The Black Path of Fear

9

The way back across town I kept wondering why I was bothering to make the trip back at all. Why annoy her any more? I didn’t have any claim on her. She’d done enough for me already. More than once, especially when I’d come to elbows or bends, when my course would change directions, I was tempted to just keep straying on at random and not bother with my memorized road map any more. Especially when I cut across streets that I could tell led straight down to the waterfront. It’s funny how water, or rather its margins, always attracts you when you’re at a loss, don’t know what to do or where to go next. Something about it.

I kept away, though. It wouldn’t have been a good place for me. They know that about it too. They expect you to do that. They were probably keeping watch down there along the docks and loading platforms.

So I kept to my course, in reverse. It didn’t seem nearly as arduous as the first time, nor nearly as risky. Perhaps that was because I’d already covered it once, and familiarity breeds contempt. Or perhaps I was more indifferent than I had been coming out, didn’t care so much whether I made it or not any more. I was already licked and just needed to be pushed down to stay down. You have to go somewhere, so I went back toward where I’d started from.

A lot of the bloom had been taken off the cafés; they weren’t as bad this time. It was getting late, even for an all-night town. Several were dark now, and several more were dimmed down to the extinction point, tables being stacked back to back. The trolleys didn’t hound me any more the way they had, either; they’d either stopped or were running on a slower schedule.

Once a prosperous-looking colored man in a natty white suit came up to me in the gloom and asked me something. It was legitimate, whatever it was; I could tell that by his aboveboard manner, but I couldn’t get it. Standing there, he looked like something printed on a photographic negative — I guess I had pictures on my mind after what had just happened — but he was all white where he should have been black, and all black where he should have been white. He repeated himself twice, then at my “Don’t know what you’re saying” gave me up as hopeless and went on to try the next person, if any, to be found at that hour. He might have just wanted a light, for all I know, but I wasn’t lighting up my face for anyone. That was the only thing that happened the whole way back.

They weren’t on duty at the alley mouth any more; they’d been called off. I could tell the way was clear from all the way back at the outermost limits of visibility, which wasn’t such a great distance at that; the walls were evenly toned there where it opened, no dark spots against them. They might, of course, have shifted around the corner to the inside, but I doubted that. A cop usually stays where you first find him, so long as he doesn’t know you’ve found him there.

I turned the corner and went in myself, and there was no one on the inside of it either. They’d given up and called off the chase, at least for the present.

The rest was easy. I found my way in and up the stairs, and I knocked the same way she had when she’d come back before, so she’d know that it was me. She took a minute or two — but you couldn’t hear her — and then she opened it up, and there we both were, right back where we’d started again.

I guess she could tell by the look on my face and the boneless way I was propped there against the doorframe, before she even asked me anything.

“Mala suerte, huh?” she grunted.

“If you mean no good, that’s it.” I thumbed my cap visor still farther up on my head. Otherwise I didn’t move.

“Well, come in, don’t stand there; what’re you waiting for — the rainy season to end?”

“What’ll I do inside?”

“Well, what’ll you do outside?”

I moved a little sluggishly, and she got the door fastened up behind me.

“Somebody beat me to it,” I said disgustedly. “They not only took the picture, but they took him with it.”

“Carajo,” she breathed sympathetically.

“You can say that again, once for me, whatever it is. It proves one thing, even if nothing else,” I told her. “Something did show up on that picture, and there would have been an out for me in it, or they wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble just to get hold of it. They hijacked him along with it to shut him up because he’d already developed it and seen what was on it for himself. Otherwise they would have just knocked him out and left him there. It’s developed on the film now and it’s also developed on his mind; that’s why they had to take the two things with them. Too bad I didn’t get the idea an hour sooner; I could have gotten in under the wire.”

I gave her a turn of the arm and reached for the door again, to go back downstairs where I’d just come from.

She grabbed me and held me fast. “You’re not quitting, are you?”

“What do you want me to do? I can’t camp out up here in your place for the rest of my life, set up light housekeeping between flying raids from the police.”

