The Black Path of Fear

11

It was a dive the like of which I’ve never seen before or since. There are wild spots all over the world — the Vieux Port at Marseille, the Casbah at Algiers, the Boca down at Buenos Aires; this was a distillation of them all, stewing in one small suffocating caldron, smelling and sweating and swearing and snarling. Outside, at least, the night had been clear, even in the reeking alley. In there it was like stepping into a lighted fog. A sort of vapor illuminated from below. You could see everything through it, but nothing was clean-cut; it was all hazy and slanted.

Poor Sloppy’s, with its harmless raffishness, seemed like the Ritz by comparison. It was crawling with humanity; they made you think of maggots, squirming all over every square inch of space under the flashing, blurred oil lanterns. Black, brown, tan, yellow — every race — and all of them garbage of each particular race. There were whites there, too, but they were in a minority to the others: beachcombers, tramp seamen, wharf rats, thugs. The race lines cut across the sexes, but that was only one more horror added to the rest. At least I got no second looks as I slouched in after him from the street, cap pulled low.

We wormed our way through to the back, he in the lead, stepping between people and over them, and sometimes on them, to get there. A hand reached for my shoulder — a woman’s, I suppose — but then trailed weakly off it again as I kept going without looking around.

He sat down on a wooden bench against the back wall that had a displaced table partially before it, the other end weighted down by someone’s inert, sodden head. I spotted a momentarily unclaimed chair and drew it up and sat down to the side of him.

No one paid any attention to us; we were just two more maggots in the squirming mass.

“What happens now?” I said finally.

“Nothing yet. It is too soon. They see you with me.”

A waiter in a sweat-mildewed silk shirt brought us two rancid beers that smelled as though the keg they’d come out of had grown moss on the inside. It was the sort of place where you paid for what you got as it was brought up, otherwise it wasn’t left on the table. They had to do it that way, with their sort of clientele.

There was an inconspicuous door offside to us, giving through the rear wall. Beside it there was a cashier of sorts, sitting poring over a Chinese newspaper. The waiters would go to him one by one and transfer their takes, when they had accumulated sufficiently to make it worthwhile.

“Do we have to drink this stuff?” I said finally.

“You smoke cigarette,” he said. “I show you.”

We both lit up a couple, and I watched to see what he’d do. He didn’t seem to do anything, just sat there somnolent, letting it burn away between his fingers. He didn’t bother to knock off the end. After a while a cone of ash dropped of its own weight and fell there on the table top.

I looked around at the cashier. He was still engrossed in that up-and-down Chinese newspaper. You could see only the top of his face over it, just the eyes. They didn’t seem to see anything but what was printed there below them.

“Do not turn your head so.”

I turned back again.

He rested his forearm flat on the table and brushed the ashes off with a swirling motion of his whole sleeve, using his elbow for a pivot. Two swipes one way, then two swipes the other.

The fastidiousness didn’t go with his mangy condition, so I figured that must be the password right there. I gave my cigarette a snap to unload it over the table, then I put my own arm down and swung it, twice one way, twice the other.

I looked around. The cashier had left his perch, as though he’d gotten tired of reading just then. He opened the door, went in, and started to close it after him. His head gave a little quirk, from our direction over to his, just before he did so. Then it closed after him.

Quon’s bony fingers landed on my arm, held it down. “Wait, not yet. There are many eyes in this place.”

We sat there a minute longer. Then he took the brake off my forearm. “You go first. In through there, where he did. Walk slow. Say nothing. I will follow.”

I got up and lingered by the table a minute on my feet. Then I started to drift over that way. You couldn’t walk straight in that littered place, anyway; you had to zigzag and detour, so that made it easy to look aimless.

I got over beside the door and glanced casually around. No one seemed to be paying any attention. I pulled it narrowly open and went in and pulled it right after me.

The noise choked off, and I could hear myself think for the first time since I’d come into the place. There was a forlorn, gloomy passageway leading ahead, with a single oil lantern to light it and a ladderlike stair structure rising steeply at right angles to it and disappearing up through a sort of transom or trap.

The cashier was standing there in the gloom, motionless, as though he were waiting for me.

He said, “You wish something?”

I didn’t answer.

He said, “You have come in the wrong door. The way out is over on that side.”

A shot of noise and fuzzy light came in, and Quon closed the door after him and was standing there.

He moved close to the cashier and seemed to get some ashes on his sleeve. He brushed it off with grave concern, the way he had the table out there before. Twice one way, twice the other.

