The Black Path of Fear

7

The stairs were all right. The only risk there was not putting your foot in the right place and going all the way down them headfirst. I went down them a good deal slower than I’d come up, with them and their light at my heels. I liked this way the better of the two, pitch-dark or not.

Next came the doorway flush with the alley. I eased up to it, back to wall. I evened myself up to the straight line it shaved down across my path, just let my big toe and the turn of my chin and the turn of my nose stick out past it. You couldn’t see little things like that in three different places along the wall.

The route down was clear. I couldn’t see all the way down to the mouth because of the gloom, but the part from here down was clear; they hadn’t left anyone posted. I didn’t know what their theory was, but I figured it must be that I’d made my escape good over the roof that time and out through one of the other houses; otherwise they would have left someone hanging up outside the door.

I made the turn of the doorway and started out on the first lap of the long cross-town trip. I swam along close to the wall, and I walked soft. The machine oil still smelled a lot, but then the alley had smelled too, and of the two I liked the smell of the machine oil better.

Of all the outdoor hazards I had ahead of me, this alley stretch right at the beginning was bound to be the toughest, and I was glad it was working out so easy. For one thing, if one of them came my way, I couldn’t hope to squeeze by without being recognized — there was no room; you practically had to rub noses with anyone trying to pass you. This was the narrowest thing ever; nothing all the rest of the way across town could ever again be this narrow, confine you to such close quarters. And secondly, this was the immediate region in which I’d given them the slip, in which they’d last seen me, and they were likelier to keep a closer watch around here than on any other section I’d pass through on the way over.

Pretty soon the alley mouth lightened up a little ahead of me. Not much, but at least it became the color of pewter or slate, instead of coal-black, from the reflection of the niggardly lights along the lengthwise lane that ran past its foot. I slowed as I got near it and started to pay myself out by hand spans along the wall.

When I’d fitted myself into the corner line again I did the same thing I’d done back at the doorway, let the rough edges of my profile overlap past it.

This time there was a catastrophe.

A voice growled right into my ear — or should I say into my questioning nose, since my ear was still back behind the wall — “¿Hasta que hora nos quedamos aqui?”

I thought it was said to me, it was so close and unexpected. I punched my outward shoulder back against the wall in a half turn-around and stayed there as flat as a wet three-sheet that’s just been pasted up.

I’d glimpsed the outer edges of his figure, and it wasn’t good; it was in police uniform.

I couldn’t move for a minute, and before I’d had a chance to the situation bettered itself a trifle. Very little, but at least enough to show that the challenge hadn’t been a direct one to me. A second voice answered his: “Hasta que lo cogimos.”

So there were a pair of them there, keeping the alley covered. I might have known it was too good to be true. Evidently they’d been silent all along and just made those couple of desultory remarks in time to keep me from stepping around the corner onto their toes. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t tipped me off, but maybe they hadn’t been here yet when she went out herself; had been posted only after the last time she’d come in.

They didn’t say anything more. They were bored at the assignment and not in a conversational mood. Once I heard shoe leather creak as one of them shifted weight. I was afraid even the machine oil would give me away; I was so close to them, even that was a liability. But I guess it had too much else to compete with.

I ebbed back a cautious step, feeling my way behind me with arched foot. Then another. After the third I was a little safer; I turned and went, face forward, in retreat. But very quiet, very tenderly.

I was stuck. Stuck good, and I knew it. There might be an upper outlet to the alley, but if there was and they’d posted men at one end, they’d almost certainly have them posted at the other end too. If they hadn’t, they needed to have their heads examined.

Before I could decide what to do about it; in fact, before I’d even recovered the full distance back to my original doorway and that degree of safety at least, the sack I was in closed up even tighter.

There was a tread coming toward me from the recesses of the alley, and when I forced my eyes I could discern movement against the blackness, or rather of it, as a figure sought to detach itself and come forward into visibility. A feat which it could not accomplish, no matter how it narrowed the distance between us; there was not enough light to let it. But someone was astir and bearing down on me, and I was going to be pinned between the two: the lookouts around the corner and this oncoming unknown quantity. There was no break in the walls on either side for me to slip into; it had overspanned the entry to Midnight’s house and was already on my side of it, crowding me before it into an everlessening zone of immunity, before I’d discovered it.

I went over to the opposite wall, then back to the first again, in a sort of floundering uncertainty. The difference was only of a pace or two across, and both were equally barren of aid for purposes of evasion. It was a good rattrap to be in. The only thing I didn’t do was make the mistake of falling back toward the alley opening again; down there the odds against me were double.

