of feet was coming this way now and he wanted to be ready.

She pulled at his blouse wrinkling it in her fingers. “No, don’t fight them. Don’t you see — that would be the worst thing you could do. It’s not just people, it’s the police—!”

Police? Hollinger swore. He took a quick step over and slammed the slide shut. He kept his hand on it tentatively, as though not sure of what he was going to do yet. He’d get the brig sure if he tangled with them, after the warning they’d been given on shipboard. But — this girl. Well, she was a girl, she was American, she was in a jam. He had to help her — he wasn’t any heel.

“What’re they after you for?” he asked. “What did you do?”

“They think I — murdered the man I came in with. I found him stabbed to death just now — right in the room with me when I... I woke up. I know — it sounds silly. They’ll never believe it.” She gestured helplessly toward the crimson flecks on her bodice. “This blood all over me — and the dagger in my lap when they came in— Oh please, get me out of this awful place! I know I didn’t do it. I know I couldn’t have—”

He eyed her ruefully.

She seemed to sense what was passing in his mind. She smiled wanly. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t anything like that. I’m not— The man was my fiancé. We were going to be married tomorrow. We were slumming. We stopped in here—”

His indecision didn’t last long. There wasn’t time. The oncoming shuffle of feet had stopped right next door. Hollinger grabbed up the geisha’s discarded robe. “Get into that kimono quick. They’ll be here in a second — maybe we can swing it.” He jumped back to where he’d been sitting originally, collapsed cross-legged on the floor. When she’d wrapped the garment around her, he pulled her down beside him, snatched off his white cap, poked it inside-out and jammed it down over her telltale golden hair.

He pulled her against him. “Pardon me,” he said with a tight grin. “It’s our only chance. Keep your face turned over my shoulder. Don’t let that dress show through the kimono.”

“What’ll I do if they talk Japanese to me?”

“I’ll do the talking. You just giggle the way all these gals do.” His arm tightened around. “Okay, lady. This is it. Here they are!”

The slide hissed back. Three bandy-legged little policemen stood squinting into the lantern-light at them. Behind them was a fourth little yellow man in plain clothes. And in back of him, huddled a group of customers, craning and goggling.

Hollinger put down one of the saki-cups, and wiped his mouth with his free hand. “Well,” he said slowly, “where’s the fire? What’s the attraction? We’re not giving any show in here.” No one budged. “Scram!”

“You see gal?” the detective demanded. “You see yellow-hair gal run by here — ’Merican gal like you?”

“Haven’t you got eyes?” Hollinger growled. “This is the only gal in here — Mitsu-san. Go away, won’t you?”

The plainclothesman snapped something in Japanese at the huddled figure. Hollinger’s growl turned nasty. “Skip it!” The girl, quaking against him, managed to produce a high-pitched giggle. Hollinger warmed inside. A good girl that. Scared, sure. But nervy. A fine girl...

“Fool gal,” the detective snapped contemptuously. His gaze rested on the saki-cups. He smiled drily, made a sign of wheels going around close to his head, bowed elaborately. “So sorry to disturb. Pliss overlook.” The three policemen bowed likewise, like stooges.

“Sayonara,” said Hollinger pointedly. “Goodbye.”

The screen slammed shut again. Someone barked a curt order, and the trampling feet moved on. The crowd continued to stop every few yards, looking into the other cubicles.

“Don’t move yet a while,” Hollinger said out of the corner of his mouth, close to her ear. “Wait’ll they get further away.” Just as she was about to straighten up, he caught her quickly, held her fast. “Darn it, stay put!”

The screen eased back again, with less noise than before, and one of the geishas peered in. “I bring saki you order—” She glanced in slant-eyed surprise at the form nestled against him. “You find other girl?” She set the tray down on the floor. There was suspicion peering through the thick orange, green and purple make-up that masked her face.

“Yeah. I found new girl. I like better than girl I had before. So long.” He jabbed his thumb at the screen.

The geisha backed out submissively, still peering curiously at the other girl.

The slide closed again. Hollinger let his arms fall. “All right now.” The girl straightened and her fingertips pressed tight against her mouth.

“Come on. We’ve got to step on it. I think she’s on to us. She’s going to give us away. He jumped to his feet, took a quick look out, then motioned to her to follow. She obeyed, holding herself very stiff and straight.”

II

The clamor at the front hadn’t abated any. Through a gap in the partitions he caught a glimpse of two white-garbed internes bringing in a stretcher. There was no out that way.

The girl looked at him in terror. “We’re trapped back here. We’ll never be able to get through all these people. I’m sorry I ever got you into this.”

“There’s got to be a back way out.” He threw an arm protectively about her. “Lean up against me, like you were dizzy. We’re going out for a breath of air, if they ask us. Take little pigeon-toed steps like you were going to fall flat on your face any minute. Buckle your knees a little, you’re too tall. Keep your head down—”

They wavered through the maze of paper-walled passageways, sometimes in darkness, sometimes in reflected lantern-light. The place was a labyrinth; all you had to do to make new walls was push a little. The only permanent structure was the four corner-posts and the topheavy tile roof.

They managed to side-step the police who were returning from the back, by detouring around one of the slides, and waiting until they’d gone by. A hurrying geisha or two, carrying refreshment-trays, brushed against them, apologized.

“Don’t weaken,” he kept whispering. “We’ll make it yet.” The stampeding suddenly started back again behind them. Evidently the geisha had voiced her suspicions. They went a little faster. The wavering gait became a run, the run became tearing, headlong flight. He slashed one more of the never-ending screens back into its socket, and they were looking out on a rear garden.

