The Black Path of Fear

12

I didn’t get very far. For a minute it looked as if I’d walked into a boxed-up bulkhead or dummy closet of some sort. The lantern light and I snubbed our noses against unbroken wooden surfacing two paces or less in from the door. There was a little amputated alley formed there, wider than it was deep, but not very much of either. Wood-walled at the sides too. I stood there blocked, with the lantern reflection bent upward into a perpendicular sheet in front of my eyes, looking at planed wood grain from an inch away. But there was no point to it: a locked door, the key to which was retained by the den attendant back there, leading into a blind niche like this.

I pressed against the frontal section first, with elbows, knee, and heel of hand, and that was rigid, fixed. Then I tried it over at the right side and that was too. But when I tackled the left, that paid off. It must have been invisibly hinged above someplace; it swung effortlessly, even loosely, out from the bottom up, like a flap, and I ducked down and went through. Then I caught it and let it back easy, so it wouldn’t sound off and give me away.

I found first of all that there was light out here, and electric light at that, so I didn’t need the lantern. I turned the little wheel around to kill it, and it gave off a whiff of oil stench and croaked. I set it down against the wall.

There was a bulb hanging on a drop cord, and someone had left it on.

I looked over the contraption that had admitted me, first of all. On the outside, the side on which I now was, it was rigged up to look like one of these enormous wardrobes that they have down there, standing nearly ceiling-high. It even had a fake seam running up the front of it, complete with grips and everything; only when you tried to open it that way, it wouldn’t open; it was in one piece. In other words, it was simply a trick entryway or exit, from back there to here and vice versa. I noticed a mate to it across on the other side of the room, identical as to width, varnish, and everything else, and wondered if that were a dummy too.

These were evidently Tio Chin’s quarters I was in; a sort of combination office and conference room. It didn’t have any of the gingerbread oriental trim of the store below, I noticed. For instance, the electric light, as I have said, instead of those phony paper lanterns with inked ideographs on them. This place looked like it belonged to a hardheaded, practical businessman — and probably a damned unscrupulous and crooked one, at that. I said to myself, I thought that was an act, that jolly-Chinese-gargoyle impersonation. He overdid it.

Cheap secondhand Spanish office furniture pitted with wormholes. There were a roll-top desk, chairs, and a table, and then the two top-heavy clothespresses. The only exotic touch in the whole room was a thick fringe of beaded strings hanging over a doorless opening opposite me that led out — and, I suppose, forward, to where his actual living quarters were.

I tried the top part of the roll-top desk first and didn’t have much luck with it. It was securely locked. There was one drawer underneath that wasn’t, but he was no fool. There were a number of ledgers in it, but when I hurriedly cracked them one after the other, all the entries were in Chinese characters; I couldn’t do anything with them.

I stopped short suddenly, held it, with that funny feeling you have of being looked at when you don’t know where it’s coming from. You sort of freeze, lock your muscles, the instinct being that further motion will betray you. Although by the time the feeling comes it’s already too late; your presence has been betrayed by then.

I let the ledgers down the rest of the way into the drawer and slowly turned my head and looked over my shoulder. No one; there wasn’t a sound. But there wasn’t any breeze or draft in here either, and there was no reason for that beaded fringe over there to be stirring slightly the way it was. Or at least settling back into immobility after just having been slightly stirred. A moment ago they’d been motionless, and now they’d just gotten through wavering.

I hurried over and listened. I couldn’t hear anything, not even the stealthiest withdrawing footfall. I parted them and looked out. I couldn’t see anything either, just the darkness of an empty passageway. But I could smell something. A whiff of something — the faintest essence of something sweet — whether from a living flower or from floral extract, I couldn’t tell; there wasn’t enough of it to go by, and I was no expert, anyway. Well, maybe it had always been out there.