“What’s the matter? You afraid it won’t be respectable?” she peered. “It’s only safe, middle-class people that never were on the run in their lives that think a man and a woman can’t stay in the same room overnight without getting tangled up with one another. Us underdogs know better. I was holed up in a room with a guy for thirty solid days once in New Orleans — neither one of us could get out — and I bet we were more proper than half these rich families that live out on the Vedado in thirty-room mansions. We were too busy watching for the police to think of watching each other dressing. There’s a cot here and there’s a floor; what more do we need? There’s just two of us.”

She jogged me over toward the cot, to have a seat on it

I had a seat on it.

“At least ride the night out here.”

“It’ll take a year of nights, and then some. What chance have I got of clearing myself now?”

She came over and looked down at me. “I see I’ve got to talk to you to get it into your head. You chamacos from up North, you don’t seem to think in a straight line like we do; you go around curves.” She pummeled me encouragingly on the chest with the back of her hand a couple of times. “You’ve still got a chance; that hasn’t changed any. You’ve still got the same chance you had before, when you started out to get that picture. Only now, instead of getting just the picture back, you’ve got to get a whole live photographer.”

“Sure, a cinch,” I said glumly.

She made with her hands. “Well, which is easier to track down and spot — a complete man-size guy or a little two-by-four picture that can be stuck away in anyone’s pocket? Don’t you see, hombre, they’ve given themselves away to you?

“You know now, by their taking him off like that, that he knows something that could help you, that he saw something on that negative when he developed it. You’ve got more now than you had before.”

“I’m loaded down with it,” I assented parenthetically.

“Now you’re sure; before you weren’t. It’s just as good as if you saw the picture yourself.”

Her line of reasoning was okay as far as it went, but I couldn’t follow it through, get what she was driving at.

“All right, I know. But the police don’t know. I’m not hard to convince; I never did think I was guilty. They’re the ones need the telling, not me.”

“But I know how you can get these others to tell the police on themselves, just as they told you. It’s a very slim chance. It all depends on whether you are willing to gamble ten to one against your own life.”

I gave a short laugh. “I’d be willing to take even longer odds than that. Twenty to one. Twenty-five. What kind of odds am I up against now? You don’t call them short, do you? And what’s so valuable about the damn thing to me now, with her out of the way, anyway? I don’t have to save it for a rainy day.”

She bore down on my shoulder, as a sign of approval, I suppose. “That’s right, chico. That’s the talk. You’ve got the right idea.”

“What’s this angle that you’ve got? Let’s hear it.”

“Here’s what it is, here. Simply to let them get you as they got the photographer. You know who I mean by them, don’t you? This bunch, this outfit, or whoever they are. Fall into their hands. Only it must seem accidental, not on purpose.”

“I don’t catch. Then they’ll turn me over to the police right away, and that’s what I’ve been dodging all night long.”

“No, they won’t. Don’t you see, hijo, now they can’t any more. They daren’t. You know what happened to this photographer now: that he was grabbed off to keep him quiet. You can prove there was such a guy and there isn’t now any more in circulation. Nobody can get around that; you didn’t just make him up out of thin air. He existed. And now where is he? All right. So even though you still can’t clear yourself of the other thing, you can pin that on them. And they know it, you bet. If you let yourself fall conveniently into their hands the police will never see you. Not alive, not able to talk.” She spun an imaginary grain of dust off my shoulder with a snap of her finger. “You follow me so far?”

“Sure. Up to the point where I’m dead instead of alive, but that isn’t such a hot solution. For that matter, I could cut my throat right here in this room; that would be even quicker still.”

She pressed down the air with the flats of her hands in a soft-pedaling motion. “Now wait a minute. Don’t muddy it up. Mira. They can’t let the photographer go because he’ll tell the police about the picture. They can’t let you go — once they have you — because you’ll tell the police about the photographer.” She spread her hands. “Claro, no?”

“Claro, yes,” I admitted, picking up the word for whatever it was worth. “But what makes you think the photographer is still alive? If your point is that once they get me I’ll be a dead duck, doesn’t that hold, equally true of him? They have the same reason in both cases.”