Apple-green and vermilion lanterns bobbed in the breeze; a little hump-backed bridge crossing a midget brook; dwarf fir-trees made showy splashes of deeper darkness. It all looked unreal and very pretty — all but the policeman posted there to see that no one left. He turned to face them. They’d come to a dead stop. The policeman was swinging a short, wicked-looking little club on a leather strap.

Hollinger said into her car: “I’ll handle him. Don’t wait — just keep going across that bridge. There must be a way of getting through to the next street over. Be right with you—”

The cop said something that sounded like, “Boydao, boydao!” and motioned them back with his club.

“Take it!” Hollinger snapped at the girl and gave her a scooting shove that sent her up one side of the sharply-tilted bridge and down the other. She almost tumbled off into the water.

Hollinger and the Japanese policeman were locked and struggling, silent but for the crunching of their feet on the fine sand that surfaced the garden path. The sailor had a sort of awkward headlock on the Jap, left hand clamped across his mouth to keep him quiet. His right fist was pounding the bristle-haired skull, while the policeman’s club was spattering him all over with dull, brutal thuds. The cop bit Hollinger’s muffling hand. Hollinger threw his head back in the lantern-light, opened his mouth like the entrance to the Mammoth Caves — but did not yell.

The girl hovered there across the bridge, her hand held against lips once more, her body bent forward in the darkness. Hollinger knew that every minute counted. Lanterns were wavering nearer in the interior of the house, filtering through the paper like blurred, interlocked moons. Their flight had been discovered.

Hollinger sucked a deep breath into his toiling lungs, lifted the squirming cop up bodily off the ground and tossed him like a sack into the stream. The bulge of his chest and the sudden strain of his back and shoulder muscles split the tight middy from throat to waist. There was a petal-shaped splash and the little brown man swiveled there in the sanded hollow, half stunned by the impact, water coursing shallowly across his abdomen and cutting him in half.

Hollinger vaulted across to the girl with a single stretch of his long legs, caught at her as he went by, and pulled her after him. “I told you not to hang around— Come on, willya?” He glared at her fiercely. She was a fine girl, all right. Scared to death and sticking around that way anyhow...

They found the mouth of an alley giving onto the rear of the garden behind a clump of dwarf firs that were streaked single-file along its narrow black length between the walls. Hollinger pushed the hobbling girl in front of him. They came out at the other end into the brazierlike brightness of one of the Yoshiwara streets.

It was strangely deserted: seemed so, at least, until Hollinger remembered that most of the usual crowd must have been drawn around to the front of the Stolen Hours by the hubbub. They ran down it to the end of the block, then turned a corner into another that was even more dismal. But this one was more normally crowded. Heads turned after them, kimonoed passersby stopped to stare. A zigzagging bicycle-rider tried to get out of their way, ran into them instead and was toppled over.

“If the alarm spreads before we can get out of this part of town, we’re sunk.” he panted. “They’ll gang up on us. Faster, lady, faster—”

“I can’t,” she whimpered. “It’s... it’s this pavement — the ground’s cutting my feet to pieces—” He was without shoes, too, but his soles were calloused from deck-scrubbing. He was two arms’ length in front of her, hauling her after him by the combined span of his own arms and hers. Betraying flashes of gold peeped out from under the parachuting kimono, were blazing a trail of identification behind them.

She stumbled and bit her lips to keep from crying out. So he grabbed her up in both arms, plunged onward with her. The extra weight hardly slowed him at all. A paper streamer hanging downward across the lane got snared in some way by their passage, ripped off its wire and flared out behind his neck like a long loose muffler. The shopkeeper whose stall it had advertised came out sputtering, both arms raised high in denunciation.

“There’s our dish!” he muttered, winded. A taxi had just dropped a couple of fares in front of a dancehall ahead. Hollinger hailed it with a hoarse shout and it came slowly backward. Hollinger let the girl fall on the seat, ran along beside the cab for a minute as the driver went forward again, then hopped in after her.

“Drive like blazes,” he panted. “Ginza — anywhere at all — only get us out of here. Fast, savvy?”

“I go like wind,” the driver agreed cheerfully. He wore a kimono and a golf-cap.

The girl was all in; the sudden release of all the pent-up tension finished the last of her control. She just lay inertly, hiding her face with both her hands. He didn’t speak to her or try to touch her. His head back against the cushion he pulled in eight long, shuddering breaths — slowly, tasting each one like a sip of icy wine. After that, he began to lick the ugly teeth-gashes on his hand.

A sudden diminution of the light around them — a change to the more dignified pearly glow of solitary streetlights — marked the end of the Yoshiwara.

At the end of a long five minutes, the girl pulled herself up. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said weakly. “I mean” — she smiled just a little, wearily — “there just aren’t any words.”

“Who does things for thanks?” he said, spading his hand at her.

She said what she’d said before: “I didn’t do it. I know I didn’t do it! Why, I was going to marry Bob. I loved him—” She stopped suddenly, confused.

He looked at her sharply, but he didn’t ask any questions. He started, though, to reach for her hand, then drew back.

They were coming into the long broad reaches of the Ginza now, Tokyo’s Broadway. The lights brightened again, but with a difference: This was downtown, the show-part of town, modern, conventional, safe. Safe for those who weren’t wanted for murder, anyway.