I went back to my job again. A wastebasket had nothing to offer but a two-day-old copy of Diario de la Marina. I turned my attention to the second clothespress next. It interested me. For one thing, it was backed against the same wall that held the opening with the bead curtain, so that argued that it wasn’t simply a secret exit as mine had been. Where there already was an outlet in full view, why bother to have an elaborate dummy one beside it? And secondly, now that I came over closer to it, I saw that it was not quite as identical as I had at first taken it to be. There was a difference of about a foot in height, in favor of this one. Then when I looked down at the base I saw what made it. This one was raised clear of the floor; it stood on legs. The other was based solidly, as it had to be to keep its real purpose secret.

It was rickety as a result of being elevated like that; the whole thing wobbled slightly when I tugged vainly at the grips on the huge doors. One of the legs was shorter than the rest, I saw, and half eaten away with wormholes. The center seam was actual in this case, but it was securely locked. I desisted, afraid of bringing the whole thing down on top of me if I struggled at it any more.

I took a step back from it, and then again I froze as I had the time before. But this time when I turned there was no optical illusion about the beaded fringe suddenly falling still or lightly wavering with aftermath of motion. It was openly, unabashedly tucked back into a small diamond-shaped opening, as if parted by two fingers, and in the center of this an eye was looking through at me. An eye with gummed lashes sticking out like rays all around it. It didn’t try to hide itself from me; instead, the split in the fringe widened, ran all the way down to the floor; the whole face came slowly through into the room, and with it the body underneath.

She was the prettiest Chinese girl I’d ever seen, and when they are pretty they shoot the works. She was like a doll and built to the specifications of one. About four-ten or five feet at the most, slim to match, tiny red dot for a mouth that you wondered show she could get food into at all. Her skin was the color of creamy porcelain, the eyes oblique, but just enough to be piquant. She had on apple-green trousers and a turquoise-blue coat, both sprinkled with small white chrysanthemums. She had two coral-pink geraniums packed in her hair just over one ear. She brought back some of that scent I’d noticed in the passage before.

I just stood there with my trap open. And I bet I wasn’t the first.

She came in a few steps toward me and then stopped. She dipped her knees demurely.

I put my hand up to the peak of my cap, dropped it again, in answer. It seemed to me to be a supremely silly thing to do, even at the moment I was doing it, but I wasn’t quite sure why. I suppose because I had no right to be found there where I was.

But for her part she showed neither surprise nor alarm, I noticed. It was almost as though she’d been expecting my arrival, and been coached to greet me when I came. Her very next words showed that.

“Buenas noches,” she said in a flutelike little voice that carried its own musical accompaniment.

I didn’t get the whole thing, but I mumbled back at her in kind.

She switched to English; they all seemed to speak it down here.

“Are you the caller my estimable uncle told me he was awaiting here tonight?”

So she was Chin’s niece; well, that was the first thing about him I found halfway passable.

I certainly wasn’t the caller he was expecting, but I nodded. What else was there to do?

She wanted to make quite sure. “You are Captain Paulsen?” I saw her eyes light briefly on the cap and dungarees. They were what had done it, they’d fooled her. He must be expecting some sea captain up here tonight. And what more likely than it was the one who did the running for them between here and the Everglades coast? The skipper of the launch or cutter the stuff was carried in?

This was starting to sound good. I liked it. I wondered if I could work it to get her to show me around a little by playing on the mistake in identity.

I touched my cap again to confirm her in the erroneous impression.

“He will be here soon. He was unavoidably called out on business.”

He should take his time, I thought. This was getting better and better by the minute.

“He asked me to tell you to please make yourself at home while you are waiting.”

I will, I promised her, unheard; just leave it to me.

“You came in that way, Captain?” She motioned to the spiked wardrobe.

“Yes.”

“It puzzled me how you got here; I wondered why they did not tell me they had admitted you at our other door.”

She seemed to take the secret passageway in her stride, I noticed. It didn’t match up with that pretty baby face of hers. I wondered just how much she knew about what it was like over there on the other side of the wall. But the more she knew, the more there was for me to find out from her, so why should I give a hoot?

“Your men are down there below?”

She meant in that Mama Inez dive. So evidently the real Paulsen brought some of his hands with him each time he came here. He needed them to cart the stuff to the place where they took it aboard. “Yeah, they’re down there,” I said.

