The Black Path of Fear

5

I’d been working for him for a week before I even saw her, knew that she was there.

It was funny how I got the job. Picked it up out of the gutter, you might say. Symbolic, I suppose, if you go in for that sort of stuff, which I don’t. That’s about where a job like that would be lying, come to think of it. I wasn’t even trying for it. I turned it over with my foot, and there it was.

I was in Miami. My name was Scott. That was about all I’d brought down with me. I had clothes. You get arrested if you don’t. I had one article of each basic garment, all on me and in use. Nothing left over. I had a coat of tan and a park bench. That was all I had to my name. The bench was mine, in a manner of speaking. It belonged to the city, technically, but I’d been picking the same one each night, so I had a priority on it. Once I even drove another guy off it, made him look for another.

I used to get up early, around dawn or a little after. Dawn is beautiful in Miami. All flamingo-pink and baby-blue. But you can’t eat it. I used to wash my face in a fountain there in the park and comb my hair with a broken half comb I had in my pocket and turn my coat back right side out, so the wrinkles wouldn’t show. And by the time I got through you could hardly tell. Or so I hoped.

I came out of the park the morning that I got the job, and I was walking along, following up my own shadow along the pale pink sidewalk, giving it its head, watching to see where it would lead me. I passed this resort, this night spot — I think it was called The Acacias, or something like that. I didn’t notice it much. Miami is a pleasure town, and it’s lousy with them. But this was a little bigger and a little classier-looking than the average; that was all I noticed about it. It must have only just closed about an hour or so before. You could almost smell the heat still coming out of it, as you went by, from the night-long blaze that had gone on inside it; it had hardly cooled off yet.

There was a little strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb, a sort of fancy border. I thought I saw something lying there in it, but the dew was flashing, so it made it hard to tell. I nearly passed it by at first. Then I changed my mind and went back and gave it a cuff with my toe. It turned over, and it was a wallet. I reached down and got it.

It was just a little bit out of true with the entrance of the place. As if somebody stepping into a car at that point, while it was still dark, had dropped it and never noticed it. It was black pin seal, with gold clasps on the corners. It said “Mark Cross” on the lining, which is a good place to get them. It had money in it, plenty, and for a minute that was all that interested me. Forty dollars, about.

I kept on walking.

It wasn’t anonymous by any means. It was loaded with identification. The driver’s license told whose it was right through the glossine, without even having to go into the various compartments. Edward Roman, and he was forty-four, and he lived at Hermosa Drive. And then in addition there were cards and scraps of paper with telephone numbers and disjointed memos on them, most of them meaningless and hieroglyphic except to the owner. No, it wasn’t anonymous by any means.

But I kept on walking. My ethics couldn’t argue with my stomach right then. I had breakfast without washing glasses first or loading trays, and when I got through there was a dollar and a half less in the wallet.

Then I let my ethics get the upper hand. It’s surprising how much easier it is to be ethical when you’re well fed.

I couldn’t even find out where the place was until I’d asked three people. The first cop I asked had never heard of it and at least was honest enough to admit it. The second one had, but in a vague way that wasn’t much good when it came to specific directions. A truck driver finally cinched it, after I’d been under way for some time. He said he sympathized with me if I was going to try to make it on foot; he would have given me a lift, but he was going the wrong way for that, coming in instead of heading out. I just kept going. It occurred to me there were easier ways to be honest, but I didn’t have anything else to do with myself, anyway, so what was the difference?

It was way out. You felt like you were halfway up the coast to Palm Beach already before you finally got to it. It was something when you did get to it, though.

I’d seen these big places before. It’s crawling with them down there. But this looked as though it had been laid out by someone who was all speed and no control. It had its own private driveway leading off the highway, which was why no one had been sure where Hermosa Drive was; that was it. The house was facing the other way, looking out to sea, with its back to the highway. It had its own private beach. It was an estate, let me tell you.

Anyway, I turned in and walked right down to it without being stopped or questioned, though there were a pair of signs, one on each side, warning you not to do that.

I went up the steps and stopped close to the door and rang. A colored man in a white linen jacket, like stewards wear at country clubs, opened up and looked out at me after a considerable wait.

I said, “Can I see Mr. Roman?”

“What do you want to see him about?”

I’d walked too far just to turn the wallet in at the door. “I want to give him something that belongs to him.”

