The Black Path of Fear

2

The Chinese section of Havana makes up in noise and overcrowdedness for what it lacks in size. It makes the Chinatowns of our cities up North look like lifeless ghost towns by comparison, and some of them aren’t slouches when it comes to being thickly peopled. But this was a veritable anthill of swarming humanity; I’d never seen anything like it. The police car, with me in the back seat between Acosta and one of the other department men, had to crawl along at a snail’s pace through the crooked, teeming streets. It would have been quicker to walk it, but maybe they felt that the car, with its official license plates and one of the men riding supercargo on the running boards, added prestige. It was certainly no help. The man at the wheel drove with one hand, his other tapping the signal button like a telegraph key. I don’t think we covered a soundless yard along the way. The continual blats coming from us only added to the din all around us. It was enough to wreck your nerves in short order — that is, if you still cared whether they were wrecked or not. I didn’t, so I wasn’t affected by it.

Where the way was wide enough they could get out of our way by flattening themselves against the walls on either side of us. But plenty of the time even that wouldn’t do it; they had to get in altogether, back up into doorways, until we’d passed by. And when they were street peddlers — and enough of them were — and had a lot of truck piled up on their heads, even that wouldn’t do it; they had to hoist themselves up on something and let us glide by below. And the man on that side of the seat had to lower his head. Several times like that we cruised by beneath momentary umbrellas of fly-active sweets or pyramided panama hats held agonizedly aloft over us. It was a peculiar way to be taken anywhere under arrest, to say the least.

This, I kept reminding myself, was supposed to be my last chance to clear myself. They were giving me this last chance, unasked. Or, rather, I had mentioned it once earlier back there at the bar, but by now it was strictly their own idea, not mine; I didn’t much care any more. What they were out for was verbal substantiation, from the Chinaman from whom I’d bought the knife, that I’d actually left there with the hear-no-evil one, that that was the one he’d wrapped for me, that he’d absent-mindedly made out the wrong receipt. Even that wouldn’t be enough to clear me altogether any more; I was in too deep by now. But at least it would make the odds more even. By supporting this one feature of my story it would indirectly strengthen all the rest of it at the same time. Any story is always as strong as its weakest detail. This detail mayn’t have been the weakest one, but at least it was the most easily proven. In fact, it was the only one that I could get a witness for. The rest was just my own unsupported word.

I wasn’t much worried about getting his corroboration; I knew I could count on it, but the strange part of it was I didn’t particularly care by this time one way or the other. These guys in the car with me were looking at it from the police point of view; I was looking at it from my own personal point of view.

She was gone, so what difference did all the rest of it make? The hell with the rest of it. I just sat there staring woodenly ahead. They could get there fast or they could get there slow or they could get there never; to me it was all the same.

We hit this Pasaje Angosta finally and sealed it up by stopping lengthwise across it. At that it only reached from windshield to the hinges on the rear door; the rest of the car was all overlap. If I’d thought the streets before this were narrow, they were parade grounds compared to this. It was more like a slit inadvertently left when two buildings are put side by side and don’t quite come together. We had to stop the way we did, broadside; to have tried to turn the car and wedge it in there would have either shorn the hubcaps and the fenders off or gouged the plaster and fill out of the walls on each side.

As though we weren’t jammed up enough, already, right away, as soon as we became static, the place started to choke up around us with onlookers. And there’s nothing so passively immovable as a Chinese crowd.

Acosta got down and peered into the chasm facing us.

“This is it, isn’t it, Escott?” he said briskly.

I turned my head. I’d still been looking forward until now. “This is it.”

He hitched his elbow at me, and I got down and stood next to him. Then the other guy got down in back of me. They both took a grip on me, and they led me forward and into it, very much the prisoner, with one of them making a tourniquet of the slack of my coat collar and the other one making one of the back of my sleeve. At that we couldn’t go three abreast; we went sort of on the bias, with me the middle link. The others stayed with the car.

It fooled you. It kept going and kept going. It even got a little wider than it had been at its mouth; not much, but just a little. It smelled; boy, how it smelled. Like asafetida, and somebody burning feathers, and the lee side of a sewer. It wasn’t of an even darkness; it was mottled darkness. Every few yards or so an oil lamp or a kerosene torch or a Chinese paper lantern, back within some doorway or some stall opening, would squirt out a puddle of light to relieve the gloom. They were different colors, these smears, depending on the reflector they filtered through: orange and sulphur-green, and once even a sort of purple-red, were spewed around on the dirty walls, like grape juice. But don’t get me wrong; it was mostly shadow; these were just the breaks in the darkness.