It came on. I’d started forward to meet it now rather than stand still. It seemed to me to have a straggling ring to it that indicated a casual approach rather than an intentional one. In other words, it was coming down this way at random and not because it knew I was there. If I kept going, head low, I might be able to barge past and break through to the other side of it before I was stopped, I figured.

The margin of anonymity between us melted away as we came together, and suddenly we were full abreast, and at another pace I would have been safely to the rear.

It was a girl again. A whiff of sachet in my face and the flirt of a skirt against my leg as I crowded past told me that. This town seemed to be alive with female night prowlers.

Her arm had found the opening under mine — I don’t know how — at the instant of passage, and I suddenly found myself locked there in a reversed arm link of companionship, one of us facing one way; the other, the opposite. I would have had to tow her backward after me, full weight, if I’d tried to keep going at that moment.

She said, “¿Como le va, mariner?”

I still could hardly see her in the gloom, even with both our elbows entangled. She seemed to be willing to take me sight unseen.

She said something about a drink, I think it was. I got the word copita. Did I have the price of a drink, I suppose.

That gave me an idea. I quit trying to wrench her limp arm off mine and let her have it back the long way around, around the back of her own neck. “Okay,” I said hurriedly, “you want a drink? Walk close to me like this... No, lean up closer... That’s it, snuggle up against me. Now walk down this way with me, just past the corner.”

She seemed to have a single phrase of English on tap. Who didn’t down there? God knows where she’d picked it up. “You serrit,” she said chummily.

“Keep talking,” I said. “Keep talking a lot.”

“You serrit, you serrit, you serrit,” she said obligingly.

I could hardly walk; I was practically carrying her on my right side, she was leaning over so. She had a big celluloid comb arrangement sticking up, and that worked swell; it screened one whole side of my face. The side they were on.

“What do you want, wine or rum?”

“You serrit.”

“That’s good,” I drawled approvingly. “Here’s the turn.”

We practically took the skin off their faces, we passed them so close. She was on that side, luckily. There were two of them, despondently holding up the wall there. One in cop’s uniform, one in mufti.

I was swinging her from side to side as we went by, as though one or both of us had already had more than enough.

She knew them both. She had to show off. Maybe that was good, too, for all I knew.

“Hello,” she said airily over her shoulder. “Look what I’ve-got. See?” It sounded as though she stuck her tongue out and gave them the raspberry. They must have been kidding her about slipping, previous to this.

I grinned widely with that side of my face. When I grin, all the skin goes back and folds up. That leaves less face to be inspected. They hadn’t been in the original party in the car, anyway.

We were well past them now, doing a slow sway from side to side.

They hollered out something after us about dientes. I think it was meant for me. To hang onto my gold teeth, probably.

I kept her with me until we got as far as I was going on the transverse. Then all of a sudden she had nothing but air around her, and it kept getting wider every minute.

“See you some more,” I said, and pitched my thumb back the way we’d just come.

She wasn’t one-phrase in Spanish, whatever she was in English. She sent up a shower of epithets that rained down all over, from one end of the block to the other. It reminded me of a water main bursting in the street behind me. Only one carrying vocabulary instead of water.

“You serrit,” I palmed back at her.

The last I saw of her she was scurrying actively around, looking for handy stones to throw after me, but fortunately there weren’t any of a size that mattered lying around loose.

I joined up with one of the main arteries soon after that, and I had to watch myself. Conditions had reversed themselves, from what they’d been back there in the alley and the lanes around it; there were too many lights now instead of too few. Every thirty yards or so one of these multiple electric lampposts would show up, bearing five warm golden globes instead of just one and bleaching the sidewalk all around it like full-strength daytime sunshine. True, they alternated from side to side of the way, but I couldn’t keep crossing back and forth just to avoid them; that would have been even more of a giveaway.

There were cafés along this street, too, open to the street, with tables paid out along the sidewalk and sending out a calcium glare that made everything stand out like high noon. I had to skirt them as best I could, pretending to look the other way, or pretending to scratch my head so I could get my arm up on that side. For all I knew, one of them might be sitting down there on one of those spidery little iron chairs, staring straight out at me. It was like being on exhibition in the line-up; only you kept going instead of standing still. One thing I found out during this half-hour or so — and to me it wasn’t a point in its favor — and that’s that Havana is a town that never sleeps. They say New York is that way, but New York is a ten o’clock town by comparison. It takes the tropics to show you what real wakefulness in the early hours of the morning is. And I didn’t want to be shown right then.