He closed the door again — sort of scared, I thought — and there was another wait. I had a feeling I was being looked over, but I couldn’t make out from where, nor by whom, so I let it go again.

Then the same colored man came back again. “Come inside a minute,” he said. There was something temporary about the permission, like a sort of tryout or screening. I could tell that by the brief inflection of his voice. He didn’t say Mr. Roman would see me, or anything like that.

I went inside after him. He kept going toward a broad flight of stairs, but before I could get to them somebody suddenly got in front of me, and I found myself stopped. He wasn’t anywhere near the forty-four that the driver’s license had put Roman down for. He came up to about my eyebrows, but he packed a lot more bulk the wide way. His skin was the color of dried lemon peel, and with the same kind of coarse bumps in it. His hair looked like it had been given a shoeshine with one of those flannel polishing cloths the kids use. His eyes looked at you steady enough, but something had been left out of them. Either it had died out behind them, or else it had never been born in them in the first place. I wouldn’t know what to call it; I’m not good at those things. Even dogs have it in their eyes; he didn’t. Soul, I guess. His reminded me of shoe buttons. Or of coffee beans. Smooth, hard-surfaced; just objects.

He had on a black silk shirt and a mustard-color sport jacket hanging open over that. Bare blue-veined feet stuck into straw sandals. But you didn’t feel like laughing.

Something about him gave me the creeps; I don’t know what it was. It was like standing with your face up against a coiled rattlesnake. An inch away, so that the darn thing wouldn’t even have to stretch its neck to fang you. You can’t even back out, because that might bring it on even faster. That was the kind of feeling.

But not because of any hostility or threat he was showing. He wasn’t showing any. His drawl was slow and indifferent, and he acted half asleep on his feet. Even his hands — they kept brushing into me lightly all the time, without his seeming to know it.

“What was that message?”

I didn’t get him for a minute.

He sort of grazed me on the chest, on the left side, with the back of his hand.

He said, “What was that you said at the door?”

“I said I want to see Mr. Roman, to give him something that I’ve got for him.”

“That could mean a lot of things, you know.” But he didn’t say it to me; he said it to the colored man waiting with one foot on the first step, one foot on the second.

His hand had been down at my hip. Or something had — too quick and deft for me to be sure. But then when I looked it wasn’t any more.

He said, “Excuse me, you had a little dust on you.”

I thought about it an hour later. An hour later I knew I’d been frisked. But right then I didn’t.

The colored man who had been waiting on the stairs said, “Okay, Mister Jordan?” He acted like this was nothing new to him; he’d watched things like this many times before.

He said, “Okay, he can go up now.”

I went up the stairs after the butler. I expected to hear that funny buzzing sound a rattler makes behind me any minute, but I didn’t.

He knocked on a door up there and said through it, “Someone for the boss.”

A voice answered through it. “He says all right.”

The first one opened the door for me and said, “Go ’head in.”

It was a big bedroom, and one wall had been practically left out. There was a terrace outside with an awning over it.

There was a man sprawled out in a deck chair out there. I couldn’t see his face at first; there was a barber working over him. There was a white girl crouched on a hassock, holding one of his hands. She was taking little digs under his nails with a little stick with cotton wrapped around the point of it.

I just stood there in the middle of the room and waited.

He said, “Get those sideburns even.”

The colored valet got down on one knee. I saw him take a little spooled tape measure out of the pocket of his jacket and touch it off against one side of the head, then against the other.

He said, “Quarter of an inch down from the top of each ear.”

“And give ’em a little slant. No square corners. I hate these square corners on ’em.”

I stood and waited.

All of a sudden the man in the chair said, “Ow!” and one of his knees kicked up a little. It wasn’t the barber; he was standing back from him.

The girl said, “You moved, Mr. Roman.”

He sat up straight in the chair and gave her a paste in the eye. He left his hand open, but he plugged it home hard. She went off the hassock and sprawled in a sitting position on the floor, with her legs still up over it.

“But you didn’t,” he snarled at her. “Not quick enough!”

She began to cry.

“Get out of here!” he yelled. “Before you get the terrace all damp!”

She picked up her things, and the valet hustled her across the room and out the door, with his arm across her back to keep her moving. He snatched up a bill from the dresser, on the wing, and I saw him give it to her. I think it was a ten-spot. “That’s all right, chile,” I heard him whisper consolingly; “you’ll do better next time. Don’t pay no heed. That’s just his way.”

