The Black Path of Fear

6

When I’d finished telling it to her the candle flame had wormed its way down inside the neck of the beer bottle, was feeding cannibalistically on its own drippings that had clogged the bottle neck. The bottle glass, rimming it now, gave it a funny blue-green light, made the whole room seem like an undersea grotto.

We’d hardly changed position. I was still on the edge of her dead love’s cot, inertly clasped hands down low between my legs. She was sitting on the edge of the wooden chest now, legs dangling free; that was the only difference.

After I’d stopped I couldn’t help thinking: How long it takes to live your life, how short a time to tell it.

She’d listened to it; a stranger hearing a stranger’s troubles. I could hardly see her any more; she was nearly as invisible now again as she’d been earlier at our first never-to-be-forgotten confrontation. Just a light shield over there for her face, and an occasional glint coming from it for her eyes.

Silence fell, and we kicked it around between us for a while.

Then she dropped her feet to the floor with a light thud and came over and put in a new candle. A new stump, rather, but the light turned yellow again, and the fungus color faded from the walls.

“It’s easy,” she said.

I didn’t know what she meant for a minute.

“It’s easy to see what it was that happened to you in

Sloppy’s tonight. Anybody with half a head can figure that out.”

I kicked up my chin without raising my eyes to her.

“Figuring it out is one thing, proving it another. You mean Roman, don’t you?”

“She was his; you took her away from him.”

“He’s in Miami. You could pick up the phone right now and call his number there, and he’d get on at the other end.”

“Sure. That doesn’t change anything.”

“I know that as well as you. But who cares about remote control? It’s the mechanics of the thing at this end that I’ve got to worry about.” I plowed through my hair. “I still can’t see how, in all that crowd around us, there was nobody who noticed the knife being driven into her. Or at least saw it in the guy’s hand, whoever he was. He couldn’t just hold it still and push from scratch. He’d have to draw it back, at least equal to its own blade length, and then drive it, like you do with any pointed weapon. How is it nobody saw his arm swing, saw the thing gleam?”

“Maybe,” she tried to help me out, “somebody did and hasn’t told about it.”

“Or maybe,” I said, “somebody did and doesn’t know it yet.”

She looked at me, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

I’d gotten to my feet, staring fixedly. Not at anything she could see, but at something I could. “Wait a minute; I think I’ve got something. I think I’ve found a possible out for myself, if it will only pay off!”

She came in closer, ready to help me.

“Let me see if I can get this straight,” I said, “before I start getting steam up over it. Got something I can draw with?”

“Only that lip pencil I used before.”

“Anything.”

She brought it over with a couple of quick long strides.

“Can I use your wall?”

“Shoot.”

I went over to it and dashed off four hurried lines that closed up a square. She came up behind me and held the candle-bottle by my shoulder so we could see better. “There are four sides to any position. These are the four sides around us where we were standing. This is us, in the middle.” I scratched a hasty X. “Now let me see if I can remember how it went. On one side there was the bar. That’ll be in this line here. That cut us off at elbow height. It didn’t go in from there anyway; it went in on the other side of her.”

“Make an arrow to show which side it went in from,” she suggested.

I made an arrow hitting the X. “Now on these two sides — the arrow side and the side here, behind the two of us — they were packed all around us like sardines. Their own bodies hid the knife play from them; it went on out of sight down in between somewhere. But there’s one side left, this fourth side here. That’s the one side where there was a little clearance — only a few feet, maybe — but still a little opening. You can always see things better from a short distance off than when you’re right up next to them — on top of them, you might say. That’s the side I’m counting on. That’s the only side that had any kind of perspective on us at all.”

“And who was on that side — more of the crowd?”

“There was only one guy blocking off that entire side — the photographer that works Sloppy Joe’s. Now do you begin to get what I’m driving at? The crowd was there, yes, but backed up behind him. He had this black hood, or whatever it is they use, spread out, cutting them off. He was, for all practical purposes, the entire fourth side. The whole opening was only a tiny thing, anyway.”

“Then you think the photographer saw it?”

“Not at first hand. His own head was down under the blamed hood. But I think there’s a good chance his camera caught it. And that’s the one witness that doesn’t lie, that can’t be fixed — a camera plate.”

She didn’t act any too sure. “It goes like this.” She gave her fingers a snap. “It would have to be awfully fast. The two of them would have to come right — like that — together.”

“It doesn’t have to show the actual moment of incision. First he had to get it out, then he had to strip the wrappings, then he had to poise it, then he had to shoot it in, then he had to leave it there. That’s five or six different steps. It could have got any one of those, and it would still be just as much help to me. It all depends on how much of us he got into focus.