“I suppose I ought to give myself up to the police,” she said, her eyes restless, like an animal in a trap. “The longer I keep running away, the more they’ll think I did do it — I lost my head in that dreadful place — the knife on my lap and his blood on my dress, and that horrible manager yelling at me.”

“Suppose you tell it to me first,” he urged, gently. “I’m sticking with you, see? I didn’t go through all that trouble just to have you put into jail. You say you didn’t do it. All right — that’s good enough for me. I don’t know who you are—”

“Brainard,” she said. “Evelyn Brainard. I’m from San Francisco.”

He said something that should have been very funny, after what had gone on during the half hour, but she didn’t laugh. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Brainard,” said he, and blanketed one of her hands in the enormous expanse of his. Etiquette.

“If you give yourself up now, I won’t have time to do anything for you. I’m due back on shipboard tomorrow noon, and we’re pulling out for Chefoo right away after that. You’d just stay cooped up until the American consul gets good and ready to ask what they’re going to do about you, and that might be a week — ten days. And then he probably wouldn’t take as much personal interest in you as” — he faltered awkwardly — “as a fellow like me would, that has met you socially.”

This time she managed a warm smile, “Socially? Well, that’s one way to put it, I guess.”

“I ought to be able to straighten it out for you between now and the time I go back,” he said earnestly. “Look, I’ve answered four questionnaires already on how to be a detective. I only have one more to go before I’m finished the course. And I’ve passed three of ’em, I know for a fact.”

They had reached the lower end of the Ginza already, were heading slowly back again.

“The first thing we’ve got to do is get you off the streets, otherwise you’ll be picked up in no time. Know anyone at all here you could hole up with?”

“Not a living soul. Bob Mallory was the only one. I just got off the Empress yesterday afternoon. I’ve a room at the Imperial—”

“No, you better not go back there. They’re either there already looking for you or they will be any minute. What about this Mallory — where did he hang out?”

“I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me. He gave me an evasive answer when I asked him. Somehow I got the idea he didn’t want me to find out—”

He gave her another look. “It wouldn’t be much help, even if you did know. It’s probably the first place they’d look for you.” They drove on in silence for a minute. Finally he said, “Look, don’t be offended, but I’ve had a room since yesterday. It’s not much of a place — it’s run by a crazy darn’ Russian. But it would be somewhere for you to be safe in while I’m trying to see what I can do for you.”

“You’re swell.”

He gave the driver the address. It was a western-style building in one of the downtown reaches of the city, little better than a shack, really — clapboard under a corrugated tin roof. But at least it had wooden doors and walls. And windows with shades on them.

He said: “Wait in the cab a minute, I’ll get the Russian out of the way. Just as well if no one sees you going up.”

After he’d gone in, she caught sight of the driver slyly watching her in his rear-view mirror. She quickly lowered her head, but with the creepy feeling that he already knew she was white, even in the dimness of the vehicle’s interior. Hollinger came back and helped her out. “Hurry up. I sent him out to the back on a stall—”

Going up the unpainted wooden stairs — the place had an upper story — she whispered: “The driver saw I wasn’t Japanese. He may remember later, if he hears—”

He made a move to turn and go down again. The sound of the taxi driving off outside reached them, and it was too late to do anything about it.

“We’ll have to take a chance,” he said.

There was nothing Japanese about the room upstairs. Just a typical cheap lodging-house room, the same as you’d find the world over. An electric bulb under a tin shade. Flaked white-painted iron bedstead, wooden dresser.

She sat on the edge of the bed, wearily pulled off the white cap. Her golden hair came out and made her beautiful again. He drew up a chair, leaned toward her, arms akimbo, poised on his knees. He said, “What happened? Tell me the whole thing from the beginning. See if I can get the hang of it. Talk low.”

III

I hadn’t seen him (she said) in three years. We were engaged before he left the States. He came out to work for one of the big oil companies here. I was to follow just as soon as he’d saved up enough money to send for me. Then, when he should have had enough laid aside, he started putting me off. Finally I got tired waiting, booked my own passage, came out without letting him know. I didn’t tell him I was arriving until night before last when I sent him a cable from the ship. He met me yesterday at Yokohama.

He’d changed. He wasn’t glad to see me, I could tell that right away. He was afraid of something. Even down there on the pier, while he was helping me to pass through the customs-inspection, he kept glancing nervously at the crowd around us, as if he was being watched or something.

When we got here it was even worse. He didn’t seem to want to tell me where he lived. He wouldn’t talk about himself at all. I’d been sending my letters to the company-office, you see... I couldn’t make head or tail of it. This morning when I woke up there was a piece of white goods tied around the knob of my door — like a long streamer or scarf. When I happened to mention it to him later on, he turned the ghastliest white. But I couldn’t make him talk about that, either.

(Hollinger explained: “White’s the color of mourning in this country. It means the same thing as crepe.”)

I know that now (she went on)... I’ll spare you all the little details. My love for him curled up, withered, died. I could feel that happening. You can’t love a man that’s frightened all the time. Anyway, I can’t. Tonight we were sitting in one of the big modern restaurants on the Ginza. I happened to say: “Bob, this is deadly dull — can’t you take me to one of the more exciting places?” He didn’t seem to want to do that either — as though he were afraid to stray very far off the beaten path.

