The Black Path of Fear

13

I came to again — you always do, until the last time, and the last time is the time that counts — and I couldn’t get where it was I was supposed to be at first. All I could tell was it was day again; there was light coming in a barred window opposite me, and the night, that long Havana night, was over at last. The night that had seemed to last forever while it was going on. When it had begun we’d been taking in the town in an open carriage together, I remembered, about to start a new life. And look at me now.

I was on some sort of cot. I still had on my waterfront duds, or at least part of them, but somebody had thrown a threadbare blanket carelessly over my legs and left my feet sticking out at the other end. I pushed myself up on my arm, and for a minute everything went wavy, then settled down again.

I looked around. There was that window with the bars on it, but that doesn’t mean anything down there; they all have them below the second story — custom of the country. Otherwise you couldn’t tell what the place was. It wasn’t an out-and-out cell; just a shade or two above that — sort of detention room, I guess. There was a calendar put out by a Cuban brewery tacked up on the wall, but they’d quit peeling the leaves off at February. February 1934, I might add.

There was a door, and just as my eyes got to it, it opened and a cop looked in at me. Just on a knob turn; no business about locks and keys or anything. “Estdo despierto, Inspector.” I heard him call out to someone. He pulled his head back again and closed it before I could say anything, but he was a cop; I was pretty sure of that.

Well, the other bunch didn’t have me, but they did. Back where I’d started again.

There was a stage wait of several minutes, then it reopened, and the same cop held it back for someone else to come through. Acosta showed up holding a batch of papers in his hand. He stopped short to say something over his shoulder by way of postscript to them in the other room, and I caught a glimpse through the doorway of a starchless figure being hauled off between two cops, legs dragging across the floor behind him, a peaked cap on the back of his head. Then the door was closed.

Acosta spanked the sheaf of papers he was holding. “¡Por fin!” he said jubilantly.

I didn’t know if he meant me or the papers.

“Well, how’s the ex-suspect?” he grinned.

I blinked at him, logy. Brilliant repartee.

“Ex. You know, used to be?”

“You mean I’m in the clear?”

He chuckled. “Well, carajo, where you been all night?” he jeered good-naturedly.

I answered that with a slight but expressive moan.

“I know,” he answered for me. “In an overturned wardrobe closet, flat on your face, among other places. We pulled you out headfirst through the top of it, easier than standing it up again; it would have taken a hydraulic jack.”

The cop came in with black coffee, and I got most of it down my chin, but enough went in to do me some good. It’s wonderful stuff for a hang-over from a hypodermic. Then they gave me a cigarette, and it went up and down in my hand like a yo-yo.

Acosta was beaming as if he loved everybody in the world — well, everybody on his side of the fence. I guess cops do when they’ve just cleaned up a case.

“Boy, you talk about near misses!” he jabbered. “My raiding party was already outside in the alley again after going straight through to the store side and coming back to report nothing suspicious. If they’d let well enough alone, we’d have been already on our way. But, like fools, they called me back inside again for a minute — I suppose to give me a little additional soft soap. While I’m standing there in the passage talking it over, boom! I thought the whole building was coming down on my head. A little stream of plaster comes spilling down from the ceiling, right on both my shoulders. I blew my whistle, and we closed in again, and this time we went upstairs as well as down.”

He quirked his head. “It was worth the trip, believe me. We found a den going full blast — we suspected there was one somewhere around here, but we’d never been able to locate it until now. And we found enough raw opium, packed up and ready to go out, to choke an ox. And, lastly, we found you and your wardrobe companion. There was quite a time up there. They lost their heads, made the mistake of pulling guns on us, so we — how you say it — went to town on them.”

“Who’d you get?”

“We got ’em all. But some of them not in serviceable condition any more. We came in from both sides, see, and nailed them in the middle. They didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“They’ve got someplace to go now,” I growled resentfully.

“Don’t worry, their tickets are bought and they’re on the train.”

“There was a picture that would have saved me. If I only could have got hold of it when I tried—”

“Oh, we’ve got that ourselves,” he assured me. “It’s Exhibit A.”

“I saw him burn it in front of my very eyes!”

“That was the negative. Campos made one print of the picture before they broke in on him at his place. He put it where he always puts his prints to dry out, and so they won’t curl up at the edges. Under the mattress of his cot. Not a very professional system, but then he works on a shoestring, anyway. So they took the negative, but they missed that. He’d already seen what was on it, and he told us where to look for it as soon as he came back to consciousness.”

“How is he; did he pull through?” I asked eagerly.

“He’s in the hospital. They gave him a pretty bad shellacking, but he’ll probably be up and around again in plenty of time for us to use him as a material witness when your friend in there goes on trial for murder. Between the attack on him and the attack on you and the picture and Paulsen’s own confession, which is what I’m holding in my hand, I don’t think we’ve got much to worry about.”

“Paulsen? He broke?”

“Into crumbs.” He laughed. “We just laid down the rolling pins a little while ago, before you woke up.”

He flipped over a couple of the closely typed papers. “He’s been giving dictation all morning. Third draft, no errors. We’ve got it down to the last comma ... The minute you two stepped out of the store — he was back; Chin had him waiting back there — he called him to the entrance and pointed you out to him.”

“Didn’t care who it was, did he? Had never even seen us before.”