Shuffling figures in felt slippers and black alpaca trousers would stop against the wall to make way for us and turn and stare after us as we went by. Sometimes they tried to follow in our wake, but the rear man of our party would fang a curt word of dismissal at them and they’d drop off again.

Once a projecting sign or iron bracket thrusting out over one of the doorways — I’m not sure which it was — clipped off my hat, but they let me stop, and one of them picked it up and gave it back to me.

We got to it. I knew it when I saw it coming from up ahead, darkness and all, even though I’d only been there once before. It was just a doorway — no show window — but it was a little wider than the others and it spilled out a brighter gash of lantern light than the rest. It had a vertical panel of black sandpaper running down each side of it, with gold-paint Chinese hieroglyphs on one side and the equivalent Spanish lettering on the other. Both were Chinese to me.

We turned off there and we went in. The alley went on the rest of the way without us, still smelling as bad as ever. In here it wasn’t so noxious. It smelled of incense — dead incense, though — and of sandalwood and of stale boxes, and that was about all.

We stopped short like a three-car train, piling up on one another a little.

Acosta said curtly: “This is it, Escott?”

“This is it,” I answered wearily.

“How did you happen to find such an out-of-the-way place, off the main streets, right after landing from your ship?”

“We didn’t. A steerer brought us here. He kept tugging us and pestering us. Finally we let him bring us here more to get rid of him than anything else.”

She hadn’t wanted to come — I remembered that now — I’d been the one. I’d wanted to buy her a little present to celebrate our landfall, and I hadn’t known my way around. “Let’s stay out of these corner pockets,” she’d urged plaintively. “The whole town’s a corner pocket,” I’d reassured her. “Come on, let’s give it a spin.”

“Himph,” Acosta said. Which meant simply: Himph.

It looked pretty much the way it had the first time. A little deader, that was all. The same soapstone Buddhas ranged along the shelves, the same carved teakwood boxes, the same brass urns and ivory thingamajigs. The same potbellied tangerine lanterns strung along in a row from the rafters, each with a single black character inked on it. The same fat, kewpie-like Chinaman, with stringy white mustache braids dangling down nearly a foot from his upper lip, was dozing on the same stool over in the same corner as the first time we’d come in; sleeves telescoped across his paunch, a taffeta skullcap with a button on his pate, slippered feet tucked in behind the rungs of the stool. His handless sleeves would go up and down every time he breathed.

“Hey, patron,” Acosta roused him gruffly.

A couple of little slits of eyes, like diverging accent marks, opened up in his satiny face. Otherwise he didn’t move at first. You could just see a twinkle behind them; that was about all the life they showed.

“Si señoles,” he said in a singsong squeak, and busted his sleeves open in the middle. A long skinny hand came out, yellow as a chicken claw, and swept around three sides of the room. Meaning: Help yourselves. If you see anything you like, time enough to wake me up then.

That wasn’t enough for Acosta. He was the police, after all.

“Take it off there,” he barked, “and step over here!”

It took a lot of doing. I don’t know how he’d gotten up on the thing in the first place, the trouble he had getting down. First the felt slippers unhooked themselves and dropped with a little flop, as though they were empty. He had the smallest feet for a fat man I’d ever seen. Then the belly came down next, threatening to tear loose from its moorings. Then his head and arms followed it, with little floundering gestures.

He was all down now and about shoulder-high to the rest of us. He came puttering over to us, shaking like jelly and bobbing his head ingratiatingly. He was a character. It occurred to me fleetingly he was too much of a stage Chinaman; it must have been partly an act. They aren’t that way; they’re just people, like we are, not bobbing Billikens. I let it go again. What did I care what he was like? The stuff that had to do with me was coming up now, anyway.

Acosta said: “You’re Chin?”

He wobbled all over and beamed. He stuck a finger into himself. “Si. Chin. At your slervice.”

So the Tio prefix wasn’t part of his Chinese name; I caught on. I found out later it was Spanish for “Uncle.” That was his trade name or his nickname, whatever you want to call it: Uncle Chin.