Then when there weren’t cafés to buck, and I’d get a nice comparatively overcast stretch just ahead, a trolley car would come banging down on me — they ran there right in the middle — shedding turquoise sparks from its overhead traction wire and casting a livid, rippling wash along the walls from its ceiling lights. They were open, too, sideless, with the benches on them running crosswise; they were packed to the gills whenever they did show up, and there were all those rows of faces staring woodenly at you for a minute or two, while you were held impaled there in the bright backwash it threw up. At least that was what it felt like to me.

I couldn’t get off the damned thoroughfare either and try my luck with some quieter alternate farther over. Her instructions were rigid and didn’t allow for substitutions; they were complicated enough and hard to keep straight as it was, and I was afraid if I took any detours I’d get all tangled up, never be able to get back on course again. This town wasn’t laid out in rectangles like Miami; the streets were all hit or miss, like the cracks in a picture puzzle.

Well, I made it. There weren’t any shouts of recognition and there wasn’t any sudden stampede after me, so I considered that I’d made it. I came to this white marble statue that she’d told me to keep my eyes out for — some patriot or other; I couldn’t remember the name — and I turned off there, like she’d coached me to. From this point on it got better, dimmer again. I was safely on the other side of “downtown” now, opposite the one from which I’d started, and getting farther away from the feverish heart of the town all the time. Streets were cool and blue-dark again with night shadows, and the people you passed on them fewer and fewer all the time.

It was a long trek, and I kept giving my memory refresher courses in it as I went along, to make sure of not going wrong. I’ve never been book-smart and I’ve never been clever, but I’ve always had a good mechanical memory. Once you pound a thing into it often enough, it hangs onto it tight. She hadn’t burdened me with street names; that would have been hopeless. I couldn’t even pronounce half of them myself the first time, much less store them up ahead. She’d just given me the arithmetical factors of direction, with landmarks to break them up.

The night was hot. The breeze blowing up some of the streets from the harbor fooled you at times, but it was hot, and all that walking in it brought the sweat out. My mongrel attire itched, and my legs ached from the unaccustomed spread gait at which I held them distorted.

I got there finally. I passed the little movie house that was the last of all the landmarks she’d given to me; dark and dead to the world at this hour, with a sign over it, “Cine,” and big tattered posters feathering the walls all around the entrance. Some ancient forgotten film still grinding away here in the byways of the town years after all the rest of the world had seen it: “Fred Astaire en Volando Hasta Rio.” I made the turn it fronted on, and I’d hit it. Calle Barrios.

A little one-block affair with shedlike arrangements on supports roofing over a good deal of its sidewalks, so that they were in even deeper shadow than those elsewhere. She hadn’t been able to give me the exact house — her informant at Sloppy’s evidently hadn’t known that himself — so from this point on I was strictly on my own.

I moved slowly from doorway to doorway, paling them one side at a time with flickering palm-enclosed matches, looking for some placard or other indication. He was a professional photographer, so I figured he must have some way of advertising himself down below at the street door, to give people a tumble that he was up there.

I got plenty, but not what I was looking for. I got a dentist, I got a licenciado — whatever that was — I got a woman who sewed or made dresses or something. I even got a guy who changed foreign money for you; I bet he gypped you plenty, too, if you were fool enough to go near him. I got to the end of the block on that side of the street I ran out of doorways.

I crossed over to the opposite side and started to work my way back along there. Once I had to stop, a guy was coming along the sidewalk, not on my side but across the way, and I had to wait until he went past. I thought that maybe that match-fluttering act might make him suspicious, or at least nosy. He didn’t see me standing there under the gloom of the overhanging sidewalk shed. He came along whistling. He went straight through the street and turned off again at the other end. I could still hear his whistling a minute or two after that in the heavy quiet, and then it faded away. I sort of envied him, whoever he was. He hadn’t had his lady killed tonight. He didn’t have to hide out along the streets. He could go home whistling.

I shrugged and struck a new match and started in again. It came right on with the flowering of the flame, as though it had been waiting there all along, right under my hand, to be revealed to me. “Campos. Retratos y Fotografias.” I recognized him by the name she’d given me, and then the last word would have told me anyway. It was the same as ours, only spelled a little different. And then there was a picture of a hand under it, pointing inward to show that was the doorway that was meant, and not any other. Which struck me as being a little superfluous, but every man to his own taste. And then there was a small 3 under it to show the floor.

I blew out the match and I went in.

They didn’t believe in wasting lights by leaving them on all night. You were supposed to be in by now if you belonged here, I suppose. I groped until I found stairs, and then I felt my way painfully up them. I counted out two landings, and then when the next one came I knew that was where I got off. As a matter of fact, it was the last one anyway.