“He’s still alive up to now. The fact that they didn’t finish him off right there at his estudio is proof enough of that. Why should they carry a dead body off with them, especially the hard way, up through a skylight and down off a roof? They’d just give it to him otherwise and leave him behind.” She made a slashing motion across her own throat. “He was still alive when they took him with them. How long he’s going to stay that way, that’s another matter. They either intend to get rid of him out of town someplace, where his remains will not be discovered so quickly, or in the ocean, where they will not be discovered at all.”

“And I suppose if I drop into their laps that’s what will happen to me? Is that your setup?” I gave her an off-center grin.

“That’s only Part One of my setup. Part Two has to follow immediately, like they say in the tines. If it doesn’t, then it’s just too bad for you. That’s your one chance out of the ten that I spoke of before. Part One is, you fall into their hands and they start the job of finishing you off. Part Two is, you and they both — the whole mess of you — fall into the hands of the police, and they finish the whole thing off for everybody. Well, all right, the guilt speaks for itself; they don’t have to use their magnifying glasses. Who was kidnaping who? Who was trying to shut up who? Were you trying to rub them out, or were they trying to rub you out? They’ve got two strikes against them, like we used to say in Tampa. You and the photographer. When they’re trying to shut so many people up, then they’ve got something to shut them up about. You haven’t; you’re not trying to. ¿Como te parece? What do you think of it; it’s a good scheme, no?”

“It’s lovely. I’d like to do something like it every Tuesday evening about nine or quarter past.”

She flung up her hand high overhead in reproach. “It’s the only one we got, isn’t it? What’re you talking about? You got a better one, spit it out!”

“It’s the only one we got,” I said wearily, “so it goes. And don’t get me wrong; I’m not kicking.” I stood up from the cot and gave my dungarees a hoist back and front. “I’m still willing to take the one chance left over out of those ten; that’s good enough for me. I’d take it if it was one out of fifty. But the thing is, will it work? You’ve just given it a beating with your gums, and it comes out swell. But can it be turned into action?”

“Why can’t it?” she snapped at me.

“Let’s begin at the beginning. This is going to take all night. All right, first off I fall into their hands; that’s the starter. Now will you tell me how the holy hell I’m going to fall into their hands when I don’t even know who they are, or where they are, or how to go where they are so I can fall into their hands? What do you expect me to do — walk around all night with a sandwich board on my chest: ‘I’m waiting for you guys to grab me?’ ”

“Don’t get so funny.” She squelched me inattentively, running a fingernail up and down between two of her teeth in perplexed abstraction.

“I wouldn’t even know them if I saw them,” I grumbled. “They could be anybody at all.”

“Shut up.” She spit out the small end of a cigar and bent over the candle with it, sucking in flame. “Anything that can be put together can be taken apart again. This frame was nailed together around you; we can find the joints, take it apart into little separate pieces again, if we only keep at it long enough.”

“What d’ya say we do?” I assented dourly.

“That fat Chinaman is in on it in some way, that Tio Chin. That much you can be sure of. All the trouble started from his place. You and she were purposely steered there; he palmed the wrong knife off on you, faked the receipt, framed you to the police.”

“Him I would like to kick the wind out of.” I nodded darkly. “And I don’t know why I’ve hung around here this long without going back there and letting some air out of that balloon-belly of his.”

“Hold it,” she said, and hauled me back. “Just busting in that store of his and beating him up won’t do you any good. You won’t find out any more than you know now. He’ll squeal like a stuck pig; the cops’ll come down on you again, and you’ll be right back where you started from. The spiked evidence of the knife and the receipt and all the rest of it will still hold good.”

“But you’re going against your own argument, aren’t you? You just finished saying that they’ll grab me, that they can’t afford to turn me over to the police now any more.”

“Sure, but you’ve got to put yourself in the right position for them to grab you. They’re only going to grab you if they think you’re not expecting it; you don’t know who they are; you’re not wise to them. They’re not going to grab you if you go busting in that store the front way, beat him up; they’ll know you’re wise to him. Besides, this Chin isn’t alone in it. He’s just the front for somebody else. He never saw you before in his life, so what did he get out of framing you up? There’s somebody behind him.”

“That’s easy. That takes it all the way back to Florida. If this Chin is in on it with somebody else, if there’s somebody behind him, like you say, he must be working for Eddie Roman in some way.”

