Waltz Into Darkness

55

He came upon it quite by accident. The merest chance of happening to go where he did, when he did. More than that even, of happening to do as he did, when he went where he did.

She had asked him to go out and get her some of the fledgling cigars she was addicted to, “La Favorita” was their name, while he waited about for her to catch up with him in her dressing, always a process from two to three times slower than his own. She smoked quite openly now, that is in front of him, at all times when they were alone together. Nothing he could do or say would make her desist, so it was he at last who desisted in his efforts to sway her, and let her be. And it was he, too, who emptied off and caused to disappear the ashes she recklessly left about behind her, or opened the windows to carry the aroma off, and even, once or twice when they had been intruded upon unexpectedly by a chambermaid or the like, caught up the cigar and drew upon it himself, as if it were his own, though he was a nonsmoker — all for the sake of her reputation and to keep gossip from being bruited about.

“What did you do — before?” he asked her, on the day of this present request.

He meant before she’d met him. Wondering if there’d been someone else, then, to go and fetch them for her.

“I had to go and get them for myself,” she confessed.

“You?” he gasped. There seemed to be no end to the ways in which she could startle him.

“I usually told them it was for my brother, that he was ill and couldn’t come for them himself, had sent me in his place. They always believed me implicitly, I could tell, but—” She shrugged with a nuance of aversion.

How could they have failed to, he reflected? How could anyone in his right senses have dreamed a woman would dare enter a tobacco shop on her own behalf?

“But I didn’t like to do it much,” she added. “Everyone always stared so. You’d think I were an ogre or something. If there were more than one in there, and there usually was, the most complete frozen silence would fall, as if I had cast a spell or something. And yet no matter how quickly it fell, it was never quickly enough to avoid my catching some word or other that I shouldn’t, just as I first stepped in. Then they would stand there so guilty looking, wondering if I had heard, and if I had, if I understood its meaning.” She laughed. “I could have told them that I did, and spared them their discomfort.”

“Bonny!” he said in taut reproof.

“Well, I did,” she insisted. “Why deny it?” Then she laughed once more, this time at the expression on his face, and pretended to fling something at him. “Oh, get along, old Prim and Proper!”

The tobacco shop he selected for the filling of her request, and his choice was quite at random, being in a resort town, sold other things as well with which to tempt its transient clientele. Picture cards on revolving panels, writing papers, glass jars of candy, souvenirs, even a few primary children’s toys. There was in addition, just within the entrance where it could most readily catch the eye, an inclined wooden rack, holding newspapers from various other cities, an innovation calculated to appeal to homesick travelers.

He stopped by this as he was leaving and idly looked it over, hoping to find one from New Orleans. He had that slightly wistful feeling that the very name of the place alone was enough to cause him. Home. Word of home, in exile. Canal Street in the sunshine; Royal Street, Rampart Street, the Cabildo— He forgot where he was, and he felt lonely, and he ached somewhere so deep down inside that it must have been his very marrow. Love of another kind; the love every man has for the place he first came from, the place he first knew.

There were none to be found. He noticed one from Mobile, and withdrew that from the rack instead. It was not new; having remained unsold until now, he found it to be already dated two full weeks in the past.

Behind him meanwhile, disregarded, the storekeeper was urging helpfully: “Help you, sir? What town you from, mister? Got ’em all there. And if not, be glad to send for whichever one you want—”

He had opened it, meanwhile, casually. And from the inner page — it was only a single sheet, folded — this leaped up, searing him like a flash of gunpowder flame:

She turned from her mirror to stare, as he blasted the door in minutes later, breathing heavily, greenish of face. Her own cheeks were rosy as ripe peaches with the recent application of the rabbit’s foot. “What is it? You’re as white as though you’d seen a ghost.”

I have, he thought; face to face. The ghost of the man we thought we’d buried forever.

“It’s been found out,” he said tersely.

She knew at once.

She read it through.

She took it with surprising matter-of-factness, he thought. No recoil, no paling; with an almost professional objectivity, as if her whole interest were in its accuracy and not in its context. She said nothing when she’d completed it. He was the one had to speak.

“Well?”

“That was something we had to expect some day.” She gestured with the paper, cast it down. “And there it is. What more is there to say?” She shrugged philosophically. “We haven’t done so badly. It could have been much quicker.” She began to count on her fingers, the way gossiping housewives do over an impending childbirth. Or rather, its antecedents. “When was it? About the tenth of June, if I remember. It’s a full three months now—”

“Bonny!” he retched, his eyes closing in horror.

“They won’t know any more who it is. They won’t be able to tell. That’s one thing in our favor.”

“But they know, they know,” he choked, taking swift two-paced turns this way and that, like a bear seeking its way out through cage-bars.

She rose suddenly, flinging down something with a sort of angered impatience. Angered impatience with him, seeking to calm him, seeking to reason with him, for she went to him, took him by the two facings of his coat, and shook him once, quite violently, as if for his own good, to instill some sense in him.

“Will you listen to me?” she flared. “Will you use your head? They know what, now. Very well. But they still don’t know who. They don’t know who caused it. And they never will.” She gave a precautionary glance toward the closed door, lowered her voice. “There was no one in that room that day. No one in that house that day. No one who saw it happen. Never forget that. They can surmise, they can suspect, they can even feel sure, all they want, but they cannot prove. And the time is past, it is already too late; they will never be able to on the face of God’s green earth. What was it they told you yourself when you went to them about me? You must have proof. And they have none. You threw the — you know what, away; it’s lying rusted, buried in the sand, somewhere along the beach at Mobile, being eaten away by the salt water. Can they tell that a certain bullet comes from a certain one, and no other?” She laughed derisively. “Not in any way that’s ever been found yet!”