We argued about it a little — the girl who was waiting on us must have heard. Because not long after that he was called to the phone and as soon as his back was turned, this waitress came up to me. She hadn’t been able to help overhearing, she said. If I wanted to see the real sights, I ought to get him to take me to the Yoshi. The House of Stolen Hours, she said, was a very agreeable place. Then Bob came back. And although he’d looked scared when he went to the phone, he was all right now. He said there’d been a mistake — no call for him at all.

It never occurred to me that there could be anything prearranged, sinister, about this sequence of events — that it might be a trick to get us in an out-of-the-way place where we couldn’t easily get help.

Like a fool. I didn’t tell Bob where I’d found out about the Yoshiwara. I let him think it was my own idea. I had a hard time talking him into taking me there, but finally he gave in.

We were shown into one of the little rooms and told just where to sit, to enjoy the entertainment—

(Hollinger interrupted: “There’s something, right there. What difference would it have been where you sat, when you just unroll mats on the floor? Who told you?”)

The manager, I guess it was (she answered). He spread out one mat for me, pointed to it, and I sat down. Then he spread the one for Bob opposite mine, instead of alongside it. My back was to one partition, his to the other. They spread the tea things between us. Mine tasted bitter, but I thought maybe that was on account of drinking it without cream and sugar.

There was a lantern shining right in my face. My eyes felt small, like pinheads, and the lantern light dazzled them. I began to get terribly sleepy. I asked Bob to change places with me, so I’d have my back to the light. He sat where I’d been, and I moved over to his side.

Then — the — thing happened — a minute later. Even I saw a faint gleam of light, shining through the screen from the next compartment behind Bob’s back — as though someone had opened a slide and gone in there. A big looming shadow hovered over him, like a genie let out of a bottle in the Arabian Nights. Know what I mean? Sort of cloud like, blurred, bigger than life-size. Then it vanished, and the screen went blank. I was already feeling so numb, with a ringing in my ears. I couldn’t be sure I’d really seen it.

Bob never made a sound. I thought he was bending over to pick up his cup at first, but he never straightened up again. Just kept going lower and lower. I thought blearily, “What’s he putting his head all the way down like that for, is he going to try to drink it without using his hands?” Then the cup smashed under his chin and he just stayed that way. And then I could see this ivory knob sticking out between his shoulder blades, like... like a handle to lift him by. And red ribbons swirling out all around it, ribbons that ran! And the last thing I saw was a slit — a two or three-inch gash in the paper screen behind him. My own head got too heavy to hold up and I just fell over sideways on the floor and passed out.

But I know, I know I was sitting on the opposite side of the room from him, I know I didn’t touch him—

When I opened my eyes, I was still there in that horrible place, in the flickering lantern light, and he was dead there opposite me, so I knew I hadn’t dreamed it. The dream was from then on, until I met you. A nightmare.

The slide was just closing, as though someone had been in there with me. I struggled up on one elbow. There was a weight on my hands, and I looked down to see what it was, and there was the knife! The blood-smeared blade was resting flat across the palm of one, the fingers of the other were folded tight around the ivory hilt. There was blood on the front of my dress, as though the knife had been wiped on it.

(“That’s the symbol of transferring the guilt of the crime to you,” he told her.)

The slide was shoved back, as though they’d been timing me, waiting for me to come to before breaking in and confronting me. The manager came in alone first. He flew into a fury. The way he kept yelling at me — it was awful. I couldn’t think or say anything at all. He pulled me up by one arm and kept bellowing into my face: “You kill! You kill in my house! You make me big disgrace — you make me lose face before customers!”

I tried to tell him that Bob had been stabbed through the paper screen from the next compartment, and when I pointed to where the gash had been — it was gone! The paper was perfectly whole.

He kept pointing to the blood on my dress, the knife at my feet, kept shaking me back and forth like a terrier. Finally he stamped out to call the police. That was my only chance. I got up and ran, I ran the other way, toward the back. I couldn’t find my way out, I thought I’d go mad there in that place with fright and horror, but — I’d heard your voice when we first went in, saying “Here’s looking at you, kids!” I knew there was an American somewhere under the same roof, if I could only find him—

IV

“That’s the story, Hollinger. And here I am, and here you are.”

“Not on your life, lady,” he grinned, getting up and shoving his chair back. “Here you are, maybe, but I’m on my way back there, to do a little housecleaning.” He cupped his hands, blew into them, rubbed them together like a kid going to a circus.

“But they know you helped me get away. They must be looking for you by this time. If I let you go back there again—”

“Sure they know. And sure they’re looking for me. But that’s the one place they’re not looking for me. Don’t you see that? I’m going back there and find out what happened to that slashed paper. The first lesson in that detective book said that when evidence either for or against a suspect disappears from the scene of the crime, look for collusion. First I thought that was some kind of a train smash-up, but one of the officers on the battle-wagon told me it means people getting together to put something over on somebody. You say you saw a slit in the paper. When you came to it was gone. The answer is there’s a trick somewhere. Maybe the manager is in on it. Because I don’t see how they could do that in his house without his knowing it.

“Now, I’ve got to locate the exact compartment you were in, and that’s not going to be an easy job, the way those places are all alike.”

“Wait,” she said, “I think I can help you. It’s not much of a thing to go by, but— Those lanterns in each cubicle — did you notice that they all have a character heavily inked in on them?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t tell one from the other. They’re laundry-tickets to me.”