“That’s what we’ve got to figure out, the link between the two of them. That’ll show us where the two pieces fit together; that’ll show us the place for you to squeeze yourself in, so we can be sure they’ll grab you.”

I pushed the peak of my cap farther back on my forehead. “Now what would a big shot ‘sport’ and nightclub operator in Florida want with a Chinese agent in Havana? Chin deals in curios and antiques down here. Roman has no use for anything like that in any of his clubs. Not even in his own house; it was all shiny and modernistic. Yet there must be some form of transaction between them.”

“You used to do his driving for him. Didn’t you ever catch onto what his real business, his real source of income was?”

“Only what met the eye. Nightclubs, races, stuff like that.”

“That’s a short season down there. Did he go up North when his clubs closed down, operate someplace else?”

“No, he stayed there all year round.”

“Then he didn’t live off nightclubs. Nine months in the year, where was his money coming from?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “That was stuff that went on inside the house. I was outside it, sitting behind the wheel most of the time, don’t forget.”

“She was inside it. She was married to him. Didn’t she ever tell you anything?”

“She didn’t know any more than I did. She got it in the form of diamonds, but what shape it was in before it got turned into diamonds, I don’t think she knew herself.”

“That wouldn’t have been me, boy. Get something on everyone; that’s my motto.”

“He was too cagey.”

“She must have dropped some little remark or other, even if she didn’t know what it was herself. Any woman tells the guy she loves all about the guy she doesn’t love any more; that’s female instinct. Try to think, will you? Some morning when she got in the car alone with you. It’s right there — it must be — if you can only remember it.”

I thought back and thought back to a hundred dead and gone mornings, when we went speeding out the driveway, until we could get far enough away to exchange our first kiss unseen. Suddenly a word came to me. Came back to me from one of them. I flexed a finger at her. “What’s guava?” I asked her.

“What about it? Let’s hear it.”

“I asked you first.”

“It’s a fruit paste. Solid, rubbery sort of stuff.”

“She said something about that once. She asked me, just like I’m asking you now, but I couldn’t tell her. She overheard something one night, and she told me about it the next day in the car. You know, we used to park and then sit there together by the hour.”

She wasn’t interested in the mechanics of our love affair. “Por supuesto. But go ahead.”

“And she’d tell me every little thing that had happened since the last time, since the day before, or two days before, or whenever it was. And this was one of those little things. It wasn’t anything. It came at the tail end of everything else, just to have something more to say to me.”

She made avaricious grasping motions with both hands. “Well, let’s hear it, anyway; let’s see what it is.”

“Give me a minute now to see if I can fish it up in one piece. The phone rang one night and woke her. Four in the morning — some ungodly hour like that. It was right there by their bed. It was for him, of course. Well, he picked it up, and then she heard him say, ‘Hold it a second; I’ll talk to you from downstairs.’ And then he went to all the trouble of putting on robe and slippers, going down to the first floor, and taking the call from there, when he could have stayed just where he was in the first place. The scratchy noises coming from the open receiver bothered her and, half asleep as she was, she reached over to put it back on and shut it up, as long as he didn’t need it any more up there where she was. She put it to her ear for a minute to make sure he was on below, and that was how she got a snatch of this conversation. This business conversation. And the only thing that struck her strange about it was the peculiar hour.”

“She heard some of it?”

“Just a little. He was talking to some man, evidently someone who worked for him, and the man said: ‘But, boss, I can’t keep the launch cruising around in circles all night. I had to unload it somewhere.’

“Roman cursed him out and was sore at some delay. She heard him say, ‘Why didn’t you land it yesterday, when you were expected to? You’ve tied everything up in a knot. Now I’ll have to send a truck down to that Godforsaken place all over again to pick it up.’

“The man said, ‘We couldn’t help it; there was a hitch at the other end.’

“Roman thought for a minute, then she heard him say, ‘Well, as long as it’s already unloaded, stay there with it where you are. I’ll have the truck down as soon after daylight as I can. How many cases of the guava are there?’

