Bob never made a sound. I thought he was bending over to pick up his cup at first, but he never straightened up again. Just kept going lower and lower. I thought blearily, “What’s he putting his head all the way down like that for, is he going to try to drink it without using his hands?” Then the cup smashed under his chin and he just stayed that way. And then I could see this ivory knob sticking out between his shoulder blades, like... like a handle to lift him by. And red ribbons swirling out all around it, ribbons that ran! And the last thing I saw was a slit — a two or three-inch gash in the paper screen behind him. My own head got too heavy to hold up and I just fell over sideways on the floor and passed out.
But I know, I know I was sitting on the opposite side of the room from him, I know I didn’t touch him—
When I opened my eyes, I was still there in that horrible place, in the flickering lantern light, and he was dead there opposite me, so I knew I hadn’t dreamed it. The dream was from then on, until I met you. A nightmare.
The slide was just closing, as though someone had been in there with me. I struggled up on one elbow. There was a weight on my hands, and I looked down to see what it was, and there was the knife! The blood-smeared blade was resting flat across the palm of one, the fingers of the other were folded tight around the ivory hilt. There was blood on the front of my dress, as though the knife had been wiped on it.
(“That’s the symbol of transferring the guilt of the crime to you,” he told her.)
The slide was shoved back, as though they’d been timing me, waiting for me to come to before breaking in and confronting me. The manager came in alone first. He flew into a fury. The way he kept yelling at me — it was awful. I couldn’t think or say anything at all. He pulled me up by one arm and kept bellowing into my face: “You kill! You kill in my house! You make me big disgrace — you make me lose face before customers!”
I tried to tell him that Bob had been stabbed through the paper screen from the next compartment, and when I pointed to where the gash had been — it was gone! The paper was perfectly whole.
He kept pointing to the blood on my dress, the knife at my feet, kept shaking me back and forth like a terrier. Finally he stamped out to call the police. That was my only chance. I got up and ran, I ran the other way, toward the back. I couldn’t find my way out, I thought I’d go mad there in that place with fright and horror, but — I’d heard your voice when we first went in, saying “Here’s looking at you, kids!” I knew there was an American somewhere under the same roof, if I could only find him—
IV
“That’s the story, Hollinger. And here I am, and here you are.”
“Not on your life, lady,” he grinned, getting up and shoving his chair back. “Here you are, maybe, but I’m on my way back there, to do a little housecleaning.” He cupped his hands, blew into them, rubbed them together like a kid going to a circus.
“But they know you helped me get away. They must be looking for you by this time. If I let you go back there again—”
“Sure they know. And sure they’re looking for me. But that’s the one place they’re not looking for me. Don’t you see that? I’m going back there and find out what happened to that slashed paper. The first lesson in that detective book said that when evidence either for or against a suspect disappears from the scene of the crime, look for collusion. First I thought that was some kind of a train smash-up, but one of the officers on the battle-wagon told me it means people getting together to put something over on somebody. You say you saw a slit in the paper. When you came to it was gone. The answer is there’s a trick somewhere. Maybe the manager is in on it. Because I don’t see how they could do that in his house without his knowing it.
“Now, I’ve got to locate the exact compartment you were in, and that’s not going to be an easy job, the way those places are all alike.”
“Wait,” she said, “I think I can help you. It’s not much of a thing to go by, but— Those lanterns in each cubicle — did you notice that they all have a character heavily inked in on them?”
“Yeah, I couldn’t tell one from the other. They’re laundry-tickets to me.”
“I don’t mean that. The one in our booth was finished in a hurry or something, the craftsman inked his brush too heavily. Anyway, a single drop of ink came to a head at the bottom of the character, with the slope of the lantern. It ran down a little way, left a blurred track ending in a dark blob. It was staring me in the face in the beginning, before I changed places, that’s how I know. Here, give me a pencil — all right this burnt match-stick will do. It’s very easy to remember, you don’t need to know what it means. Two seagulls with bent wings, one above the other. Under them simply a pot-hook. Then this blot of dried ink hanging down from that like a pendulum. Look for that, and you’ll have the cubicle we were in. I don’t think they’ve bothered to remove the lantern, because they wouldn’t expect a foreigner to notice a little thing like that.”
“Neither would I,” he said and nodded approvingly at her. He picked up a razor blade from the edge of the washstand, carefully sheathed it in a fragment of newspaper.
“What’s that for?”
“To let myself in with. In some ways, paper houses are pretty handy. Lock yourself in here behind me, just to be on the safe side. I’ll give you the high sign when I come back. Don’t open up for anybody else at all.”
She moved after him to the door. “You’ll never make it in that uniform. It’s all torn.”
“I’ll take care of that, borrow something from the Roosky downstairs. Try to get some sleep and get that dope out of your system.”
The last thing she murmured through the crack of the door as he slid out into the hallway was, “Please be careful.”
“Okay, lady,” he said with a grin, saluting jauntily from the eyebrow.
The Russian, behind the shelf that served for an accommodation desk, growled, “Eh, tzailor! Is no fight by back of house, why you tell me to go look?” He pointed to the split middy. “I tink you fight youself.”
“Never been known to. Listen, I gotta go out and it’s cold. Lend me a hat and coat.”
“Sure, bott you leaf deposit. How I know you come back?”
“Here’s your deposit, suspicious guy.” It felt funny to have something with a brim to it on his head, after two years. The bell-bottomed pants were a give-away, but he counted on the darkness to take care of that. He had to fasten the coat’s top button over his bare neck, where civilians wore collars and ties.
A quarter of an hour later he was casually strolling past the front of the Stolen Hours again, hands in pockets, hat-brim tipped down to his nose. The place was shut up tight, whether by police order or at its owner’s discretion he couldn’t tell. Probably the latter, for no policeman had been left posted outside the premises. The Yoshi had quieted down. Lights still peered out up and down its byways, but the dance halls and pool-parlors had closed up shop for the night, and the only wayfarers in the streets now were homeward-bound drunks and an occasional pickpocket or lush-worker sidling past in the shadows.
He didn’t try to get in the Stolen Hours from the front, but went around the block to the next street over, located the lane they’d escaped through and threaded his way along it. There was a bamboo wicket barring it at the inner end. He didn’t bother with it — just climbed up over with a seaman’s agility and dropped soundlessly down on the inside.