“If it’s going to be about me,” I said, “make it in English. He speaks a few words of it. He did the last time I was in here.”

He ducked his head, as at a compliment. “Lilly bit,” he said. You’re phony, I said to myself. Nobody could be that quaint. They’d even kill them in China if they were.

Acosta said, “Take a look at this man here.”

He took a look through the slits under his eyebrows.

“Was he in your place earlier tonight?”

“Yes, gentleman was.” The mustache strings rippled all the way down.

“Did he buy anything?”

“Yes, gentleman do.”

“All right, tell us. What did he buy?”

“Gentleman buy knife.”

That was all right; I’d never said I hadn’t.

“Describe the knife. You know what means ‘describe’ in English?”

He simmered comfortably down over his boilers. “Oh, shu. Ornlamental knife. Knife with jade handle. For to cut letters. For to cut fluit. For to hang on wall, maybe.”

“Describe the jade handle.”

This was it now. I wasn’t as bored as I thought I was, after all. My chin perked up a little, and I looked at him.

He brought it out in piecework. It struck me he was trying to get a buildup out of it for some reason or other.

“Jade handle have monkey.”

“We know that, but describe the monkey.”

His hands streaked up and blotted out the upper half of his face. “Monkey hiding eyes, so.”

It hit me slow. Everything always seems to have, all my life. Like when she’d died. I’d been the last one to catch on. They were all through nodding to one another and giving the “I-told-you-so” office, Acosta and the other Cuban, before I finally got it.

Out went the ray of hope, and it got plenty dark. A bass roar that I hadn’t known I possessed myself came up slow through me — all the way up from my feet, it felt like. “You’re crazy! What’s the matter with you? What’re you trying to do to me, you fat hunk of—?” I strained forward at him from between the two Cubans who’d still been hanging onto me all this while. I upset a teakwood taboret with a lot of brass things on it, and they sang out like tocsins. “I bought the one holding its ears! You know it! You saw me—”

They shut me up. They were handling this.

“Whoa! Take it easy, now,” Acosta said, and there was a glint of toughness under the calm of his manner. He forked his thumb crevice to the front of my neck and pushed me back with that. The other guy paid in his grip on my arm by twisting it around behind me, and they got me still like that.

Tio Chin shrugged amiably. “Come by threes,” he said. “First one sold is to gentleman. Others still got. Can show you.”

“Can lie through your teeth,” I slurred at him. My arm took another quarter turn behind my back, like a crankshaft. I swallowed the rest of it. It was mostly about his mother, anyway.

He waddled over to a stock cabinet, slid back a pair of panels, and groped around inside of it. He was way over at the back, where the lantern light couldn’t reach so good, anyway.

When he came back he had a roll of thick quilted silk tucked under his arm. I knew what it was; I’d seen it before. But I didn’t see how he was going to prove his point by it. There had to be one missing, and I knew which one it was I’d walked out of here with.

“Imported from Hong Kong,” he said. “Come flum there to Panama to here. Only order three sets. Cost too high; never make sale; no demand. Got invoices to show, in Spanish and Chinese. Can prove only order three sets for store. Show you invoices later.”

He undid the roll first; it was fastened at both ends. Then he let it drop down, open out into a square. Or, rather, a long oblong strip. Threaded through this, on the inner side, ran a succession of silk loops, in two long parallels, top and bottom. They held a row of knives, the top ones the handles, the bottom ones the tips of the blades. All the handles were carved in the same monkey design. It was repeated three times over in three different substances: in ivory, in ebony, and in jade. There were eight: three ivory ones, three ebony ones, and two jade ones. One of the jade ones had been taken out; there was a gap where it belonged.

The two that were still in place were the monkey holding its mouth and the monkey holding its ears — the one that I’d bought, had had wrapped, and carried out of here in my inside pocket.

“See?” He beamed jovially.

“Well?” This was Acosta to me.

I wriggled violently all the way down, like a flag caught on a flagpole and trying to lash out. “You’re a liar!” I bayed at him. “You’re pulling a switch on me; that’s what you’re doing! I don’t know how you worked it, but—”

“No do nothing,” he protested querulously. “Only show this.”