I didn’t want to hurry things up, God knows, but I wanted to sound plausible. And also find out how much time I could count on for myself. “How soon will your uncle be back, do you think?”

“Soon. He went to see about getting an extra truck. He said one more would be needed tonight. He asked me to tell you this; he said you would understand.”

I did: an extra-heavy shipment tonight. Maybe they were having to cut down the number of runs back and forth they were making, so they were trying to make up for it by doubling on the amount they carried each time.

“Can I get you some tea, Captain, while you are waiting?”

That was about the one thing I could have done without beautifully right then: sitting drinking tea at a time like that!

I shook my head.

She suddenly corrected herself. She’d obviously never met the genuine captain face to face, but she must have been present behind the scenes at the times of his former visits. She wrinkled up her nose at me. The tiny thing could even be mischievous. “I mean, of course, the kind of tea the captain drinks. The rice wine of my uncle.”

I tried to shake my head to that, too, even at the risk of stepping out of character. I wanted to keep her in here with me, where I could get some information out of her.

But before I could stop her she’d dipped her knees again and turned to go back. She brushed open the fringes to go through, and then as she did so something seemed to go wrong. I saw two or three of the strands pull taut after her, and then she stopped and started wrangling with her wrist. A couple of the tricky things must have snarled on some button or ornament she wore on her sleeve.

She tried to free herself, failed, finally threw me an appealing look.

It was my time she was using up, so I was only too glad to hurry over to her, see what I could do.

I groped clumsily through the slanting lines of the things that blurred my sight like rain. She was on one side of them, I on the other.

“Here, at my wrist,” she said. “Take hold and see if you can—”

Our four hands met in a sort of bowknot, with the things all messed around them. Instead of making it better, I seemed to be making it worse. Something stung the bade of my hand unexpectedly, seemed to hang on for a minute, like when you get a splinter in you, then slid out again. I couldn’t see what it was; there were three other hands and all those beaded drippings in the way, and all of them moving around in one place.

I pulled the one it had happened to out of the beaded tangle, blew on it. There was a tiny blue dot there, too small for blood to come through. “What was that?”

“I am so sorry,” she purred contritely. “A pin on my sleeve must have scratched you.”

But she was free again, I noticed, as mysteriously as she had become snagged. She dipped her knees to me once more, hurried off into the gloom with little midget steps.

I stood there a minute, idiotically looking at the back of my hand, then in the direction in which she’d vanished. Like the chump I was. Then I turned and went back to my futile tinkering with the roll-top desk.

I noticed a change coming over my efforts presently. There was something easier, less strenuous about them. First I thought that it was the roll-top that was resisting less. But it was still down fast, hadn’t gone up, so then I could see that it wasn’t that. It was my own arms that were using less energy, going at it easier, tricking me into thinking I was having less trouble with the job. I started to feel lazy. What am I doing this for; what’s the use? Before I knew it I’d come to a full stop; I was just standing there with my hands on it, but not doing a thing any more.

A little leftover spurt of energy came trickling out after the main reserve had been siphoned off, like a chaser, and I gave one last tug. Like a muscular hiccup. Then it evaporated and I quit and just stood there, inert.

I was starting to feel dizzy. I swayed a little, and instead of trying to open the desk now, I was just using it to help me stand up. It wasn’t very steady any more; it kept going over one way, and I’d go over the other; then it would come back my way, and I’d go over the other. We couldn’t get together.

I nearly lost my balance altogether, but I managed to hang onto it a moment longer by giving the desk a tight hug from a sprawling position over its top.

The beads split open with a catlike ejaculation, and four men came into the room, one behind the other.

So here they were, and here I was, and time was up.

The fat Tio Chin was foremost. Behind him there was a hard-bitten, skull-faced, birch-blond individual, about six feet tall, wearing a peaked cap somewhat similar to mine and a skimpy pea jacket that looked like it had shrunk in the rain: this time the real launch captain. He looked like a Scandinavian who has been buried three days and dug up again after decomposition has already set in. Behind these two there were a couple of anonymous plug-uglies: I suppose the hands they used to load and unload the stuff. They were whites, but under deep burns that made their faces look as though they’d been smoked and shriveled for a long time by equatorial head-hunters.