“She heard the man say, ‘Five dozen; three and two.’ And that was about all she listened to. She hung up and went back to sleep. She mentioned it to me in passing, but it didn’t add up; neither of us could figure out what was behind it.”

“To me it sounds very much like smuggling.”

I nodded. “A launch. Some lonely spot on the beach at night. Then he sends a truck down to pick it up, whatever it is. What does this guava look like; how does it come?”

“You can see it in all the grocery stores here; it’s a standard confection. They pack it in layers, in cigar-sized plywood boxes, about so.” She shaped her hands about an oblong. “And not more than a couple of inches deep, as a rule.”

“I don’t get it. Those clubs of his — there was no outlet for it there.”

“There’s no duty on it, no reason to smuggle it in. It was something more than just guava.”

“Yeah, but what? I thought at the time that maybe it was rum or something that he was trying to beat the Federal tax on. That was before I knew how this stuff was packaged. But rum would have to come in barrels; it couldn’t come in little flat thin slabs.

“About ten days later,” I added inconsequentially, “he gave her a walloping diamond bracelet, a regular sling for a broken wing. Whether it had any connection with that phone call or not, I don’t know. She yanked it off, I remember, and nearly skinned her arm raw, and threw it on the back seat and spit after it, while she was sitting there in the front with me.”

“So there was a big return on the stuff, whatever it was. It paid off better than rum or anything else, if he could do that. Keep at it, keep with it, see if we can get it.”

I don’t know how long we sat trying to puzzle it out. I haven’t got much imagination. I’d thought of rum, and I couldn’t seem to get much past that. What they used to call white slavery cropped up in my mind once, but I junked that; it wouldn’t fit in with small cigar-sized boxes.

The place smelled bad, and I shook my head to try to keep it clear for the job we’d picked out. I wrinkled my nose at her. “Gee, it stinks in here. What is that?”

It was the same acrid odor that had bothered me before while she was out and I was waiting for her, alone. It seemed to have come back again, or else it was still hanging around. A little bit like burned feathers, a little bit like sour dough.

“Oh, that’s him inside there. Don’t pay any attention to that.” She thumbed the wall behind her back, the dividing one between this room and the next. Something that sounded like the low-voiced groan of a sleeper tossing in distress came through in the moment of silence that followed. Then a soft thud, then nothing. “He probably just came to and lit up again. That goes on off and on all—”

She shut up abruptly, looked at me. I looked at her. We both got it together, in one of those sudden flashes that sometimes strike two people at one and the same time.

“That’s it!” she said, and gave her fingers a snap. I knew what she meant.

“Opium! Raw opium embedded in the guava! Probably between the two layers of it, in those little flyweight boxes you told me about. There’s his source of income! Not the clubs and tracks up there. A thousand percent profit on every nugget. Ten thousand percent.”

“There’s the tie-up with Chin. Chin imports antiques and curios, jars and vases and fancy boxes from the East. I bet half of them with fake bottoms. Then he reships from here. This is a way station. It doesn’t come from here. But it’s a lot easier to get it in from here than it would be straight over from China. They keep a closer watch for it from that direction. Chin’s the — how do you say it in English—?”

“The middleman.” I was thinking of her, though. No wonder she’d hated those jewels he’d showered on her. No wonder she’d wanted to drop them overside into the water, right tonight when we were coming ashore. She hadn’t known; I was sure of that. But her instinct had told her there was something about them; it must have, for her to loathe them so. I remembered how she’d said they’d spoken to her at night in the dark, from the dresser top in funny, squeaky, piping voices. The voices of lost souls going down into hell.

I took my hand away from my eyes, uncovered them. She’d stopped for a moment, short of the door, on her way out. She dipped, hiked up the bottom of her skirt so suddenly, I thought she was going to take it off altogether for a minute. She fumbled with the top of her stocking, let the skirt drop again. “And now I know of some good use for that money you tried to wish on me before!”

I saw where she was going, knew what she was going to try to do with it. “Can they talk to you when they’re that way? Can they understand you? Can they tell you anything?”

She flourished my own wad of bills at me. “This talks, even in nightmares. I’m bringing him a handful of new dreams, aren’t I? And maybe even a new fellow customer to share his dreams with him!”