Some way, I thought to myself.

Roman got up out of the chair and stretched and came into the room. He didn’t look the forty-four the license had him down for, either. Toads don’t show their age. He had on blazer-striped satin pajamas, purple and a very light green, about the color of a fish’s belly when you look at it through the water. That was what they were; the record stands. He had a brocaded robe mercifully covering most of them, except the trouser legs and the chest; of a very intricate pattern — I think they call it Paisley.

He went over and looked at himself in the mirror. Looked at himself good. I kept thinking, You must have a strong stomach, mister. Then he picked up a cigar and clipped it and lighted it. Then he decided the time had come to notice me.

He said, “What can I do for you, Jack?”

I said, “I thought maybe you’d like to have this back,” and held it out toward him.

He looked at it in surprise; didn’t seem to want to believe it was his, even after he’d opened it and conned it. He said, “This ain’t mine, is it? Where’d you get it?”

I told him where I’d found it.

He still had a hard time convincing himself. He said to the valet, “Get out my last night’s. See if the wallet’s missing from it.”

The colored man looked. He said, “It’s gone, boss. Not a sign of it.”

Roman said, “I never even missed it until now!” He was a little taut, I thought. He started to look all through it quickly, but not at the money.

Then he shot open a drawer and took out another billfold, an alligator one this time, and looked through that. “I guess it was in this one,” he said. He looked a little relieved, I thought.

“How much was in it?” he asked indifferently.

“Forty-one dollars,” I told him. “I spent a dollar and a half to get something to eat, so there’s only thirty-nine fifty left in it now.”

He said, “I wouldn’t have known.” He looked at the valet. “Can you imagine that for an honest guy?” There seemed to be some sort of novelty attached to it, as far as he was concerned. “Can you beat that?” he kept saying. “He comes all the way out here with it—”

He turned to me abruptly. “Take it; it’s yours, fellow,” he said to me.

I turned it down. “Thanks just the same,” I said, “but it would be gone inside of two or three days, anyway—”

“I like you,” he said. “I want to show it. What can you do?”

I gave him the rather skinny list. “I can garden a little, carpenter, drive a car—”

He stopped me on that one. “You’ve got yourself a job.”

The man who’d stopped me short of the stairs had come into the room. Or, rather, I looked, and he was there just inside the door. He seemed to have that trick of suddenly appearing from nowhere.

He said, “What about Claybourne? D’you want two of them, Ed?”

“Can him,” Roman said. “Give him twenty minutes to get out of there.” Then when the two of us got to the door he changed his mind. “Make it fifteen,” he called. “I may want to use the car in about half an hour myself, and I don’t want to get held up.”

That was on a Thursday.

I worked for him a whole week before I even saw her, knew that she was in the house at all.

The phone rang in my quarters, and Job’s voice said, “Bring the car around, Scotty. Two and a half minutes, now.” He was the colored butler who’d first opened the door for me the week before.

“Yep,” I said.

I thought it was him again. I put on my jacket and cap and got in and took the car over beside the main house. I braked flush with the entrance and stepped down, opened the back up, and stood there by it at attention. He liked all the trimmings when he got into his car.

And the door opened and a girl came out.

By herself, and beautiful. It’s all right to say beautiful, but it’s not the word that counts; it’s what it does to you.

I blinked, but I kept the rest of my face from showing anything.

She came out slow, as though she didn’t much care whether she got to where she was going or didn’t get there. Not slow so much as listlessly, wiltedly. She closed the door behind her and she came down the steps.

She didn’t even look at me. Her eyes were down, their lids at half-mast. I don’t think she even noticed there’d been a change of drivers. How could she if she didn’t look at me? I was probably just a blurred bottle-green offside to her retinas.

I got her by heart between the entrance steps and the car step. By heart is right.

She wore a cream flannel dress, one of those things that’s practically a slip; no shape to it, just straight down from shoulders to knees. It had a sash of Roman-striped ribbon twisted around the waist. And she had a bandanna or kerchief of the same striped stuff knotted about her head, so that you couldn’t see her hair at all or even tell what color it was. It was completely hidden. The two wings of the knot it was fastened in perked up one on each side of her head and reminded me for some screwy reason of a kitten’s stubby ears. Her right hand was heavy with a diamond that must have tipped over a mountain when they mined it out from under it.