“My hand is not very steady,” he apologized.

“Perhaps you would like to rest,” the cashier suggested. But I was the one he was worried about. He kept watching me.

I took the cue and negligently fanned my hand across the guy’s sleeve, the same way Quon had. It occurred to me even at the moment that it was a silly sort of mumbo-jumbo, but if that was the routine, that was the routine.

“Perhaps a short nap, a little siesta—” the cashier purred.

“Could stand,” I said.

The cashier rubbed his hands together suggestively.

I slipped him one of the bills Midnight had returned to me, then a second one for Quon.

He didn’t seem to take them, but they went, were gone. Like doing card tricks. “See upstairs; maybe they will be able to do something for you.” He went over to the foot of the stair ladder, called up something in Chinese. A guttural answer came back through the trap opening.

Quon nudged me to go ahead. “Suba,” he said. I started to climb up.

I could smell it the minute my head came clear of the floor. It was terrible. But I hadn’t expected roses. I tried to breathe as sparingly as possible.

There was something peculiar about the stair flight. It wasn’t built in. When I got to the top I saw there was a grappling hook attachment to k; it could be drawn up bodily from above, on the order of a fireman’s extension ladder, cutting off the second floor from below. Then there were two winged flaps that could be folded together over the gap in the ceiling, obliterating it. A handy piece of carpentry in case of a raid.

There was a figure standing up there, waiting, as I slowly came up through the floor. Villainous-looking, but then I didn’t expect kewpies around this setup. He was holding a lantern out stiff-armed to get a good look at us as we came through. The rest of the place up there was just oblique shadows slanting off from that small core of light in all directions. I stepped clear, and after a moment the ghostly figure of Quon joined me.

We were in a sort of passage, the mate to the one below. One end of it led into a sort of cavernous chasm, with a faint red glow peering from it offside.

He beckoned us after him with curt contempt and went toward there. The lantern, doling out background to us as he went along and then obliterating it again, showed me a fairly broad opening without any door, a slanted chair alongside it where he kept watch. Then on the inside, when we’d followed him through, there was a small charcoal brazier squatting on the floor. That was where the red glow had been coming from. Ranged around it on three sides were bunks in two tiers.

The reek of the gum was overpowering in here. But there wasn’t a sound. Not a whisper. You couldn’t tell if there was anyone in those bunks or not. Or whether they were out cold, or watching us stealthily, or what. I think that added to the horror, that eerie silence. A grunt or. a sigh would have been something, at least.

I was groggy with fright. I knew — or at least I hoped — that I was going to get over it in a little while; you can get used to anything, but it sure was on full right then. I could feel sweat pumping out all over my forehead, and it came out cold and oozy.

He splashed watery lantern light up at a couple of the bunks, decided against them — maybe because there was somebody already in them, although I couldn’t see and didn’t try to — then shifted to another direction and splashed it up at a couple more. Then he gave us the go-ahead with his thumb and a grunt. He might have been a cutthroat himself, but he hadn’t much use for anyone who frequented this place; that stood out all over him.

I bent down and crawled in, with my insides trying to stay behind. It was like — I don’t know how to say it — getting into a coffin. No, worse — a coffin’s clean, at least; you’re the first one that’s used it.

Quon put his knee to the wooden sideboard, and I gave him a vicious push back. “Get out of here!” I grated. He came back and did it again. Then I saw that he was trying to climb up to the one above, and I let him alone.

When his form had writhed from view and I could see out again, the attendant was bending toward me, holding a pipe extended. I took it with both hands and held it broadside, as though it were some sort of reed instrument, and he turned and slippered over to the brazier by the door and started to fan it up a little.

I was surprised at how heavy the thing was. I reached down inside the seaman’s jumper Midnight had provided me with and got hold of my undershirt and wrenched off a piece of it. I shoved that into my mouth, wadded it up good, and then I let the pipe rest against it. And I still felt like everything was coming up behind it.

He came back holding a pinch of live coal with a pair of hand tongs, and dropped that into the pipe. The pill he placed on a little, flat, buttonlike saucer out near the end of the pipe. It was supposed to sit there and cook.

Then he let me alone, before I keeled over out of sheer repulsion, and turned his attention to the top bunk.

Then he knocked off and went back to his post outside the door. He took the lantern out with him, and that reversed the tone scheme, made it gloomy in here and dimly lit out there. It was like being awake in the middle of a nightmare.