“The knife went in down about here.” I showed her where, on her own figure. “If he took us just head and shoulders, he missed it; it was too low. But if he took us at half length — say from the waist up — there’s a good chance something may show on his plate. Even if it’s just enough to show that it wasn’t my own hand holding the knife, but somebody else’s, that’s all I need. At least it’ll be a lot better than what I’m bucking now.”

I flipped the lipstick over onto the cot.

“He’s still got that plate with him, in the back of his camera or somewhere!”

I buttoned up my coat and started for the door. “I’m going. I only wish this had hit me sooner. I’ve got to find out who he is and where I can get hold of him again!”

She parked the candle, got over to the door ahead of me, turned, and motioned me back.

“You better let me tackle it. I can do it for you, and a whole lot quicker and easier than you can. You’ll only be sticking your neck out.”

“You’ve done enough for me already. This is my own jam, not yours.”

She gave me the back of her arm in rebuttal. “You can’t even talk the language; how you going to ask anyone? Where you going to go looking for him — around Sloppy’s? You can’t even show your face around there without getting picked up. Talk sense, chico, will you? I can do it in half the time. Nobody knows me or thinks I have anything to do with you. I can come and go like I please. Sit here quiet, now. Lock the door after me and don’t open it up for anyone. I’ll knock like this, double, when I come back, so you’ll know it’s me.” She showed me how.

“I feel like a heel,” I said, “letting you do my dirty work for me.”

“I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for a guy the cops were once down on, just like they’re down on you now. Flowers on a grave. How many times do I have to tell you? Stay here; I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The door opened narrowly; she peered, slipped through; it closed again and she was gone.

I stood there listening to her go for a few minutes; you could hardly hear her, just a soft whisper going down the stairs. Then I kicked down the latch with my foot and turned away and ambled across the ghostly, candlelit room.

I sank back on the cot and sat there, thinking. Thinking what a honeymoon this had turned out to be. Her on a slab at the morgue and me hiding out in an outcast’s room in the Chinese quarter.

Time seemed to stand still, just hang there, stuck. I had no watch to nudge it along — I’d never had one in my whole life, now that I came to think of it — and there wasn’t anything in the room to go by either. Only the slow, slow sinking of the candle flame, and I didn’t have the knack for turning that into numbers. Once in a while I could hear faint, far-off churches here and there across the town jangle thinly like plucked wires, but I couldn’t make head or tail of them either. They weren’t even; one would start in just as another was getting ready to finish, and that would run the score up higher than there were hours in any night. I couldn’t tell where one left off and the next began. What did it matter? I had no date.

Then all of a sudden I heard something, and my neck went up. Nothing moved in the whole room for a minute except the cigarette that dropped in a plumb line from my fingers to the floor, and the foot that pinned it where it had fallen.

It was someone on the stairs, and for some reason I had a good hunch it wasn’t she. I think it was the rhythm of the tread told me; it was slower than hers. True, I’d never listened to her climb before, had never taken the count of her footfalls, but somehow I felt she would at no given time have come up any stairs with that lethargic, almost somnambulistic beat. The rhythm of the walk is an index to each personality; it is as distinctive as fingerprints or the timbre of the voice; no two alike. Hers might be as stealthy as this, as soft-purred, particularly if she were stalking someone, but there wouldn’t be that excruciating lag between each drop. Almost as if the climber had frozen each time before going on to the next pace. It didn’t match her.

There was no leather in the texture; it was the slurred sibilance of felt, such as in those moccasins she wore or the slippers that the Chinese featured around here. It should by that token have been altogether inaudible, but it wasn’t; there was enough grit upon the aged stair surface and enough hardened coating of wear upon the underside of the sandal to give that little whispered betrayal each time they ground together. Particularly in such a silence as this, and to such wary, hunted ears as mine.

I was erect now at a crouch, holding the cot frame down by my palms along its edge to keep it from singing out as I left it. I let it up very easy, and it grumbled only a little.

It had left the stairs now, was coming on toward the door on a flat plane — don’t ask me how I knew; you can tell things sometimes without being able to tell afterward how you told at the time.

I started to cross the room in time with it, fitting my own stifled paces into its falls out there on the other side, so that the one might possibly cover up the other, just as those church bells had confused me before.

I pinched the candle flame dead between my fingers in passing, and then I was at the door. Like I had been before, when I first came in here. But the police had been easy to figure; you knew where they were heading from a mile away; this you couldn’t tell what it was.