I was already taking prophylactic measures in my own mind, though. I must have had a hunch I needed them. I thought to myself, I can about imagine the type. His speed. Sure, on the outside, beautiful. On the inside, sawdust.

She said, “In toward town, please,” in a low voice that you could hardly hear, and got in.

I closed the door after her. She sat down on the seat with that little precautionary under-leg tuck they give even the scantiest of skirts. Ever watch them?

I got in and drove her. He liked it fast. I took it moderate with her. But she didn’t seem to know or care how we were going.

On the way in she said suddenly, “Stop here a minute.”

I stopped, but when I looked around there wasn’t anything there but the sea. But it was a particularly good place to see it from, a secluded place, with palms framing it on both sides.

We just sat there; I don’t know how long. I watched her in the glass once or twice. She just kept looking out at it. Looking out at it. She was straining slightly forward. She even had her two hands on the car-window sill. There was a yearning, wistful expression on her face, like you’d see on the face of a shut-in peering out from behind a window at the world outside.

She was just looking out at that line where the water met the sky. That imaginary line that isn’t there when you get to it but that promises so much to all of us.

You couldn’t hear a sound from me. A change of opinion doesn’t make any noise. I quit fidgeting on the driver’s seat, like I’d been doing until then, and just looked down at my own lap and stayed that way.

After a while we went on, and she finished her shopping or whatever it was, and I waited for her and brought her back.

On the way back she spoke to me twice. She said suddenly, “What happened to Claybourne?” As if she’d only just then discovered that she wasn’t riding behind the same man.

“He’s gone, miss.”

She said, “It’s Mrs. Roman.”

The surprise was a double-header. Her being it. And then the way she said it. The look on her when she said it. I’d taken it to be just a one-season stand of his. Or maybe even a one-night stand. But it was for her whole life. And she said it in the apologetic, almost shame-faced way in which a woman who is discovered at some messy household task would say, “I’m all covered with grime and soot; I’m not fit to be seen.”

That was all; not another word. And if she’d come out to the car slow, when she left it she went in twice as slow. She almost dragged.

Then Job’s voice on the phone again. “The car, Scotty. Two and a half minutes.” And the drive again, and the stop again.

She said, “Stop here.”

I don’t think it was actually the same spot. But the principle was the same.

I watched her in the mirror, puzzled. I didn’t have it right for a minute. I almost thought she was frightened, or didn’t feel well, until I got it straight. She was taking such deep breaths. I could see her chest rise and fall with their slowness and depth. Like a person who couldn’t breathe freely until now, until she came out here to this lonely spot; who is starved for air, hungry for it, and can’t get enough of it. Like a person who was trying to drink in that invisible line out there that held her eyes so fast.

On the way back she spoke to me twice again.

She said, “By the way, what’s your name?”

“Scott, miss.” Then I remembered about the day before and I said, “I’m sorry; I forgot,” and I answered it over again. “Scott, Mrs. Roman.”

“That’s all right,” she said, more to herself than to me. “I think I like it better the other way, at that.”

We shouldn’t have stopped there at sunset. They say moonlight is risky, but sunset is dangerous too. There was no moonlight for her. The spotlights on the floor shows at his clubs were the only moonlights she knew. But we stopped there at sunset, and twilight’s a sad hour; the day is dying, and your hopes are dying, and your youth is dying, and the dream you’ve had will never come true now.

I saw the watery fill in her eyes. Her face wasn’t twisted up any. The tears were just coming down it slow, the way it was, two to a side.

I should have minded my own business. It’s easy to say that. I turned around to her on the seat and asked her, “Is there anything I can do?”

The look she gave me skinned my heart alive. “Yes,” she said. “Make it three years ago. Push it back so that it’s three years ago. Or if you can’t do that, call me ‘miss.’ Or if you can’t do that, just look the other way.”

All of a sudden I’d gotten in the back seat with her before I even knew it was coming on myself.

I said the things you say when it hits you like that. Or the things you say, they said themselves.

“I love you. I’ve loved you for three weeks and two days now. I’ve loved you ever since you first got into the car in back of me. I didn’t know it until just now.”

I took time off and took my lips away from hers and said, “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again. I’m quitting tomorrow.”

She said only five words. And five were all she needed to say. It told me the whole thing. “Don’t do that to me.”

We didn’t say anything more about it from then on, ever again. About being in love, or loving one another. We didn’t have to say anything about it after that. We were it.