“Yeah, but I’ll do something,” I raged, “if I can only get at that stomach of yours with my foot!” It swung up harmlessly in the air; they had me back too far.

“¡Quieto!” Acosta growled, and gave me the back of his hand across the teeth.

I didn’t even notice it; I had no soreness to waste on anyone but that blubber-faced Chinaman. “You heard me ask her! You even carried that roll thing over to her, where she was standing, and held it up for her to decide! You heard which one she said to take! You saw which one I took out and handed to you to wrap! You must have done a palm switch when you carried it over to the counter—”

“I leave others there by you, in case. I only take one over to lap it up. I only loll up case after you go out of store. You touch, maybe; I no touch.”

That was true; he had. That stalled me for a minute. That must have looked bad to them, checking myself like that in mid-argument. I couldn’t help it. Everything looked bad to them already, so they might as well add that to it while they were about it.

Acosta sliced his hand at me disgustedly. “What is the use of stringing this out any longer? No one else bought one of these knives but you. And the one that you say you bought has been back here in the store all the time. Come on. We have been lenient with you, given you every chance to clear yourself, because you are a stranger here. You should have been locked up an hour ago!”

“Don’t do me any favors,” I mumbled sullenly.

He lingered to ask Chin an additional question or two. For the record, I suppose.

“Tell me, how did they act, these two people, when they came in here?”

“Like people do in store. No diffelent. Señola go around, touch things all over place. Gentleman stand still, not move so much.”

“He asked to be shown a knife, or it was you who first offered them?”

“He ask for kimono for lady. I show; they look; they buy; I lap. Then lady, she go over in corner, touch a lot of little things some more.”

“Then?” I could see Acosta getting more interested. I started to store up steam pressure for another outburst at the lies I figured were coming.

“Then gentleman, he say: ‘You got something I could use in the way of a knife?’ He talk low.”

I’d talked low because he’d been standing right in front of me; you don’t call out loud to someone when they’re face to face with you.

“And?”

“I bring set; I show. He take one out; he feel to see if sharp.”

Acosta was all ears.

“He go over to lady with it. He do like this.”

He pretended he had a knife in his hand. He pretended Acosta was she. He drew his hand back and swiped it around toward Acosta’s heart, from the side, bearing upward a little from his own hip as he lunged. “He stop just in time, before it touch her. He say: ‘This is what you get.’ ”

“And the lady?”

“She close eyes. She say something in English. No can get; no can understand English so good.”

“As if she were frightened?”

“Was frightened, maybe — don’t know.”

What she’d said was, “From you it’d be a pleasure.” He’d taken all the playfulness out of it. He’d repeated the bare act itself, but he’d stripped it of all meaning. He’d left out the look in our eyes. How could anyone repeat that, anyway? He’d left out the playback of — I suppose you’d have to call it passion; I don’t know what else to call it — from me to her and from her to me again. He’d left out the tease in my voice and the come-on in hers.

He’d sewed me up beautiful.

The explosion never came. How could it? He hadn’t told them a thing that was partly untrue. He hadn’t told them a thing that was wholly untruthful. I couldn’t get him on it. He had me.

I kept looking at him and wondering. Did you do that on purpose? What’s behind it? What do you get out of it by twisting things around that way? Or is it just my blind bad luck? Did it just happen to come out distorted that way, through the filter of your sleepy observation?

He looked so sleepy; he looked so harmless. He looked benign. That was the only word for him — benign.

They started me out. When he saw that they were through with him for the present he bobbed his head about sixteen times in parting salutation and waddled back in the direction of the stool over in the corner.

The last look I had at him from the doorway, he was perched back on top of it again, the way he’d been when we’d first come in. His felt slippers were hooked on behind the rungs; his sleeves were relocked over his belly, and those little slantwise nicks in his face had already dropped closed again. He’d drowsed off before we were even over the threshold.

Acosta broke up my baleful scrutiny of him with a swing around the other way, by the back of my collar.

“Come on, Escott,” he said grimly. “Straight ahead.”

“Listen,” I said through my clenched teeth. “You’ve got me under arrest; you’re taking me down to get me booked, and you’re going to get me jailed. That ought to satisfy you. All I ask is one thing. At least give me the right initial; it begins with an S, not an E.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get the right initial,” he promised. “You’ll get everything that’s coming to you.”