The Black Path of Fear

10

She was in there a long time. She had a hard time with him. I don’t know how she did it. She seemed to know how to do it, though. Bring them down to earth again from the poppy clouds they float around in high up above. Maybe she’d had to do it before at one time or another. Or maybe it was just her instinct and practical common sense that told her what to do. Just like a woman in the upper sunlit regions will know how to nurse someone who is ill, intuitively, without ever having taken a nurse’s training, so she, down here in the shadowy underworld, seemed to know how to cope with an opium fiend without ever having been tainted by addiction herself.

I could hear her intermittently through the wall while the process went on, and it made my blood run cold at times with sheer reflex horror. Not that the telltale sounds in themselves were horrifying — they were commonplace enough — it was knowing what the basis of the situation was that made my stomach turn.

Her voice reached me by itself at first, unaccompanied, monotonous, insistent, saying the same thing over and over. It would stop, then it would go on again. Perhaps close to his ear. I quickly blinked that thought out of my mind as the memory of what he had looked like returned to me. One phrase, over and over, until you wanted to go nuts and grab hold of the top of your head, even though you were a room away. Maybe “Wake up,” or maybe “Talk to me,” or maybe just calling him by his name; I don’t know what it was.

Then I heard a tin gasoline can clonk once on the floor and the splash water made being poured from it into some smaller receptacle. She must have found some way of heating it; perhaps he had a small alcohol stove in there. This took awhile. And meanwhile the voice went on, mechanical, like a record when the needle is stuck in one place. Then the water again, sloshing more softly this time, as though some rag or other were being saturated in it. Then a sodden, slapping sound, as though someone were being belabored with an improvised hot towel.

A groaning and eerie whimper now underscored her voice when it sounded. Then she seemed to lose him again; he must have slipped back into oblivion. There was a thud, as of someone falling prone from a semi-erect position.

My heart thudded with him.

The slapping became sharper, like a whipcrack; it wasn’t with a saturated cloth now; it was with the flat of the hand.

Suddenly everything stopped and she’d come back to our own room. The door flapped open and she was standing in it, breathless, her forehead sequined with moisture, a strand of her hair down out of place over one eye.

“I nearly had him! Then he got away from me again! Quick, give me one of your cigarettes!”

I didn’t get it; I was slow on the pickup. Like a dope, I thought for a minute she wanted it for herself. She grabbed it from me, jerked it into her mouth, bent over the candle for a moment, and then beat it back there again, leaving a little bluish haze in the air where she’d been standing.

I got what she’d really wanted it for only after she was already gone again. She never smoked those things herself — she’d told me so — she was a cigar smoker. But I guess there’s too big a coal on a cigar.

“I’m going nuts if I get much more of those sound effects,” I told myself, and walked around a lot in tight corkscrew circles that kept getting smaller each time around, until they ended in standing still in one place.

The yelp was loud and clear when it came, and it blew all the fog away. I tried not to picture it, but I couldn’t help wondering how deep she’d had to go, how long she’d had to — hold it steady.

That did it; that ended it. After that there were just the two voices, murmuring low.

That part of it took a long time too. I guess she had to gain his confidence. But I guess the money helped some too. It should have. It’s the greatest little thing there is for winning confidence.

Then finally she came back to me again, came tottering back. She looked all in. You’d almost think that some of the aftereffects had transferred themselves to her, the livid sick color she’d turned. She had the look on her face of someone who has just been granted a quick glimpse down into the bottommost depths of hell from the top of the stairs. And didn’t turn away quickly enough.

Her teeth were chattering as she closed the door behind her. “I’d rather be dead,” she said. She shuddered and she pulled her shawl around her tight, and the night was hot in Havana. “Boy, could I use a shot of aguardiente — after that!” She flung herself down into a chair and held her hair.

“You should have let me go in and tackle it.”

She fanned her hand at me without looking around. “You wouldn’t have known which end his head was at. And he probably would have pulled a knife on you and run amuck as soon as he got a look at your face. They’re apt to be more afraid of a Yank than they are of a Cuban.”

I didn’t ask her anything; I let her sit for a while and get over it. I kept watching her and thinking, You find gold in the unlikeliest places. Dunghills and ash heaps. She’d done it for me. Gone in there like that for me. Someone she didn’t even know back an hour or two. Why? What did she get out of it? What was the percentage? Yes, you find gold kicking around in the funniest places.

She lifted her chin from the back of the chair. “It’s Tio Chin, all right,” she said quietly. “I can tell by the way he described the layout. He’s never seen him himself, this one, but all you have to do is put two and two together. The store is just a front. The place they go for it is a dive called ‘Mama Inez.’ That’s around on the next alley, and it backs up against the store. I know that place; I’ve passed it often myself. Both under the same roof, get it? There isn’t any Mama Inez; that’s just the trade name. It’s a combination eating place and rumshop; on a close night you can smell it all the way down at the corner.”

“Do you think I have any chance of finding out anything if I go in there?”

“No,” she said flatly.

“Then what’s the—?”

“But you’re going over with him. Going through the mill with him. That makes a difference.”

“That sounds appetizing. You mean actually buy a pipe and—?”

“Listen, they’re not fools in that racket. You think they’re wide open to the street, so all you gotta do is hand them a card that says ‘Joe sent me?’ And then you get a bird’s-eye view of the works?”

“All right, I go in and get introduced. They grab me.”

“That’s what we want, isn’t it?”

“It’s all right about getting them to grab me. But that’s only half of it. How are we going to get the cops in on it? Once I’m grabbed I’m no longer a free agent.”

“What do you suppose I’ll be doing — sitting up here manicuring my nails? I’ll follow the two of you over to this den, guapo. At a distance, so he won’t notice me. Then after you go in I’ll hang around out there in the alley. A girl holding up a doorway is no novelty in this neighborhood.”