Three days later, when we were out there again, I said: “Look, I haven’t got anything.”

“That’s what I want, your nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I’m only waiting for you.”

“Where? Where do you want it to be?”

She looked out at that line again over my shoulder. “What’s over there? Over that way?”

“Havana, I think. Not straight out, but down that way a little.”

“I don’t care what it’s called. It looks so open, so free. So clean. No one can get you back again, with all that deep water in between—”

“Havana, then?”

“Havana, then.”

“There’s a cruise ship from New York standing in right now. It goes on to there next. I’ll find out when it pulls out. I’m afraid to take a chance on a plane; you have to wait for reservations. And they have a habit of phoning you to confirm or cancel the flight. It might get to him by mistake. The ferry’s risky too. It’s slow, and he has that cabin cruiser down in the bay.”

“Don’t take too long. Hurry, hurry. There’s death at our shoulders all the time. Every minute, every second. Even when we sit here like this. Don’t look at me, don’t breathe, don’t think — until we’ve done it.”

I thought of that coiled rattlesnake, Jordan, and the lethal buzz I still expected to hear, even when I had him in the seat behind me. She was right; there was a lot of death around. Around us all the time.

“It may be soon. I’ve noticed it since Wednesday already. The ship, I mean. They don’t stay in longer than three or four days at each stop. In case I don’t get a chance to tell you tomorrow afternoon, how will I be able to—?”

I could feel her whole form quiver against me. “Don’t come near me! Be careful. I’m so frightened, Scotty.”

“Can you see my window, the window of my quarters, from where your room is in the main house?”

“Yes. And I’ve often watched it before I knew what this was coming on. It was like a little postage stamp of light across the grounds.”

“I’ll blink my lights then. Watch for them. When you’re up there dressing for dinner, around seven. Count the number of times they go out. That’ll give you the hour it sails. If it leaves before the next afternoon’s drive. If they don’t go out at all, that means it doesn’t leave for another twenty-four hours. Then watch for them the following night.”

“Take me back now. It’s way overtime. And he already said to me the other day, ‘You go out more in the car than you used to.’ It hasn’t clicked yet, but it will sooner or later; it’s bound to.”

I took him in the morning. And that’s when I did it. I used up the slack I had waiting around for him and went over there to the place where they sold the tickets. It was due to sail at midnight that very night, they told me. I told them I just wanted space from here to Havana. I wouldn’t have got it, but they’d dropped off a few people just now in Miami. I took two cabins, one for her and one for me; don’t ask me why. If we’d wanted just a cheap affair we could have stayed right here and gambled with our lives and had one. We wanted more than that, and wading through a lot of muddy water didn’t seem to me to be the quickest way to get to it.

I didn’t see her in the afternoon, didn’t have a chance to tell her. He kept me down there with him the whole time. I don’t know if it was purposely done or not. His face didn’t show anything. It might have been just a coincidence. And then again I remembered what she’d told me he’d said, about her using the car more often than she’d used to, and wondered. All he said was, “Stick around.” So I stuck, afraid that if I made a move while his back was turned I’d give the whole thing away; and the hours piled up and rusted away into sundown.

I brought him back with me at six — fast, like a bullet, like he liked to be carried anywhere — and we streaked by that grove, our place, where we had stopped so often, at such speed that it was just like a quick snapshot on our right, there and then gone again.

But a funny thing happened. At the exact moment we did so Jordan broke a sour sort of chuckle in his throat. Jordan was always with him, of course; when I speak of “him” I meant it in the plural; he never moved a foot without him.

They hadn’t been saying a word just ahead; there hadn’t been anything to lead up to it. It seemed to come by itself, just as we were passing that place.

“What’re you snickering about?” Roman asked him.

“I was just thinking,” I heard him say. “That’s a good place for lovers back there.”

Roman didn’t answer; let it go. I could feel that funny needling feeling you get when a whiff of cold air plays over the back of your neck. I curbed an impulse to raise my eyes to the mirror. I had a hunch if I let them go up to it I’d find Jordan’s already there, waiting to meet mine. Maybe I was wrong, and since I didn’t try it, I have no way of telling. But if it was a coincidence again, it was a very fine-drawn one: that he should laugh at that one particular place along the whole length of the road from Miami out to Hermosa Drive. To me it was as if the rattles had given a flickering stir behind me just then, a preliminary to motion.