But the big change was in Chin himself. This was behind the scenes now, and the feeble-minded celestial act had been discarded, just as I’d suspected when I first saw the room itself. He wasn’t wearing his hands plaited together, and when he opened his mouth it was to shoot out better English than I used. The pigtail mustache had vanished, and so had most of the sleepiness and all of the benevolence. The only thing he still had the same was the fat stomach.

They ranged themselves around me, robot-like, matter-of-fact, deadly in their sluggishness. No dramatics, no violence; just sort of an amused superiority that even extended to the two stevedores. They weren’t going to be tough; they were going to be playful. They were going to have some sport with me. Cat-and-mouse stuff. With the mouse already very groggy and almost down for the count.

I blinked, and there were eight instead of four of them. Then I blinked again, and they condensed back to four again.

Tio Chin said, “Well! Well, well, well! A customer. What do you think of that, boys? A customer. And after closing hours, too!”

The aluminum-complexioned sea captain furled his lips back to show two white teeth and three black ones. Ten years before, when he did that, it had probably turned out to be a smile; it didn’t now any more. “And no von to vait on him, either. You should give better service than this, Chin. You lose money this vay.”

Chin said, “Well, we’ll take care of that right now.” He bowed in his best store-front manner. “Were you looking for something?” He rapped his palms. “A chair for the customer. Where are your manners?”

A chair seat bit suddenly into the rear hollows of my legs, and I folded down onto it. I sat there looking up at them dully. My eyelids felt like they were putting on weight, kept trying to close. I didn’t feel much like repartee. “All right,” I said. “All right. You’ve got me.”

The two seamen had lounged back against the wall, grinning, to watch their bosses. The captain sat down on one of the other chairs, facing me. He was too big to sit down like most people, just straight up and down; he took up some of the slack by folding one leg flat across the knee of the other. He was still trying to be coy, and with the kind of face he had, it was ghastly. I guess he didn’t get much relaxation; he seemed to be enjoying this. “Maybe he came here looking for somevon,” he chuckled. “Vy don’t you ask him who he’s looking for? I know who he’s looking for, I bat you. Show him. Go ahead, show him.”

Chin snickered. “Our policy is always to accommodate the customer. Never let him walk out dissatisfied.”

“Never let him walk out at all be batter.” The launch captain couldn’t even laugh right any more; it came out in sputters and burbles, like a leaky steam joint. I expected to see the front of his face blow off. It would have improved his looks, anyway. “Go ahead, show him vat he came to see,” he urged. “Don’t keep him vaiting.”

“You make me give away all my trade secrets, Paulsen.” Chin took out a key, opened the front of the clothespress. He pulled the two halves out and stood aside to give me a good look.

The hanging figure looked vaguely familiar, but I wouldn’t have been able to identify him for sure, the state they had him in now. “Peek-ture, for the señor and lady to show their friends?” came back to me. But it was just association of ideas more than anything else; you couldn’t tell who this was any more. He was all crisscrossed with rope, and they had him dangling by a sort of halter arrangement from under the arms to a hook on a stout rod that ran across the top of the clothespress.

He wasn’t dead yet; I could see his chest rising and falling even from where I was. He was either unconscious or else stunned with abuse. There were purplish discolorations under each eye, and his whole face was lumpy, as if he had the mumps, and his lips were split. I wondered for a minute how it was he hadn’t suffocated inside that thing, but then when I looked up I saw that the top was off; there was a wire mesh roofing it instead.

“Is that who you were looking for?” Chin chuckled.

“No,” I glowered. “I came here looking for the rat who Stuck a knife through my... my—” I couldn’t finish it.

Chin closed the wardrobe slabs, gestured emptily. “No sale.”

Paulsen smote his knee. “Oh, now I know! Vy didn’t you say so sooner? Look, I show you a picture of him. How you like to see a picture of him?”

My eyes swerved back to him fast, dulled as they were. He was fumbling inside his jacket. He took out a greasy wallet. Out of that he took a glossy black photographic negative.