It went: Sh — one — two — two and a half; sh — one — two — two and a half. About like that. It might have been a palsied totter, as of someone about to fall flat on his face between each step, but I wasn’t counting on that. It might equally have been somebody very sneaky, but not quite sneaky enough, trying to get up within grappling distance outside a door before he was detected.

It stopped. The two and a half ran up to three, four, five, and the break didn’t come. It must be right out there in front of my face, at a halt.

A part of my coat moved a little against my body, and the shock was like that of feeling a weapon’s touch go against you. I managed to hold still, and then I saw that it was the knob trying to turn and carrying the goods of my coat partly around with it, where they were pressed close together.

Then a hand tested the door for give, pushing at it here and there to force it through. There was a sharp, scratching sound that made me jump as though it had opened my skin; it was the head of a match being carried across the door to ignition point. The seam suddenly stood out, as though a long yellow thread had been unraveled.

But this was no longer as furtive as the approach had been, and it reacted in kind upon me. The tension I had been under channeled itself suddenly into a desire to come to grips, to retaliate. She had told me not to open the door, but you’re always your own man when you get sore enough.

I toed up the foot grip, ripped the yellow threat of the door seam wide, and braced myself to crash into whoever it was. And then I didn’t. There are some figures that are too awesome even to tangle with in fight. This one was so uncanny I couldn’t have brought myself even to touch it, much less hit it or grab at it.

I couldn’t tell if it was a ghost, or something alive that had come up out of the grave, or something already dead that was on its way down into the grave and had stopped off here first by mistake. It was an emaciated, cadaverous-looking Chinaman. I couldn’t tell if he was old or young. The match rayed down over him, but its rays didn’t make any too much sense. He wasn’t white and he wasn’t yellow either; the color of his face was a grayish green. His eyes were sunk in deep pockets, as big as the sockets in a skull. His clothes hung loose on him, like the rags on a scarecrow. He must have been just tined ribs under them, without any skin to web their dorsal projections together.

A curious sort of odor came from him, like — well, there’s a certain sort of clay; if you mix it with water it gives that same brackish, pottery-like reek.

He acted stupefied. He said something between his teeth, but I couldn’t get what it was. “Otla puelta.”

“Beat it,” I cursed low. “Get out of here, you walking spook!”

He turned uncertainly, like he was going to fall over any minute, and started to feel his way along the wall with one hand, toward the next door down. The match went out before he got there, and I closed the door and fastened it again. He was bad enough in the light; I didn’t want him coming back again in the dark.

I listened warily and I could hear the other door softly open and close again. Sounds of someone moving quietly around in the adjoining room filtered through the partition for a minute or two after that, and finally complete silence descended, as though the thing had died in there.

Then after a short pause that same peculiar, acrid odor was around me again, just like I’d noticed it at the door, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from this time; it was sort of disembodied. Then that drifted away, too, or at least lessened to the point of not being noticeable any more.

I wiped the stickiness from my face and relighted the candle and sat down on the cot to wait for her some more.

It seemed like she’d been gone half the night, but it might have been only three quarters of an hour or so. Then when she did come she was better at it than he had been. I didn’t hear her on the stairs at all; just her knock came cautiously through all at once, the way she’d said she’d give it.

I went over and let her in fast. She was loaded down with junk; there were two big bulges under her shawl, one on each side of her, that she was holding up with her arms. She was looking watchfully behind her, to make sure the stairs had stayed empty, when I opened the door. I was surprised at how glad I was to see her; you’d think I’d known her weeks or months already.

She gave me a knowing wink as she brushed by. Meaning: It’s okay; everything’s under control — or something like that. I refastened the door after her, and she dumped a couple of bundles of stuff on the table where the candle was and thinned out under the lines of the shawl again as a result.

“I found out what you need to know, chico,” she began with breathless satisfaction.

“Go easy,” I cautioned. “There’s somebody right on the other side of the wall here from us.”

“Oh, him?” she said unconcernedly. “He’s all right. He scares the hell out of you when you first look at him, but he’s harmless. He smokes opium, but he minds his own business. He’s out of this world half the time; that’s why he’s a good guy to have in the room right next door to you. I feed him sometimes; otherwise he’d starve to death.”

I just gave my collar a stretch and let it go at that. “What luck’d you have?”

She lowered her voice in spite of what she’d just said to me about his other-worldliness. “The picture-postcard shooter that works Sloppy’s is called Pepe Campos. He wasn’t there any more; he’d called it a night, but I got all the necessary dope on him out of one of the barmen, with the help of a short beer and a little eyelash work. He’s got a little hole-in-the-wall room somewhere along Calle Barrios that he uses for a combination studio and sleeping quarters. I couldn’t find out the exact house, but it’s a short little lane — I know where it is — so that shouldn’t give you too much trouble. I also found out something else. This guy I was talking to told me someone else was in there asking for Campos just a little while before I was. Some man.”