It was dark when we got out. I took the car in as soon as they’d left it and went up to my room. The next two hours were the toughest I’d ever lived through. I paced back and forth there in my quarters, watching the time, stopping every other lap to look out the window. Away off in the dark, looking much farther away than they did by daylight, for some reason, I could see the short string of lighted beads, stretched out across the upper surface of the main house, that were the windows of his room and of hers, forming a continuous line. I couldn’t signal while his lights were still on, for if I could see over there, he could see over here.

I wondered if they were having a row or something tonight. Seven came and passed, and by seven on other nights, they were usually down at the table already. Then I thought maybe he’d gone down but had forgotten to turn out his room lights behind him. But if he had, she would have stepped in and done it for him, to clear the way for me, I figured, so it couldn’t be that.

I nearly went nuts. Sure, we had five hours yet, but she didn’t know that; I had to get word to her. She might think it wasn’t leaving until the next day, go to bed or something soon after dinner; she’d told me she did that as often as she could. In the dark, at least, she didn’t have to see him; I suppose that was it.

Then, suddenly, at about seven-twenty, during one of my turnarounds between laps, half the lighted beads were gone. When I got back to the window only her lights were left. I jerked myself over to the switch, reached for it with my thumb, held off for a minute, and then started to shuttle it up and down. Twelve times I blinked it, starting with “on” and ending up with “on” again.

Then I went back to the window again and watched.

The beads blinked just once. Then they stayed on again, as evenly as before. She’d seen. She’d got it.

I went over and ate with Job, downstairs in the back, like I did every night. I was more cut off from her there, right in the same house, than I was back in my own quarters. Back there, at least, I could see the rooms she was in from the outside.

“It’s like a funeral out there,” he told me with a jerk of his head toward the swing doors. “Chills the food before you even set it down.”

I didn’t answer. That’s a hell of a word to come up tonight of all nights, I thought. I only hope it’s the wrong one.

“You haven’t eaten much,” he told me when he got up to scrape the plates off into the pail. Then he added, working away at it, “She didn’t either, tonight. Scarcely touched nothin’.”

This time I shot him a look, a long sharp-pointed one, to see if there was any meaning hidden in the hookup he’d just made between us. There didn’t seem to be any; he would have answered the look if there had been. I think. They always look to see where the thrust lands when they’ve made one. It must have been just a coincidence, like Jordan’s laughter at the moment of passing the palm grove.

I got up and shoved my chair back and went back where I belonged. This was about a quarter to nine. We had about three hours, now. Two hours net, deducting the ride in.

I was nervous. I’d never been so nervous before. All the little lines across the flats of my hands were wet and shiny, and no matter how many times I dried them off, they’d come back slowly wet again. It wasn’t fear of those two — Roman and Jordan — as much as it was a fear for her; that I mightn’t be able to get her out of there in time; that she’d suddenly be held fast, immovable; that I’d lose her; I guess that was it. A sort of love anxiety.

I walked around and around; how I walked around! There should have been dust coming up under my heels, the tracks I made.

Nine-thirty, quarter of ten, ten. Two hours left, one hour net.

Then suddenly it rang and nearly took the top of my scalp off. Job’s voice: “Bring the car around, Scotty. Right away.”

This was it. She must have rigged up something, found some way of — I smashed my cigarette out and ran downstairs and almost backed the car out without clearing the door out of the way first.

I got over there fast, almost too fast to stop in time.

Just as I drew up the light flashed on over the house entrance and the door opened, and she came out. She was in evening dress, white and long and glossy, and she had all her diamonds on. Everywhere they’d go, there was a diamond, and he hadn’t left any place out. It was like a mass of living quartz coming toward you through the electric-light rays.

My insides all went down. I thought, There’s something wrong. That’s not the way she’d dress to make a quick run for it with me. My God, she’ll light up the whole road into town like a flare.

Her face was frozen; she didn’t know me. I held the door for her, and she passed me by and got in.

“Look out. They’re right behind me.”

Roman came first, bulky and perfumed up with hair tonic. A white silk scarf folded fiat around his neck, but without any topcoat over it. He thought they could be worn by themselves.

And then there was a stage wait and I heard him complain, “What’s Giordano doing?” And when he gave him his real name, his pre-prosperity name, like that, he was out of humor about something — but not necessarily with Jordan himself. I’d already learned that sometime back.