“How will you know? I won’t be able to get word to you. If I signal you before they grab me that’ll be too soon. If I wait until after they grab me I won’t be able to signal you at all.”

“We’ll have to work out some sort of a timetable then. Suppose I wait an hour from the time you go in?”

“That ought to be long enough. If they’re going to grab me at all they’ll have me grabbed by that time. One more thing. How do you know they’ll listen to you?”

“The cops? They won’t. So I’m not going to waste my time trying to tell them that you’re innocent, or that you’ve been grabbed in there, or anything else. All I’ll tell them is that I know where they can find you, that I saw you go in there. They’re looking for you already. That’ll send them in prisa without asking any more questions than that. I’m a stool pigeon, see? I’m trying to pick up a little loose change for myself by handing them this information. Then once they get in, let them find out the rest for themselves.

“It’s tricky timing. How’ll I know how long an hour is? I don’t pack a watch.”

“How’ll I know? I don’t either. You can tell how long it is by the way it feels. Didn’t you ever try that? It’s easy. You can feel time just as easy as you can tell it from a clock.”

I couldn’t help laughing at something that occurred to me just then. “Suppose an hour feels a lot longer to you than it does to me and we miss connections?”

“Ah, cut it out!” she said gruffly. “This is no time to be funny. You may end up laughing on the other side of your face.”

There was a soft shuffling sound outside the door.

“Here comes your convoy. He’s going to steer you in there and show you the ropes. Otherwise you’d probably never get past the street entrance. You’re white, you know, and they don’t trust you guys.”

I got a little stage fright down under the belt “Say, I’m not going to have to — try any myself, am I?”

“You better not, guapo, if you want to keep our timetable straight. That stuff shoots your sense of time to pieces. It makes a minute seem like an hour, or it can make an hour go by like a minute. I suppose you can fake it in some way if you have to; stick cotton in your nose, or something.”

She looked at me half humorously, half sympathetically. “Are you scared?”

“Sure I’m scared,” I said irritably. “What do you think I am, anyway — a tin soldier? But I’m going through with it.”

“I’m glad you admitted it,” she said. “Because if you said you weren’t I would have only called you a liar — in my heart. And I don’t like to have to do that with my friends. I’m a crook, but I’m an honest crook. I’m scared too — for you. But I’m going through with my part of it.” She hitched up her shoulders. “Always remember this. A hundred years from now it’ll be all the same to the two of us.” “A hundred minutes from now it’ll be all the same to the two of us.”

“You better go out there now — before he goes back under standing up and I have to bring him to all over again. I’ll step out and make the contact for you.”

The last thing she said was, “Don’t look around. I’ll be behind you on the street.”

She opened the door and revealed this flickering, candlelit picture of horror. You expected it to blow away like smoke, but it stayed there upright.

“Here’s my friend, Quon. I told him you’d fix him up. He’s been a long time without his sleep.”

The cadaver didn’t answer, just looked me over. I couldn’t tell if he really saw me or not.

To me she said, for stage effect, “Come back and see me when you wake up.” And pretended to close the door.

I motioned to him to go down the stairs first, before me. I didn’t want to have him falling on top of me when we got halfway down.

He stopped down in the street entrance and took root. Just stood there, as though that was as far as he was going.

I fumbled in my clothes and handed him some money. He fumbled in his and then he got under way again, went out into the alley. So that was the lubrication that had been required.

We shuffled along, down to the mouth of the alley and around it. All of a sudden he spoke to me without turning to look at me. His mouth was sort of half open all the time, anyway, as if he were panting for air; you couldn’t tell when he was getting ready to speak and when he wasn’t.

“You know La Media Noche long?”

I saw I’d have to watch myself. He wasn’t as dopey as he looked.

“From before, when I was in port. I knew her hombre too. I was the friend of both.”

It must have been the right answer. I saw him nod shrewdly.

“He lives on in her. She is not for love. The whole street knows that.”

We came out of the alley together, turned down the other way, the opposite way from that which I’d taken the time before. Two strange shapes sidling along side by side, bound for a strange place, and with a strange purpose best not inquired into: spread-legged merchant seaman and hunched, bedraggled specter.

There was no light around, and yet he must have been looking at me when I wasn’t aware of it. He no longer was, though, when he spoke. That made it all the creepier, as if he had eyes at the side of his head.

“You have never slept before. You haven’t any of the marks on you. Our eyes know each other.”

My throat tightened up for a minute. “I begin tonight. Life is hard, and I want to forget it for a little while.”

He shrugged with the bony epaulets that were his shoulders. “You have paid me.”

We went down a new alley, a little wider, a little straighter than the one Midnight lived on. Only a little, though. Ahead, at about the approximate distance that Chin’s shop lay from the mouth of the other one, ribbons of light spoked across this one, glimmering through the interstices of an unfurled bamboo blind stretched across an entryway. I knew that must be it, before we’d gotten to it, because of its parallelism to the hidden curio store on the other side. I was scared and started to feel crawly long before there was anything to be scared or feel crawly about.

It was like a last port of call. And the path that had led me to it through the night had been so black and so full of fear, and downgrade all the way, lower and lower, until at last it had arrived at this bottomless, abyss, than which there was nothing lower.

The bars of light made cicatrices across us. He reached in at the side and slanted up one edge of the pliable blind, made a little tent-shaped gap, and bowed his way in through there. His hand, lingering behind a moment, made a hook to me to follow.

For a second I stood alone, livid weals striping me from head to foot. I kneaded my face with one hand in a half circle, starting up at my forehead and ending around past my mouth and chin. Then I hiked up the blind and stooped through in turn.