Half heeding her, he glanced around him at the walls, and even upward at the ceiling, as though he felt them closing in upon him.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said in a choked voice, pulling at his collar. “I can’t stand it any more.”

“It’s not here it’s been discovered. It’s in Mobile. We’re as safe here as we were before it was discovered. They didn’t know we were here before. They still don’t know we’re here now.”

He wanted to put an added move, an extra lap, even if a fruitless unneeded one, between themselves and Nemesis, looming dark like a massing cloudbank on the horizon.

She sighed, giving him a look as if she found him hopeless. “There goes our evening, I suppose,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “And I was counting on wearing the new wine-red taffeta.”

She clapped him reassuringly on the arm. “Go down and get yourself a drink; make it a good stiff one. You need that now more than anything, I can see that. There’s a good boy. Then come back, and we’ll see how you feel by that time, and we’ll figure it out then. There’s a good boy.” And she added, quite inconsequentially, “I’ll go ahead dressing in the meantime, anyway. I did want to show them that wine-red taffeta.”

In the end they stayed for the time being. But it was not her reasoning that kept him, so much as a fascinating horror that held him in its grip now. He was waiting for the next Mobile newspaper to arrive at the tobacco shop, and knew no other way of obtaining it than by remaining close at hand, here where they were.

It took five days, though he prodded the shopkeeper almost continuously in between.

“Sometimes they send ’em, sometimes they don’t,” the latter told him. “I could write and hurry them up, if you’d want me to.”

“No, don’t do that,” Durand said rather hastily. “It’s just that — I find nothing to do with myself down here. I like to get the news of the old home town.”

Then when it came, he didn’t have the courage to examine it there in the store, he took it back to her and they searched for it together, she holding the sheets spread, his strained face low on her shoulder.

“There it is,” she said crisply, and narrowed the expanse with a sharp, crackling fold, and they read it together.

“Now they know,” he said bitterly. “Now there can be no denying it any longer. Now they know.”

“No they don’t,” she said flatly. “Or it wouldn’t be in here like this. They’re guessing, as much as they ever were.”

“The shovel—”

“The shovel was in the house, long after we left. Others could have used it, who came after us.”

“It gets worse, all the time.”

“It only seems to. They want to do the very thing to you they are doing: frighten you, cause you to blunder in some way. In actuality it’s no whit worse than it was before it was found.”

“How can you say that, when it stands there before you in black and white?”

She shook her head. “The barking dog can’t bite you at the same time; he has to stop when he’s ready to sink his teeth in. Don’t you know that when they do know, if they do, we will never know they do? You are waiting for a message that will never reach us. You are looking for news that will never come. Don’t you know that we’re safe so long as they keep on mentioning it? When they stop, that’s the time to look out. When sudden silence falls, the danger has really begun.”

He wondered where she got her wisdom. From hard-won experience of her own? Or had it been born in her blood, as cats can see in the dark and avoid pitfalls?

“Couldn’t it mean that they’ve forgotten?”

She gave him another capsule of her bitter wisdom, sugared with a hard, wearied smile.

“The police? They never forget, lovey. It’s we who will have to. If we want to live at all.”

He brought in three papers the next time. Three successive ones, each a day apart, but that had come in all together. They divided them up, went to work separately, hastily ruffling them over page by page, in search of what they were after.

He turned his head sharply, looked at her half frightened. “It’s stopped! There’s not a word about it any more.”

“Nor in these either.” She nodded with sage foreboding. “Now the real danger is beginning. Now it’s under way.”

He flung the sheets explosively aside, rose in instant readiness, so much under her guidance had he fallen in these things. “Shall we go?”

She considered, made their decision. “We’ll wait for one more newspaper. We can give ourselves that much leeway. They may already know who, but I doubt that they still know where.”

Another wait. Three days more this time. Then the next one came. Again nothing. Dead silence. Brooding silence, it almost seemed to him, as they pored over it together.

This time they just looked at one another. It was she who rose at last, put hands to the shoulders of her cream satin dressing robe to take it off. Coolly, unhurriedly, but purposefully.

“Now’s the time to go,” she said quietly. “They’re on to us.”

He was still baffled, even this late, at the almost sixth sense she seemed to have developed. It frightened him. He knew, at least, it was something he would never attain.

“I’ll begin to pack,” she said. “Don’t go out any more. Stay up here where you are until we’re ready.”

He shuddered involuntarily. He sat on there, watching her, following her movements with his eyes as she moved about. It was like — observing an animated divining rod, that walked and talked like a woman.

“You went about it wrong,” she remarked presently. “It’s too late to mend now, but you may have even hastened it, for all we know. Singling out just the Mobile papers each time. Word of things like that can travel more swiftly than you know.”

“But how else—?” he faltered.

“Each time you bought one, you should have bought one from some other place at the same time, even if you discarded it immediately afterward. In that way you divide suspicion.”

She went on into the next room.

Even that there was a wrong and a right way to go about, he reflected helplessly. Ah, the wisdom of the lawless.

She came back to the door for a moment, pausing in mid-packing.

“Where shall it be now? Where shall we go from here?”

He looked at her, haunted. He couldn’t answer that.