“Checking his bullets, I guess,” I heard her say with soft-breathed bitterness.

Then the rattlesnake came out, erect on its tail; the height of a man, and slim, and deadly.

They sat on each side of her, and I closed the door without meeting her eyes and hopped in.

Roman said, “The Troc, Scotty.”

That was one of his places.

I took them at his pace, not hers, and the stars throbbed a little with it. I kept my eyes off the mirror. It wasn’t as tough that way. I just watched the road sizzling toward us, like water lathering out of a broken hydrant.

None of the three said anything. They didn’t say anything for almost three quarters of the way in.

Then finally Roman remarked, “You’re quiet tonight.”

She said, “I feel that way.”

Jordan said, “Maybe she didn’t want to come in with us tonight, Ed.”

But she didn’t answer.

Roman said, “Didn’t you?”

“You already asked me that back at the house,” she said. “I came. I’m here. What more is there?”

And after that they didn’t say anything more for the final quarter of the way in. Quiet drive.

We got to the Troc with its peppermint-striped awning stretched out to the edge of the sidewalk and blue lights shining under it. The doorman, a big Bahama buck named Walter, who looked even blacker in the blue light than he was, knew who Roman was and practically got down on two knees and kowtowed.

She didn’t have a chance to say anything to me. She had to alight before them, and they brought up the rear, walling her in. I watched her go in. Her white dress looked blue now, and the beautifully sculptured skin of her back looked like marble with a faint bluish tinge to it.

Everything was blue around that entrance. Even my heart.

I drove around the corner and parked there, just out of sight. I didn’t know what to do. The side of the place lined the side street I was on, but there were no openings along that wall, no windows, it was just blank stucco.

I kept walking down as far as the corner and casing the entrance from there, along the frontal building line. People kept coming in all the time. No one left. The place was only hitting its stride.

Once a waiter came out and stood there a minute with Walter. I thought maybe she’d sent some message out to me. I started down toward the two of them, to make sure he wouldn’t miss me, if that was it. He looked at me coming along — the waiter — and then he turned around and went in again. So he must have just wanted a breath of air.

I turned and went back. I already knew you couldn’t see into the place from out front — there was too much depth of entryway — so I didn’t even try.

Eleven came, and then eleven-ten. Eleven-twenty, and then eleven-thirty. I stood there by the car and I kept whacking at the glossy surface of it with my open hand. It smarted, but not half so bad as just standing there helpless, watching the time go by. Maybe that was why I did it.

Suddenly there was a shiny flash down at the corner, where there’d been only dull reflected blue light until now, and she was coming running toward me. She was just in her bare dress. I mean she’d left her head scarf and evening bag and all the rest behind her in there.

I hurried her the last few steps with my arm curved to her back. “Quick!” she panted. “Don’t talk now! Just let’s get away from here.”

She jumped into the front seat, and I was already under the wheel.

We tore away from there.

“How much time have we?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“I couldn’t leave the table any sooner. I would only have had to come back again. They picked one right in a line with the entrance, damn it. They would have seen me come out of the powder room and go for the door; they were both looking that way.”

“Then how did you—?”

“Someone came over and sat down with us just now. They rearranged their chairs to make room. That turned them partly the other way.” She reached down into the top of her dress. “Here, take this,” she said.

It was money in a small chamois pouch. She took it out and tried to hand it to me. I kept my hands on the wheel. “Whose is it?”

“Mine.”

“But whose was it before that?”

She thought about it. “You’re right,” she said.

She put her hand on the outside and let the wind peel it away from her. It went streaming backward into the night, in tens and twenties and, for all I know, hundreds. Someone had a good time along that stretch of roadway the next day, I bet.

“Aren’t we ever going to get there?”

“Soon. The worst is over now. It doesn’t sail until twelve, and we still have—” I felt her pressing herself against me. “Why’re you so scared?”

“That isn’t it, Scotty, they know! The whole thing worked out wrong. It paid off ahead of time. It’s delayed action with a fuse. And we’ve got to beat the fuse to that boat. And I don’t think we can now.”

I asked her what she meant. It was just a mess of words to me.

“Somebody saw you. Somebody that knows him saw you buying the tickets, or coming out of there, or whatever it was. He recognized you, or rather Ed’s car. One of those ghastly coincidences, tonight of all nights. He was the one who sat down at the table with us just now. Only he thought it was Roman and me you were buying them for. Thought we were going away on a quick trip or something. I heard him mention it to Ed. Luckily it didn’t register. Because I was still there at the table with them.