“I don’t mean that. The one in our booth was finished in a hurry or something, the craftsman inked his brush too heavily. Anyway, a single drop of ink came to a head at the bottom of the character, with the slope of the lantern. It ran down a little way, left a blurred track ending in a dark blob. It was staring me in the face in the beginning, before I changed places, that’s how I know. Here, give me a pencil — all right this burnt match-stick will do. It’s very easy to remember, you don’t need to know what it means. Two seagulls with bent wings, one above the other. Under them simply a pot-hook. Then this blot of dried ink hanging down from that like a pendulum. Look for that, and you’ll have the cubicle we were in. I don’t think they’ve bothered to remove the lantern, because they wouldn’t expect a foreigner to notice a little thing like that.”

“Neither would I,” he said and nodded approvingly at her. He picked up a razor blade from the edge of the washstand, carefully sheathed it in a fragment of newspaper.

“What’s that for?”

“To let myself in with. In some ways, paper houses are pretty handy. Lock yourself in here behind me, just to be on the safe side. I’ll give you the high sign when I come back. Don’t open up for anybody else at all.”

She moved after him to the door. “You’ll never make it in that uniform. It’s all torn.”

“I’ll take care of that, borrow something from the Roosky downstairs. Try to get some sleep and get that dope out of your system.”

The last thing she murmured through the crack of the door as he slid out into the hallway was, “Please be careful.”

“Okay, lady,” he said with a grin, saluting jauntily from the eyebrow.

The Russian, behind the shelf that served for an accommodation desk, growled, “Eh, tzailor! Is no fight by back of house, why you tell me to go look?” He pointed to the split middy. “I tink you fight youself.”

“Never been known to. Listen, I gotta go out and it’s cold. Lend me a hat and coat.”

“Sure, bott you leaf deposit. How I know you come back?”

“Here’s your deposit, suspicious guy.” It felt funny to have something with a brim to it on his head, after two years. The bell-bottomed pants were a give-away, but he counted on the darkness to take care of that. He had to fasten the coat’s top button over his bare neck, where civilians wore collars and ties.

A quarter of an hour later he was casually strolling past the front of the Stolen Hours again, hands in pockets, hat-brim tipped down to his nose. The place was shut up tight, whether by police order or at its owner’s discretion he couldn’t tell. Probably the latter, for no policeman had been left posted outside the premises. The Yoshi had quieted down. Lights still peered out up and down its byways, but the dance halls and pool-parlors had closed up shop for the night, and the only wayfarers in the streets now were homeward-bound drunks and an occasional pickpocket or lush-worker sidling past in the shadows.

He didn’t try to get in the Stolen Hours from the front, but went around the block to the next street over, located the lane they’d escaped through and threaded his way along it. There was a bamboo wicket barring it at the inner end. He didn’t bother with it — just climbed up over with a seaman’s agility and dropped soundlessly down on the inside.

The lanterns were out and the garden was lifeless. The faint gurgle of the brook was the only sound there was. Hollinger stole over the bridge, a looming, top-heavy figure out of all proportion to its microscopic measurements; he was still without shoes, never having recovered his footgear after that first flight. He obliterated himself under the uptilted roof-projection that shadowed the rear of the house, with only the heels of his torn white socks showing in the gloom.

Only taut paper faced him. They didn’t use locks or bolts apparently but hitched the frames up fast in some way on the inside. He took out the razor blade and made a neat hair-line gash down alongside the frame, then another close to the ground, making an L around the lower corner. He lifted it up like a tent-flap and ducked through. It cracked a little, but not much, fell stiffly into place again.

The house seemed deserted. Hollinger couldn’t be sure whether or not the manager slept here after hours. The geishas and other employees probably didn’t. He could hear bottled crickets chirping and clacking rhythmically somewhere ahead and didn’t, unfortunately, realize that crickets are used as watchdogs in Japan. They stop chirping whenever a stranger enters the house. They did that now. The sound broke off short almost at the first tentative steps he took, and didn’t resume.

He worked his way forward feeling his way along the cool slippery wooden flooring with a prehensile toe-and-heel grip, shuffling the multiple deck of screens aside with a little upward hitch that kept them from clicking in their grooves. He waited until he was nearly midway through the house, as far as he could judge, before he lighted his first match. He guarded it carefully with the hollow of his hand, reduced the light to a pink glow. The place seemed deserted.

He tried six of the cubicles before he got the right place. There it was. Traces of Mallory’s blood still showed black on the floor. The smeared ink-track on the lantern was just a confirmation. He lit the wick and the lantern bloomed out orange at him, like a newly risen sun.

The location of the blood smears told him which of the four sides to case. The screen out in place at the moment was, as she had said, intact. He ran his fingers questioningly along its frame, to see if it felt sticky, damp, with newly-applied paste. It was dry and gave no signs of having been recently inserted. He could see, now, that the inserts weren’t glued into the frame at all, they were caught between the lips of a long, continuous split in the bamboo and held fast by the pressure of the two halves of the wood closing over them again, helped out by an occasional little wooden nail or peg. They couldn’t be put in a hurry.

But they could be taken out in a hurry, couldn’t they? He shoved it all the way back flush with the two lateral screens, and squinted into the socket it had receded into. There were two frame-edges visible, not just one. He caught at the second one, and it slid out empty, bare of paper! But there were tell tale little strips and slivers of white all up and down it where the paper had been hastily slashed away.

He just stood there and nodded grimly at it. “Unh-hunh,” he said.