“It’s not a very good picture I show you,” he apologized.

He held it out toward me. I reached for it, and it was a little farther away than it had been. I reached for it again, and again it was just a little too far out of reach.

“Here, take it. I thought you vanted it,” he said. That was his idea of being funny. “First you vant it, then ven I give it to you, you don’t take it.”

I grabbed harder than before, and this time I went over flat on my face on the floor.

I could hear the thunder of their laughter up over my head. My eyes started to droop closed. I didn’t care; let ’em laugh.

They weren’t through, though. They hadn’t had enough. They picked me up again and sat me back on the chair, and with the reverse of equilibrium my eyelids went up again.

Paulsen was holding the negative up toward the light now, squinting at it fondly. “I tell vat’s on it,” he said. “You can’t see gude from vere you are. Is on it the lady’s face and yures. Is on it the lady’s—” He passed a hand down his own side.

Chin gave him the gutter word for it.

“Is on it the knife, all the way in. Is on it the hand of falla who holds knife. You can’t see his face. But on back of hand is small star with five points.”

Then he showed me his own, with the deeply inked original tattooed on it. “Yust like this.”

“You were the guy,” I told him, low. “You were the one did it. There was a cap like yours somewhere near us in the crowd; I can remember that now, but I didn’t before—”

He turned languidly to Chin. “You think I should keep this picture? My girl back in the States, maybe she don’t like it; it show me with other voman.”

Chin was simmering with amusement. “You’re prettier than the picture makes you look, Paulsen.”

Paulsen nodded. “Maybe I gat another taken sometime.” A match flared in his hand, and he brought the two slowly together, the film and the flame, watching me over the top of them to see if I was getting the full effect.

I was. I packed a fist and tried to launch myself at him. He was agile for a guy that tall. He hopscotched his chair back without getting up from it and still holding the flame and negative. I floundered short and would have gone down on my kisser again, but this time the two crewmen caught me around the waist and held me up off the floor.

They slopped me back again like dirty water across a deck.

“Now vatch close,” Paulsen grinned.

The flame and the negative came together. The film hesitated for a minute, then it started to pick up speed. It burned fast and smokelessly and with a very bright, concentrated flame, the way that stuff does. Then it died down and he was holding nothing between his fingers but just a little smudge.

I felt swell. My head looped down over my wishbone.

Chin’s voice was gurgitating with laughter. “Look at him, he’s all tired out. Maybe the climate down here doesn’t agree with him.”

One of the huskies standing behind my chair took a corkscrew twist in my hair, hauled my head up and around again. The pain made my eyes flicker open.

“He needs a change,” Paulsen said. “Maybe a little sea air vill brace him up. Nothing better than that. I take him vith me ven I go back tonight, him and that other falla in closet. I take them both vith me. They both very sick men.”

“For free?” Chin asked, ingenuous to the gills.

“For free. Part of the vay, anyway.”

That “part of the vay” roused me for a minute.

“Are you a good svimmer?” he asked me. “I bat you are not so good as some of the sharks they got between here and the Keys.”

Chin grimaced appreciatively. “He hasn’t got as good teeth as they have, either.”

My head did a side roll, then came back again.

Paulsen clucked concernedly. “He’s too tired even to listen to us. He don’t hear a vord ve say. Chin, that niece of yours should be ashamed of herself.”

Suddenly the tempo of their slow, sadistic baiting had busted wide open; a quick, hustling activity had taken its place almost before I knew it. My senses were too torpid to be able to keep up very well. The hinged flap at the side of the dummy wardrobe I’d come through myself earlier suddenly flew up without warning, and I got a blurred glimpse of a figure standing there, half in, half out, jabbering something in firecracker Chinese to Chin, then whisking back out of sight again.

Chin got a move on, caught up in the new pace. “Tie this guy up,” he flung at the two huskies. He could move quickly when he had to, in spite of that big bay window he carried. He sprinted out through the bead drops, called something in Chinese. A girl’s voice answered from up front somewhere. Then he came back again, ran through to the dummy wardrobe, and went in behind it. It was wide enough to admit him, though I hadn’t thought it would be.