“What was it to him? Just a little job on the side. Chin showed him the knife. ‘This is the one he thinks he just bought. He’s carrying the receipt for it in his pocket right now. I switched them on him when I was wrapping them up.’ Then, he says, Chin said to him, ‘You follow him and switch them back again — this time through the woman’s skin. Be sure you get the other one away from him.’ Then he gave him some of the same green paper and rubber bands as he’d wrapped around the original knife.”

“So he didn’t actually take it from my pocket and strip it then and there in the crowd.”

“Of course not, how could he? That was to make your defense sound fishy to us.”

“Which it sure did.”

“He got your own away from you before you even got anywhere near the bar. He saw that you were going in there, and he got in ahead of you. You squeezed right past him when you were wriggling your way through the crowd, pulling her after you. You even helped him without knowing it; to make it easier, you had your coat unbuttoned. The pressure of his body against yours in that thick crowd peeled it back, and the knife was too long for the pocket anyway. It practically came out in his hand.

Then he worked his way over after you, as soon as you had found a place to stand, knifed her with the one Chin had given him, threw the decoy paper and the rubber bands on the floor, so they’d be found lying there as if they’d come out of your own pocket.”

“Thought of everything, didn’t they?”

“But the photographer got his hand.”

“So now you’ve got him. And he got his orders from Chin.”

“He got his orders from Chin,” he agreed. “He admits that.”

“So far so good. Now what about getting it out of Chin where he got his orders from?”

“It stops there.”

I sat up straighter on the cot, parking the coffee mug with a clunk. “What d’you mean, it stops there? You’re going to punish the hand and let the brain go?”

He made passes with his hands. “We can’t hook up the two together. We can’t prove which brain the hand was working for.”

“Look,” I said, “give it to me straight. Never mind the parabolas or parables or whatever you call them.”

“Tio Chin is dead,” he said. “He died a couple hours ago, after being unconscious ever since the raid.”

“What the hell’s the matter with those men of yours?” I flared. “Why’d they have to be so hot-triggered? He was fat; he couldn’t have put up much of a fight! Why didn’t they try to take him al—?”

“My men didn’t do it. He didn’t put up any fight at all. He just sat there quietly waiting, when he saw that he was trapped and couldn’t get out. We broke in the room where he was, and we found him sitting there in a Chinese robe, drinking a cup of tea, his niece bowing her head against his knee. I thought I saw him making a face, as if it was bitter, but we didn’t catch on in time; there was too much excitement going on. We were on the lookout for gunplay, not tea drinking. The girl died first, and he passed out a few minutes after we got him down here. It must have been a triple overdose. Even the stomach pumps couldn’t bring him back.”

That was one guy I never thought I’d be sorry to hear was dead, but I was; I sure was. I wanted him back as badly as if I’d liked him, instead of hating his guts the way I had. “Where does it stand now? Where does that leave it?”

“The connecting link is broken,” Acosta told me. “We have the man who did the actual knifing, and he will be tried for murder. But we can’t go back any farther than that. There is a gap now. The middleman is gone. It was a relay, from one to the next.”

“But it was Roman!” I socked myself hotly on the chest. “I know that! I’m as sure of it as I’m sitting here! You ought to too. Anybody — The order originated with him. He was the starting point.”

“That’s just an opinion, not a fact. And I agree with it myself as an opinion. But I can’t issue an extradition warrant on the strength of an opinion. I have to have proof before I can proceed against anyone, not an opinion. Not even when it’s my own opinion.”

I crouched over low and took a close look at the floor, as if I was trying to make out something written on it. And in invisible ink at that. “But Chin never set eyes on either one of us in his life before until last night, maybe half an hour before it happened. What reason? Doesn’t your own common sense tell you—?”

“That’s probably true. Although you can no longer prove even that, because Chin is dead now. But it also works in reverse. Paulsen has never set eyes on Roman in his life either; doesn’t even know there is such a person. And we know that’s true because he gave us everything else; why wouldn’t he have given us that? He would have been only too glad to pass the buck if he could have. He can’t.”

“He’s been running the stuff up there. He must have turned it over to someone. He didn’t just dump it on the beach.”

“A man with a truck picked it up each time, a man that initialed a receipt and didn’t give him any name. And that man certainly wasn’t Roman. The initial was just a code okay. Chin knew what it was; Paulsen didn’t have to. Paulsen was working for Chin, out of this end. Not for anyone at all out of the other end. And even if that trail could be traced back eventually to Roman, yours is a different trail, and yours can’t. He gave the order for that killing to one man and one alone, and that man is dead now, without having spoken. Don’t you see? It’s gone forever.”

“And even if you had Roman right here is your jurisdiction, in custody here in Havana, you couldn’t bring him to book for murder, couldn’t proceed against him?”

“No,” he said. “What evidence is there against him?”

I stood up slowly, as if I’d lost all further interest in the conversation. Well, to tell the truth, I had. “That seems too bad,” was all I said thoughtfully. “It seems too bad.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets and looked at him suddenly. “What’s my own status? Am I being held here as a witness, or what?”

I noticed he took a minute or two to answer. “By rights, you should be,” he said to me in a hesitant sort of way. “It’s a murder trial, after all, and your presence will be necessary as a witness.” Then he passed a hand over his chin. “But let’s stretch a point and say you’re free under your own cognizance.”

“I’ll be in Havana when the trial opens,” I assured him grimly.

He watched me drift over toward the door and put my hand on it.

“Where are you going?”

“There’s an old saying in my language. To change it around a little, I’m going to see a dog — about a lady.”