Ed passed it off; it didn’t make sense. He thought it was just a mistake. But now. Starting in from the minute I left that table, from the minute they miss me — it’ll suddenly make sense. It’ll suddenly pay off. They’ll know. Havana. The boat. There’s only one every ten days. With the two of us gone, they’ll know who the tickets were for; they’ll know where to catch up with us before we have a chance to sail.”

“But I have the car.”

“This third man who sat down at the table with them has one of his own. They may already be on the road behinds us.”

I gave it the gun. “We’ll take care of that.”

But now our anxiety had reversed itself. We wanted it to leave soon; soon and fast. Only give us time enough to get aboard and then pull right out.

“We’ll be under way in ten minutes now.”

“But you can die in only one.”

“We won’t,” I promised her. I hoped I was right.

“There’s something back there. Some pair of lights that seems to do everything we do. Awfully far back, though. The size of little pills.”

“Don’t keep looking back,” I soothed her. “That won’t keep them off our trail, if it is they.”

We got there at six to midnight, with a great slashing turn and a plowing stop in front of the pier. I gave her the tickets, said: “Here, wait for me by the gangplank. I’ll get this out of the way.” She wanted me to come right with her, but I waved her on. We couldn’t leave it standing right there; it would have been a giveaway to them, if it was they behind those distant “pills” she’d mentioned.

I took it offside, left it where it was good and dark, came chasing back on foot. Cars were coming up every minute, coagulating into a sluggish single-file line in front of the embarkation point. I couldn’t tell if the “pills” were included in it or not; they had lost their separate identity. Most of the people spilling out of them were lushed up; this was a pleasure cruise, after all. The vessel’s steam siren let go with a dismal, bronchial blast that drowned everything else out for a minute.

I found her waiting at the foot of the gangplank. There were plenty of other women in evening gowns milling around, and that was all to the good; it made her less conspicuous. We showed our tickets and went scampering up. A steward took us in charge, led us down below, showed us where the two staterooms were: one opposite the other across the passage. He tried to come in, adjust the porthole. I handed him a bill, said, “Never mind that. We like everything just the way it is.” He turned and went off.

She said, “Lock the door.” And she crowded up against it and flattened it with her hands, to make it stick fast, after it was already locked.

“I’ve got another one for myself,” I told her.

“Oh, don’t leave me. Propriety be damned. Stay in here with me tonight.”

Motion started in.

I said, “It’s all right. We’re safe.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever be,” she said. “Do you?”

“Do you feel it? It’s getting stronger every minute. We’ve made it. We’re okay.”

We sank down together on a sort of settee under the porthole, with the fresh breeze coming in over us, and we stayed that way, my arm around her, her head against mine. We stayed up all night. It was only an overnight run, anyway.

That’s a pretty condensed love affair. One night. But we weren’t gypped. I think we said everything there was to say in that one night. And maybe it was better there was a deadline on us. Because there was no money. And the hard grind would have chipped all the glamor off in the weeks and months to come. We had it brand-new from the factory. And what more can you ask for?

We stayed like that all night, her head pillowed on my shoulder, mine slanted back against the stateroom panel. The porthole curtain rippling inward over our heads like a pennant, the water humming softly by outside. We were happy. We were heading for that line way out yonder, where the water meets the sky, that we’d longed for from the shore.

The porthole paled, and the day broke across the Gulf Stream.

Then suddenly there was a sound at the door, and we both died a little all over again. It was about six; it was too early yet to be in Havana, and there was this soft, almost surreptitious tapping on the wood. As though it were being done with just one finger.

We were erect now but still cleaving together. I carried her with me that way over toward it.

“They’re on board! They must have got on last night!”

“No, no, take it easy. They wouldn’t have waited this long if they were.”

We stalled to see if it would come again. It came again.

“Who’s there?” I asked gruffly.

A man’s voice said: “Wireless message, sir.”

That’s the oldest gag in the world. On land it’s a telegram.

“Don’t open,” she whispered fiercely.

I said, “Shove it underneath if you have one.”

A tongue of tawny yellow started to lick through. It really was one.

I waited until it had fallen still. Then I pulled it free, and we opened it and read it together. The instructions were to deliver immediately.

It was addressed to her. It was short and bitter. Just one word.