He called some orders through at that end — quite a few of them — and I could hear pulleys squeaking and woodwork thudding, as though they were raising that detachable stair out there and obliterating the trap.

Meanwhile the two seamen had me helpless between them, were lashing my arms together behind my back with a length of rope.

Chin reappeared again, puffing now from his own quickness but with a complacent look, as though everything had been taken care of.

“Vat happened? Vat’s the row?” Paulsen asked him.

“We’ve got company. We’re having a little visit from the police downstairs.” Then at the nervous start the captain made: “Just sit tight. Don’t try to leave now. You’re all right while you stay up here. It’s nothing; we’ve had them before. It’ll be over in a minute or two. They simply go straight through from the back of the drink shop and keep going until they find themselves out in the open again, in the alley on the other side, like a puppy chasing its tail. They wouldn’t come up here in a million years. They never have yet.”

“I don’t like it, having ’em right under my feet like that,” Paulsen said skittishly and shifted a little, as though the floor were hot.

“There is nothing to attract their attention to us. People don’t look up at a ceiling when they come into a place; not even police on a raid. Not unless there is a stair line to draw their gaze up after it. Otherwise their eyes follow the lines that are already there; in this case, straight ahead. It’s very simple and very surefire.”

The hour. The hour must be up.

Chin motioned lazily toward the wardrobe. “Put him in there with the other one until they’ve gone. Then you can take them both with you in the truck, along with the other bales. We’ll fix up a couple of sacks.”

He came over close and peered into my face. “He’s still awake, but you can hardly tell it.” He smirked. “Just one little spark left. Watch it go out.” He rounded his cheeks and blew a puff of breath at me.

Then his face sort of slipped backward. I didn’t know if he was moving or I was. “What kick has he?” I heard him say from far away. “After all, it’s an easy way to die.”

I could still hear and feel longer than I could see. I could feel them pick me up and carry me between them, hoist me up into the big cavelike thing. Then I could feel a sort of halter they must have made between my arms in back catch onto something, and I swung there loose, stocking feet clear of the clothespress bottom.

Then it got dark, or rather the lingering red on the lining of my eyelids, which were down already, dimmed to purple and then to black. Wood closed against wood, and a key turned and withdrew.

Everything got blurred and comfortable. There was no more trouble in the world; there was no more murdered love; no more cops. No one you had to be afraid of, no one you tried to get, and no one who tried to get you. Twilight of the mind, with night coming on fast. Not the night of the calendar; the night of the being.

Even the unnatural rearward hoist of my arms stopped hurting. But I was straight up and down, and I wanted to sleep the way you were supposed to sleep, the long way. I tried to lie down a couple of time and I couldn’t; my feet just skidded.

Over the open top of the thing the sound of a voice, dim, unrecognizable, coming from far away, roused me flickeringly and for the last time. A snatch of something being said out there: “They’re going already... They’ll be out in a minute... I told you... I don’t know — some street girl around here who was probably thrown out of the drink shop and wanted to get even... They’re going to arrest her for giving a false alarm...”

I didn’t know who it was who was going, and I didn’t care; good, let them go. All I wanted to do was sleep. But I wanted to sleep lying down, the way I was used to; it felt tight this way.

I tried again and leaned forward. Somebody, something, wouldn’t let go of me. I leaned forward with all my might, tried to throw myself down.

My head came to rest against the locked front of the clothespress. I don’t know how much a head weighs. Mine felt like it weighed a ton. But even a little added weight is sometimes enough to tip a scale ...

I was falling asleep. Falling — I could feel myself going down into it headfirst. Sleep sure was deep, for you to fall into it like that. Somebody in my dreams screamed, “Look out! It’s coming down—”

The last flicker of consciousness went with a sort of soft thud that might have made a big thundering noise all around me, that might have even shaken the whole building, but that I didn’t even hear or feel inside me, where I now was.

I was lying flat now, the way you should sleep.

I didn’t know if this was sleep or death. But even if it was death, gee, it sure felt good to die.