I didn’t like the way that sounded. “It could be just a coincidence. But then again it could be somebody else figured out the same thing I did about his picture plate being the only witness. Two minds with the same thought at the same time, you know. I think I’d better get started fast.”

“You’ll never make it.”

“I’ve got to make it, Midnight. There’s no two ways. All right, you did the groundwork for me; you got me the lead. Now the rest is up to me. I can’t just sit here and send out messages by carrier pigeon all night.”

She chuckled and swung her elbow at me. “Who you calling a carrier pigeon?” She went over to the table where she’d dumped all the stuff she’d brought in with her and started busting the brown paper apart. “I figured you’d want it that way, so I picked these up for you on my way back at a place I know of.”

She took out a not-very-natty outfit consisting of a pair of oil-stained dungarees, a turtle-necked seaman’s jumper and a peaked oiler’s cap. You could smell the engine room a mile away on all of them.

“Turning me into a wharf rat, are you?”

“It’ll give you more of an even chance. At least you won’t be spotted on sight if you steer clear of direct overhead street lights. They’d know you were coming, in that stuff you’ve got on now, from a block away.”

“Okay,” I said, “turn your back,” and I got into them. The odor of machine oil nearly threw you over, but after the first minute or two you got used to it. I wasn’t interested in how I smelled right then, anyway.

She scanned me critically when I was through, walked around me in a half circle, cigar tipped up at the alert. “That’ll do it,” she said finally. “You know, the funny thing about you is, you look more at home in that era-barcadero rig than in that fancy tourist’s outfit you’ve been sporting until now.”

“This is about my speed, I guess.”

“Slouch a little when you walk, and those damn-fool cops won’t know you for the same guy they lost inside this house, unless they come up and stare you right in the eye. Loosen up your legs a little; that’s all you’ve got to do. A landsman keeps his legs sort of close; a seaman spreads them out for balance. Now listen close. I’m going to give you the directions you’ve got to take to get from here over to Calle Barrios.”

I came in next to her and ducked my head intently.

“I’m not going to give you street names; that’d be just a lot of Greek to you, and you’d only get all tangled up. I’m going to give you just the directions you’ve got to head in and the number of times you’ve got to turn. You go down to the mouth of the alley and you turn to the right. That’s this hand, here. You follow the street that runs past the alley all the way to its end. When you get to its end, this time you turn left—”

“That’s this hand, here,” I said dryly.

“Now you’re on one of the main stems, and you’ve got to watch yourself.”

She rehearsed me carefully on it. First she ran through it from beginning to end three separate times herself, to get it firmly planted in my mind. Then she made me play it back to her word for word, to make sure I had it, wouldn’t go wrong.

“Think you’re set now? Havana’s a tough town to find your way around in when it’s new to you,” she warned me.

“I’ve got it down pat now,” I assured her. “I couldn’t miss it if I tried.”

“Well, just the same, don’t try.”

“You’re a good kid, Midnight,” I told her.

“That’s something I haven’t been called since I was four years old. And even then they had me mixed up with somebody else.”

I dug down deep into the pocket of my old suit. I crammed a fistful of American folding money into her hand, all I had on me. Honeymoon money. “Here,” I said. “Just in case something does go wrong and I don’t make it. For the outfit — and for being a good scout.”

She switched it to the table top and took her hand off it. “I’m not out for money. Not in this, anyway.”

This time I said it for her. I was getting to know it by heart. “I know. Flowers on a grave.”

“Listen,” she assured me jauntily, planing her hand in front of my face, “while there’s still a store counter left that I can dip from, or while they still buy my flowers at the café tables and show me where their wallets are while I pin them on for them, don’t worry about me; I’ll get along. I always have until now.”

“You’ll never get to heaven.”

She shuddered at the very thought. “It must be awfully damn lonely up there, don’t you think?”

“All right, if you won’t take it, then put it away for me until I get back. And forget where you put it.”

I listened toward the stairs, opened the door, and eased past it to the outside. Then I looked around at her before I closed it.

I wasn’t any too sure that this wasn’t good-by for keeps. I knew I ought to say something, just to sign off, but I didn’t know what.

She was standing between me and the candle, so her head was black against the dim glow of it. It made like an aura around her, and she was the last person who ought to have an aura. Or was she?

“Well, be seeing you,” I said.

She gave me the Spanish for something; I think it was “Good hunting.”

I closed the door behind me.