“What do you mean not worry? My boat’s gone!”
“Yes, sir, every foreign boat left very early, but you can reach your boat farther down the coast. You see, here is the car that takes you down there,” he said, pointing out a cab that had come up the circular drive. “Please don’t worry. He will take you. Your room was already paid, sir, and your friends have your belongings with them.”
Well, that was good news, at least. “Look, I have to take care of something first.” The desk man seemed honest enough, but there was no way he’d ask him to return the watch to Ann. Besides, his plan might still work. He could come back.
The uniformed man was jabbering with the driver and shaking his head as he called out, “Mr. Alter, sir, he cannot stay. The ride takes more than an hour, sir, and they are waiting for you.”
There seemed to be no choice. Tim got into the backseat of the cab and tried English. The driver spoke a little, so after they’d pulled out, he explained that he would like to stop at an address on the way. Without getting out the watch, Tim slipped the card from his pocket and handed it to him, saying, “I want to go here for a few minutes. I’ll pay you extra to do that.”
“I don’t want trouble,” the driver said, looking gravely at him in the rearview mirror.
“It’s all right,” Tim said with force. “I’ll take responsibility. I can pay.”
All the people who weren’t around the hotel complex must have come into the city, Tim thought. The crowds were so bad that the cab crawled among pedestrians and pedicabs, an old lady carrying a monkey in a bamboo cage. The day was hot again already, the people edgy, sullen, unwilling to yield though the driver honked with annoying frequency. The place smelled like an open sewer. A boy spit at the windshield as the car crept by, then turned and dodged between people down the mouth of an alley, his tattered clothes flying as he shoved past a group of men gathered there. The cab’s radio droned incomprehensibly.
By the time they’d reached the Chinese pawnshop where Ann said all the foreigners did business, Tim had almost decided to turn back, but then he realized that he couldn’t go back with the watch and have to explain why he’d taken it for no reason. Besides, the crowds were much sparser here, farther inland from the harbor. He pressed some cash into the driver’s hand to overcome the unreliability he read in the man’s apprehensive expression.
“It’s okay. I’ll be right back,” Tim told him. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The inside was dark, but the old pawnbroker was there, sitting in the back on a stool behind a glass counter. “I’ve brought this in for Ann Gamble,” Tim explained.
Without speaking or giving any sign of knowing Ann’s name, the old man put his hand out for whatever it was this time, and when he saw the gems on the lady’s watchband, he reached into a pocket of his apron, brought out a loupe with a light inside, and considered them carefully, nodding at last in recognition.
Not even offering to bargain, he reached into another pocket and counted out a pile of money onto the glass. Tim did a fast calculation, saw that it was at least eighteen hundred dollars, more than enough to take care of both of them, even if the boat and the skipper and the crew left without him. Relieved, Tim grabbed the big wad of money, took a paper the man scratched out, and almost ran for the door, stuffing cash into his pockets.
As soon as he got outside, he saw the cab was gone.
No, there it was. Well up the block, slowly driving away through the throngs. He pushed along the gutter trying to catch it, waving his arms and yelling, but had to give it up as hopeless after half a block. Now what? Find a pedicab? Call another taxi? He turned back. His yelling had drawn attention from the far end of the side street where a group of young men approached, one in front shaking his head and waving him away, “No good for you here. You go home now,” he shouted, looking more worried than angry.
Something inside Tim cleared then, like a lifting fog, and he knew what he had to do. He should never have taken her watch without telling her, it wasn’t his call, and he couldn’t be out on the street carrying this kind of cash. The watch he could hide, the wads of money he couldn’t. He smiled at his accosters with harmless good will, backing up to the pawnshop, going inside again. They didn’t follow him; maybe he was just a sideshow. He went back to the old man, put the money on the counter, and put out his hand.
The old man counted the money, then shook his gray head. “Need ten percent more.”
“No. I changed my mind.”
“You make deal.” Again the old man shook his head. He wasn’t going to budge.
The watch wasn’t on the counter, but Tim reached over and grabbed the front of his apron. “I said no deal. Now give it back.”
The old man was surprisingly strong. Tim’s angle was not a good one, leaning over the counter. He let go suddenly, pushing him hard, and the old man fell backwards over his stool, his head striking the shelf behind him as he slid to the floor. It was very still then, the sounds of the city crowds muffled by his own fear breathing fast. The pawnbroker didn’t move, and Tim dashed around to the back of the counter, tried to rouse him, lifted him to see a small puddle of blood under the loose, limp old head. He looked at the face then. The eyes were dead. The man was dead.
He checked himself, saw blood on his right hand. Repulsed, he tried to shake it clean, instead speckling the man’s apron front and chin with red spray. He steeled himself, reached into the pockets with tears of panic and desperation welling in his eyes, and gasped in relief when he found the watch, Ann’s watch.
His mind like four blank walls, Tim forced himself to walk, not run, from the store. As he closed the door behind him, he heard shouting down the street, then glass breaking and automobile horns, so he walked up the street, in the direction from which he’d come in the cab. He shoved his hand into his pocket to hide the blood and, touching paper, realized he still had the money.
But there was no going back now.
He was pushing against a crowd that wanted to go toward trouble, not away. A boy with no front teeth laughed at him, punching him in the arm.
What was he going to do when he got back to the hotel? How to explain himself? How to explain that the man was dead, but it wasn’t intentional, and that he hadn’t meant to end up with both the watch and the money? Behind him was shouting, a gang of boys and men, some with improvised clubs and blades. He kept moving forward even when someone struck him in the ribs, then a stunning blow over his ear. It ought to hurt, but didn’t. Did they know about the pawnbroker? Is that why they were after him? An angry human whirlpool, part festival and part riot, swirled around and past him. Windows shattered. In the distance, he heard sirens. He was very dizzy but kept walking as though toward a goal. The watch was still clenched in his hand, and he held it to his ear. It was ticking like a heart as he staggered ahead, one foot in front of the other. Finally he put it back in his pocket, some part of him advising him to hide it.
A police car was pulling through the crowd, and Tim put his hands up in the air, waving them, but that made him even dizzier. He stumbled back against a building, where he realized that he was hurt, that pain was a helmet crushing his head, a serpent coiling, squeezing the breath from his lungs. He pressed one arm against his side, saw the Asian man wearing a uniform, the crowd parting for his drawn gun, continuing to shout and jeer. Tim no longer knew what he hoped for, which he would choose, an honest policeman or a corrupt one. Maybe the man would speak English. Maybe he would understand. Maybe he never even got a report of a dead shopkeeper.