Probably the frame itself would be unslung tomorrow and sent out to have a new filler put in. Or destroyed. They hadn’t had the opportunity tonight, with the place buzzing with police. He didn’t think the rest of the staff had been in on it — just the manager and the murderer. The fact that the girl’s last-minute change of position hadn’t been revealed to them in time showed that. The geishas waiting on the couple would have tipped them off if they’d been accessories. They hadn’t, and Mallory had been killed by mistake. But she’d only arrived the day before — why did they want her out of the way, not him?...

Hollinger pondered.

There was no audible warning. But his shifting of the slide had exposed the assassin’s compartment beyond the one he was in, and the lantern-light reaching wanly to the far screen of that threw up a faint gray blur overlapping his own shadow — a shadow with upraised arm ending in a sharp downward-projected point. Seeing that shadow saved his life.

The dagger came down behind him with no whisper of sound and he flung himself flat on the floor under it, rolled as he hit. It nailed down the loose overlapping width of the Russian’s coat, bit through it into the plank, skewered it there. His assailant, thrown off balance, came floundering down on him.

They both had sense enough not to try for the knife, which was jammed in the floor halfway up to the hilt.

Hollinger couldn’t have chosen a worse position if he’d spent a year beforehand working it out. He was flat on his stomach with what felt like the sacred mountain of Fujiyama on top of him. He couldn’t use either arm effectively; and he was pinned down by eight inches of steel through a coat he couldn’t work himself out of. He nearly broke his back trying to rear up high enough to swing his shoulders around and get his arms into play.

Apelike hands found his throat, closed in, got to work. Two or three backhand blows glanced harmlessly off a satiny jaw-line. Hollinger gave that up, brought his legs into play instead. He got a scissors-lock on the short thick neck of the Oriental, squeezed.

The throttling hands left his throat to try to pry his legs off. He let them be wrenched apart without much resistance; the hold had been just a stop-gap — too passive to get him anywhere. They broke, jockeyed to get into better positions, blowing like fish on land.

Hollinger rolled over on his back, the razor-edged dagger cut its way free through his coat, remained bedded in the floor. He scrambled to his feet, staying low, resting his knuckles on the floor for a counter-balance till he was ready.

The Japanese had planted his feet wide apart like a croquet-wicket. He crouched low so that his chest was nearly touching the floor. The coppery, rippling muscles of his chest peered through the opening of his flimsy kimono.

Hollinger straightened, came up at him swinging. The right he sent in should have taken care of anyone. But it went wide, streaked upward into the air. The Jap cupped a slapping hand to his elbow, gripped the thumb of that hand at the same time. Hollinger felt himself leaving the floor like a rocket, twisting through the empty frame. He landed with a brutal thud in the compartment behind them, where Mallory had been killed. The fall left Hollinger squirming, half-paralyzed. The Japanese whirled to face him, stamped both feet in a new position, crouched again.

Jiu-jitsu. Hollinger knew he was sunk, unless he got a lucky break. He stumbled up again, weaved around warily, arching all over and with his ears humming. What good were dukes against a system of invisible weights and balances?

The hands shot out at him again, open. His own dizziness saved him: he gave a lurch to one side, his reflexes still stunned. The Japanese wasn’t quick enough in shifting position: his legs and shoulders swung, but for a second his flank was exposed. Hollinger didn’t waste the opening. He sent in a quick short jab to the vital nerve-center under the ear. That rocked the Japanese for a second, held him long enough for Hollinger to wind up a real one. He sent home one of those once-in-a-lifetime blows. The yellow man’s face came around just in time to get it between the eyes. The squat figure went over like a ninepin, and Hollinger stood swaying, his bleary eyes watchful, waiting for the other to come at him again but the Japanese was finished. He lay there gasping, threads of blood leaking from his ear, nose and mouth. His eyes stared stonily, without sight in them, at nothing.

Hollinger let out a groan and then let himself slide to the floor.

A couple of minutes went by. No one else came in. That was all to the good because Hollinger felt that one whack with a flexible fly-swatter would finish him off.

The Japanese began to groan after awhile, twitching his shoulders, arms, legs. But there was a board-like stiffness about his middle that caught the sailor’s eye. It had cost the Japanese the fight whatever it was. A wedge of white showed, in the kimono-opening, below the rising and falling coppery chest. Underclothing maybe. Whatever it was had kept the yellow man from pivoting out of the range of Holllinger’s finishing blow.

The sailor bent over him, pulled the garment open. Paper. Layer after layer of stiff, board-like paper, rolled around him like a cuirass, extending from ribs to thighs. A sash held it in place.

Hollinger rolled him out of his queer cocoon by pushing him across the floor, like a man laying a carpet. The stuff was in two lengths, one under the other. The Japanese had evidently slashed the whole square out of the screen first, then quickly slit that into two strips to narrow it so that he could wind it around himself. The knife-gash itself showed up in the second section, as it peeled free. The edges driven inward by the knife. Any cop worth his salt ought to be able to figure out what really happened with this to go by.

He riffled it out of the way. Then he flung himself down on the still stunned Japanese and gripped him by the throat. “Who was it?” he said in a low voice. “Who was in there? Who killed American fella?”

“No!” was the only answer he could get. “No!” Again and again.

“Better open up! This is waiting for you!” He showed a fist.

“No see! Man go in, come out again. I no know!”

“After what I just took off your hide? All right, here she comes!”

“Denguchi do! Denguchi do! I no do, he do! He get money for to do, he hired for to do—”

“Who hired him, you—?”