I put the devilish thing down fast the minute he’d gone. I was scared stiff a little of it might get me, anyway, even from that short insulated contact. I hauled the wadding out and spit about sixty-two times, muffling it with the piece of torn shirt.

Then I just stayed there, propped on my elbow, and sweated some more, and finally I started to cool off and the goose-pimples to smooth out on my skin. My teeth wanted to chatter too — I don’t know why, this long after — but I curbed them and they got over it.

It felt like it was about half an hour now, and even if my sense of time was fast, I figured I’d better get started and see what I could do.

I sat up first and took off my shoes. They were Western shoes, or whatever you want to call them — hard-soled shoes — and I wanted to get up on him quietly. I left them behind on the bunk, swung my feet to the floor, and started to pay out my stocking soles in the direction of the den opening.

He wasn’t quite back behind the screening wall. The way he had his chair, I could see a thin slice of him sticking out beyond it: a strip of his head and one shoulder and arm.

I’d come in there with just my bare hands, but I couldn’t risk any noisy wrestling matches. I not only wasn’t sure I’d come out ahead, but the whole thing had to be swift and soundless, or it was no good to me. I reached down by the brazier and picked up the hand tongs he’d used before. They weren’t very large, but they were iron and plenty heavy enough for what I wanted them for. I brought them along with me, poised up high, the last few creeps.

The way he was sitting, I had to take the side of his head. And even to get at that I had to circle out a little, offside to him, which was risky business. The doorframe shielded most of the top and back of it from me. I had a good hunch he was awake, too, although he was sitting there motionless.

The corner of his eye caught my motion at the last minute, but it was already too late. He started to swing his head around to me, and that just gave me what I wanted. I swung just once, like a pile driver — there was no time for second tries in this — and he sucked in his breath, trying to build up to a yell, but it never got up that far. He slid off the chair sideways and sideswiped the wall like a turning wheel and crumpled to the floor. I waited to see if it had taken, and it had taken.

I picked him up from under the arms and hauled him around into the bunkhouse with me and out of sight behind the doorway. If bleary eyes from the bunks saw me doing it, it was just one more unreal scene from their dreams, I suppose. No one stirred; there wasn’t a sound. I tied and gagged him up with rags from the bunk I’d been in myself. Then I went out and picked up the lantern and took a good look around to see what I was up against.

There was only one logical direction in which to go from here, and that was along the dimly perceived passage toward the back. To go down the stair ladder again was no good; I’d simply find myself back where I’d started.

I struck out and started cautiously along it in my stocking feet, watering it with the lantern as I went. I passed a couple of doors, but when I nosed into them they seemed to be simply small supply or storage cubicles stacked with empty cartons and packing cases. These looked, by the telescoped way they were piled up, as though they were being reserved for future use instead of being discards that had already been used. For what purpose, I could imagine.

I kept going, and finally the passage dead-ended in a flat surface that at first sight seemed to be simply the same cracked, mildewed plaster that had lined it all along the way. Passages don’t end like that for no reason, though, with a lot of vacant space going to waste where they seem to be leading to. And, furthermore, Midnight had said that the Mama Inez premises backed up against the building housing Tio Chin’s store.

So I gave it a thump for luck, and it gave out the sound of wood backing. Then I tested the side wall, and that was genuine plaster. I brought the lantern up closer, and I could see what it was. A very clever paint job hiding a door, complete down to cracks and mottled damp patches. It would have fooled anyone, even in better light than I had.

I fingered around it for a while, and finally I located a keyhole bedded invisibly down within one of the blacker cracks, over at the side. Just about where a keyhole should be in a door, but with no knob or anything to give it away.

I turned and retraced my steps all the way back to my original point of departure. I found the clouted bunkhouse attendant still lying quietly where I’d left him. He was bleeding a little out of one ear; hadn’t come to yet. I did what I should have done in the first place, fumbled all through his clothing. I turned up, among other things, a long skinny iron key, and that looked like what I was after. I went back with it, aimed it at the crack, and it belonged. The keyhole swallowed it up to the hilt. I could hear a lock flush open, but the door continued to adhere. I pummeled it a little around the edges to spring it, and it broke and slanted outward. I picked up my lantern and took it in with me.

If I hadn’t done anything else yet, at least I’d linked up the two separate segments or cells: the dope den and Tio Chin’s store. Now all I had to do was link up the killing at one end of them and Ed Roman, in Miami, at the other end of them, and I’d have a straight line running all the way back, without a break, from the killing to Ed Roman in Miami.

But the night was getting old, and my hour was nearly gone.