I went back to matches again to make sure of getting the right door. There was no difficulty about that. There were only two in sight, and one of them didn’t belong to anybody. It was the door to a water closet. I proved that by looking, but you could have told without even opening it, anyway. I went back to the other door, braced myself, and knocked subduedly.

I thought: How am I going to make him understand me? He might know a word or two of English; most of them down here seemed to. I tried to remember whether he’d used any in accosting the two of us at Sloppy’s, but I couldn’t any more. Too much had happened since.

He must be asleep long ago. I knocked again, a little less tactfully.

Money would do it. Money talks in any language. But I didn’t have any. I’d left my roll with Midnight. Well, all else failing, I had a pair of persuaders down at the end of my arms. If I couldn’t talk to him — and I had no money that could talk to him — they’d have to talk to him. But I’d only use them as a language of last resort.

I hadn’t been able to rouse him yet. I pummeled good and loud this time. And waited. And still he didn’t come. I tried the door, but that was too much to hope for, that I’d just be able to walk in like that, at will.

I pounded some more. This time I hit it on all cylinders. It went rolling down through the slumbering house, hollow and distorted, like thunder that had strayed in some way and was trying to find its way out again. Then it tapered off, but only long after I’d quit knocking.

A door opened somewhere down below, and a woman shouted up shrilly: “¡Callese!” Shut up up there, I suppose. Then she waited, to see if I was going to do it again. I wasn’t and I didn’t. If he’d been in there he would have heard me by now. She slammed inside again finally, simmering to herself.

I gave her a minute or two to go back to sleep. Then I struck a match and examined the door. I wasn’t going to give up. I hadn’t come all the way across Havana to turn around and go away again, no better off than I had been before.

It had a transom over it of dust-pearled glass. It wasn’t down quite flat; it was teetered in about a quarter of an inch out of its frame. But the thing was, it wasn’t a fixed panel, a fanlight. If it went up a quarter of an inch, it could be made to go up farther than that. It must be moveable, must work on a hinge or rod of some sort.

Scott was going to get in there.

I aimed for the bottom of its frame with the heels of both my hands, sprang for it, missed getting a fast enough hold, and dropped back again. I aimed again, sprang again, this time caught on and swayed there. I got my foot on the doorknob, and that gave me a brace. I nudged into the panel with my shoulder, and it moved quite easily, almost flapped back loosely. The hinge must have been broken. It came back each time, but that didn’t matter; at least it didn’t stick.

I got my head down in through it and was looking at the dark upside down. Then I worked one shoulder and arm through and let myself go farther. I was afraid to let go altogether and just drop. I would have landed headfirst and might have knocked myself out. More important, the crash might bring up someone from the floor below to investigate.

I located the inside knob with one acutely downstretched arm and then found a cross-latch just above it. In tight, so he must still be in there, because that sort of latch could be worked only from the inside. I felt like a clothespin, with my rump riding the transom. I slipped the latch grip over and then had to work myself back outside again. Which wasn’t as easy as getting in. Once I thought I wasn’t going to make it and would have to hang there suspended the rest of the night. The back of my head kept hitting the transom and closing it down on my own neck.

I finally got out again and dropped down to the floor outside and then went in the way you’re supposed to through any door, head uppermost and feet to the ground.

It reminded me a little of when I’d busted into Midnight’s room an hour or two back — or was it a year ago now? Only this was even darker. There wasn’t even a red cigarette glint this time. It was like being tangled up on the wrong side of a heavy black velvet curtain and trying to cuff your way out through it. Except that you couldn’t feel velvet folds in front of you; you could just feel plain black air.

I thought: He’s got to be here because the latch was shot home on the inside of the door. And yet how could he be and still fail to hear that drubbing I’d given the door?

I was going to light a match first, but then I realized that wouldn’t show me much; it would only show him me, if he was here. If his work was photography, even third-rate photography, there must be electricity in the place. I turned and started to measure off the wall alongside the doorframe, hand over hand. When I’d gone up about as high as my shoulder I quit and did it on the other side. There wasn’t anything on either side.

I started forward a few paces, trying to get to room center, so I’d be able to get my match’s worth, as long as I had to use one. I think I had about two left by this time out of the whole double fistful I’d brought away from Midnight’s place.

All of a sudden something tickled the rim of my ear. I thought it was a mosquito or gnat for a minute and swerved my head, but then it came back on the other side. I clawed out in a sort of stifled fright, and something pulled tight across the edge of my hand, caught, and then clicked at the other end. The light I’d been looking for went on straight over my head, in a sort of blinding cascade, and I was holding the other end of the dangling string that worked it.

I couldn’t use my eyes for a minute after so much darkness. Then I took the back of my hand away, and they went to work again.

I didn’t like what I saw.