The yellow man’s eyes glazed. Then closed. The head rolled over heavily. Hollinger swore. He got up and quickly rolled the paper into a long staff, tucked it under his arm, took it out with him. Nothing more he could do here tonight.

The Russian was snoring in his lighted wall-niche when Hollinger got downtown again. Hollinger chased up the stairs past him, wangled the knob of his door triumphantly. “Hey, lady. Evelyn! It’s me, open up and listen to the good news!”

V

There wasn’t a sound from within. She must be in a pretty deep sleep, after what she’d been through earlier. He begun to thump subduedly. “Miss Brainard,” he said. “Lemme in, will ya?” Finally he went at the door in a way no sleeper could have ignored. He crouched down, looked through the keyhole. The light was still on inside, and he could make out the pear-shape of the key on the inside of the door.

Frightened now, he threw his shoulder against the door. The cheap lock tore off at the fourth onslaught. The Russian, roused, had come up meanwhile and was having epileptic fits at the damage to his premises.

The girl had vanished, with the key still locked from inside. A corner of the bedding trailed off onto the floor. One of the cheap net-curtains inside the window was torn partly off its rod, as though somebody had clutched at it despairingly. The window was all the way open. There was a tin extension-roof just below it, which sloped to within easy reach of the alley.

It wasn’t the police. They would have come in by the door, gone out with her by the door. All he had to go on was a name — Denguchi.

“Didn’t you hear anything? Didn’t you hear her scream out up here?”

The Russian immediately turned professionally indignant. “Oh, so you got girl opstairs! For this is extra charge!”

“I haven’t now!” gritted Hollinger, and the lodging-house keeper drew back hastily at sight of the grim lines in his face.

“I no hear. I tzleep. How I know you got somebody op here?”

Hollinger tested the disturbed bed with the back of his hand. It still showed faint traces of warmth. “She hasn’t been gone very long—” he muttered. “But every minute I stand here—”

Where would they take her? What could they possibly want with her? Just to hold her as a hostage, shut her up about the first murder? He didn’t think so. It was she they’d meant to get the first time, and not the man. Now they’d come back to correct the mistake. Then why hadn’t they killed her right here, why had they gone to the trouble of smuggling her out the window? The only answer he could find for that was that somebody had sent out after her. Somebody who hadn’t come here had wanted to see it done, had wanted to gloat. Who could be that interested in killing a woman? Only another woman. There was another woman in this somewhere, he should have realized that from the beginning—

He had a sudden hunch where to go to look for her. He remembered Evelyn’s remark in the taxi: “He didn’t seem to want me to know where he lived.”

He grabbed the Russian by the shoulder. “How do you find an address in a hurry, an address you don’t know? I’m out of my depth now—”

“You osk inflammation-lady at telephone-exchange—”

Not so different from home after all. He started shoving the Russian downstairs ahead of him. “Do it for me, I can’t talk the lingo! The name’s Robert Mallory — and tell her to steer the police over there fast—”

The Russian came out in a moment and threw a “twenty-five” and a tongue-twisting street-name at him.

“I’m leaving,” Hollinger called back. “Take care of that cylinder of paper upstairs for me!” He ran out into the streets saving the unpronounceable name over to himself out loud. If he dropped a syllable, it might cost Evelyn Brainard her life. He got a prowling cab just by luck. He kept on saying it over and over, even after he was in it.

“I hear,” sighed the driver finally, “I catch.”

Mallory had done himself well. His place turned out to be a little bungalow on one of the better-class residential streets, with grounds around it, even a little garage behind it and a driveway for his car. There were no lights in front, but the garage told him his hunch had been right. The reflected square of a lighted rear-window showed up against it, ghostly-pale, thrown over from the house. Someone was in the back of the house. Mallory had died hours ago in the House of Stolen Hours, and if the police were here, they would have been in front of the place, not in back.

He didn’t waste time on the front door, just hooded the Russian’s coat over his head for padding, bucked one of the ground-floor window-panes head on. It shattered and he climbed in, nicking his hands a little. A scream sounded through the house, then broke off short as though a hand had been thrown over the mouth emitting it. He waded out of the velvety darkness of the room he was in toward a semi-lighted hallway, toppling over something fragile behind him.

He ran down the hallway toward the light at the back. As the room swung into his vision he saw the Brainard girl in there, writhing, clutching at her throat, a darker head peering from behind her blond one. Somebody was strangling her with a scarf, or trying to.

But nearer at hand there was a sense of lurking menace hidden behind the slightly-stirring bead curtains bunched over to one side of the entryway. The girl, half-throttled as she was, tried to warn him with a limply outflung hand in that direction.

He caught up a slim teakwood stand, rammed it head on into the stringy covert, at stomach level. It brought a knife slashing down out at him, as if by reflex action. It cut the air in two before him. He grabbed at the tan fist holding it, brought it all the way out, vised it against him. Then he sent a swift punch home about two feet above it. The beaded strips lacerated his knuckles, but they must have lacerated the face behind them too, acting like cruel little brass-knuckles.

There was a yelp of agony and the man reeled out into the open, a short little demon in a candy-striped blazer. Hollinger twisted the knife out of his hand by shoulder pressure, gave him a second head blow that dropped him. Something white streaked by him, and when he looked over at her, the Brainard girl was alone, coughing as she struggled to unwind the strangling sash from her throat. She staggered toward him, fell into his arms with a jerky backward hitch of the elbows, like something worked on strings.

A door had banged closed upstairs somewhere.

The Japanese didn’t know he was finished yet. He was starting to inch over toward where he had dropped the knife. Hollinger jumped in between, kicked it out of his reach once and for all, hauled him to his feet by the collar of his sweater, hauled off and dropped him with a remarkable final blow.

The girl had collapsed into a chair, and was breathing with a pitiful burgeoning-out and sinking-in of her body at the waist. He found a water-tap in a western-style kitchen adjoining the room, filled the hollows of his hands, came back and wetted her throat with it. He did that three or four times until that awful breathing was nearly normal again.

“Attagirl,” he said. “You’re hard to kill — like me.”

She managed a wan smile. “The only reason it wasn’t all over with by the time you got here was that she had to get it out of her system first — rub it in that he’d been hers, not mine. She dragged me around on a Cook’s Tour of the house, with a speech for every memento—”

“Who was she?”

Her gaze fell before his. “His wife,” she said slowly, “poor thing. Legally married to him by the Shinto rites—”

He shook his head at her. “What a rat he was,” he said. He turned. “She’s still in here someplace — I heard her go upstairs.”

She reached out, caught him by the arm. “No,” she said with a peculiar look, “I don’t think so. She — loved him very much, you see.”

He didn’t at all. A whiff of sandalwood incense crept down the stairs, floated in to them, as if to punctuate her cryptic remark.

The police-watch came trooping in on them at this point, with a great flourishing and waving of clubs, hemmed them in against the wall.

“Now you get here,” Hollinger greeted them ungratefully.

“Hai!” said the cocky little detective, and pointed to the professional hatchet-man on the floor. Immediately two of the cops started whacking him with their clubs. Then they turned him over on his face, lashed his hands behind him with rope, and dragged him out by the feet — a nice Oriental touch.

They had, evidently, been playing steeplechase, picking up the traces Hollinger had been leaving all night long. They had the battered Stolen Hours proprietor, the furled wall-paper, the Russian, and the first taxi-driver, the one who must have gone back and betrayed the girl’s hiding-place to Denguchi.

The detective, puffing out his chest like a pouter-pigeon, said to her, “So you do not kill this man. Why you not stay and say so, pliss? You put us to great trouble.”

“We put you to great trouble?” Hollinger yelped.

“Iss grave misdemeanor. Run away from question iss not good. You must come and give explanation before magistrate.”

“Why, you little pint-sized—!”

She quickly reached out and braked his twitching arm against his side. “Don’t you ever get tired of fighting?” she murmured.

“What fighting? I didn’t have one good man-sized fight all night, only guys that bite you, grab your thumbs, and jump you from behind curtains!” he said aggrievedly.

“Where other woman?”

The sandalwood, like the troubled spirit of one departed, hovered in the air about them. They found her upstairs, behind the locked door, kneeling in death on a satin prayer-pillow before a framed photograph of the man Evelyn Brainard had come out to rob her of. A pinch of incense sent a thread of smoke curling up before it. Her god. Forward she toppled, as the ritual prescribed, to show she was not afraid of meeting death. Hands tucked under her, clasping the hari-kari knife.

She looked pathetic and lovely and small — incapable almost of the act of violence that had been necessary in order to die.

To have interfered, the sailor somehow felt, staring in from the doorway, would have been the worst sort of desecration. He looked at the weak mouth and chin pictured inside the frame. Too cowardly to hurt either one, he had hurt both, one unto death. A pair of love birds were twittering in a scarlet bamboo cage. A bottle of charcoal-ink, a writing brush, a long strip of paper with hastily-traced characters, lay behind her on the floor.

The detective picked it up, began to read.

“I, Yugiri-san. Mist of the Evening, most unworthy of wives, go now to keep my honored husband’s house in the sky, having unwittingly twice failed to carry out my honored husband’s wish—”

The girl had stayed downstairs. “Don’t tell her, will you?” Hollinger said when the detective had finished translating the death-scroll for his benefit. “She doesn’t have to know. Let her go on thinking the woman was the one tried to get rid of her, through jealousy. Don’t tell her the man she came out to marry hired a murderer to get her out of his way, because he didn’t have guts enough to tell her to her face. It’s tough enough as it is.”

The detective sucked in his breath politely. “This was — fffs — great crime, to make it seem another had done it.”

“It was — fffs — great pain-in-the-neck while it lasted,” the sailor agreed.

It was getting light in Tokyo when they left the police station, walking slowly side by side. They had their shoes at last, and that was almost the best thing of all.

“I guess,” she said ruefully, linking her arm in his, “I pretty well messed-up your shore-leave for you.”

“Naw,” he assured her, “you made it. Absolutely! That reminds me, keep the night of November third open, will you?”

“November third? But that’s six months away!”

“I know, but that’s when we get into Frisco Bay.”

“I will,” she said. “I’ll keep November third for you. There isn’t any night that I wouldn’t keep for you — ever.”

“Well, I’ll borrow a minute from one night now.” Hollinger said. He took her in his arms.

Afterword to “Death in the Yoshiwara”

“Death in the Yoshiwara” (Argosy, January 29, 1938) is the only Woolrich pulp story set in Japan and a gem of pure whizbang action writing that will remind older readers of a Republic Pictures cliffhanger serial, while its protagonist will no doubt strike younger generations as a prototype of Indiana Jones. The climax of course comes straight of Madama Butterfly and demonstrates yet again how profoundly Woolrich was influenced by seeing Puccini’s opera in Mexico City when he was a boy.