“Are you enjoying yourself?” he said.
“Yes,” she lied. “It’s very pleasant.”
“You don’t seem to be. You look bored.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t particularly care for this place. It depresses me.”
“Really? You just said it was pleasant.”
“I was only being agreeable. I would never come here if I had my choice.”
“I should have consulted you I suppose, but I wanted it to be a surprise. We’ve gone out together so seldom that I don’t know the places you like to go.”
“Well, you probably wouldn’t like the places I like, so it would make no difference anyhow.”
“Perhaps you could convert me.” He reached out and touched her right hand, which was lying palm down on the table, and his eyes glistened for the first time with overt malice. “As I said before, I’m feeling quite guilty for having neglected you. It might be amusing for both of us to become more familiar with each other’s habits.”
“I don’t wish to interfere with your life. It isn’t necessary for you to make concessions that you don’t really want to make.”
“You’re too generous. It only makes me more determined to emulate you.” He touched her hand again and laughed, and the malice in his eyes was in the laugh also. “However, here is our dinner, and I hope you are pleased with what I ordered. Afterward, we’ll dance. It has been a long time since I’ve danced with you, hasn’t it? I’m sure I’ll be awkward in the beginning, but you must be patient until I improve. The music is by Nat Brandywynne, I believe. Are you familiar with his orchestra? Do you like it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve beard it.”
“Well, no matter. To tell the truth, we are only killing time as pleasantly as possible until we can go to the special event I’ve arranged for you. However bored you may be by all this, I promise that you’ll not be bored by that. I promise that you’ll find it most interesting.”
He looked across the table at her, waiting for her to ask again what the special event was to be, but she did not ask because she was afraid to know, because she knew by feeling already that it was going to be, whatever developed specifically, the bad end of this bad night in which waiting and waiting and waiting was to be one of the worst of all bad things. Dinner was served, and the remains of dinner were taken away. Afterward they danced, and their dancing was a kind of cold and acceptable social sodomy. She refused after the first time to dance again, and so they sat and sat and did not even talk, and eventually it became eleven-thirty and time to leave.
In the Imperial, she shrank against the door and closed her eyes as a frightened child closes his eyes in the night, trading one darkness for another, the living and breathing outer darkness of a thousand threats for the sealed and solacing inner darkness secured by the thin membranes of the lids. She was conscious of moving, of riding for a long time on different streets, but she had no sense of direction, and when the car stopped and she opened her eyes at last, she had no idea of where she was, except that it was an incredibly dark and narrow and filthy street that turned out not to be a street at all, but an alley.
“Where have you brought me?” she said. “What are you going to do to me?”
“Do to you?” He took her face between thumb and fingers and turned it up and around and looked down into it smiling. “What a fantastic idea. I only brought you here to see something amusing. I told you that.”
Releasing her, he got out of the car and came around to her side and opened the door, and she got out beside him. A bulky shadow separated itself from the deeper shadow of a recession in a crumbling brick wall. The shadow moved toward them and became an obese man, and she had the most peculiar feeling that it was a man she had seen somewhere before, but this was probably only a contingent of terror and not so.
“You didn’t say you were bringing anyone,” the obese man said.
“Was I obligated to inform you?” Oliver’s voice was a soft expression of utter animosity, and Charity was aware that between these two men, in whatever strange relationship they had established, there was deep and abiding hatred. “Are you suggesting that I have no right to bring my wife as a guest if I please?”
“It’s not smart,” the man said. “It may be dangerous.”
“I think not. And if you’re worried about its compromising your usefulness in the future, you needn’t worry any more. I had already decided that your usefulness has been exhausted.” Oliver turned his head slightly toward Charity. “My dear, this is Mr. Sweeney. You’ll hardly believe it, I know, but you and he are old friends after a fashion. Isn’t that so, Sweeney?”
The man called Sweeney didn’t answer. Turning, he moved back to the dark recession and disappeared. Guided by Oliver’s hand on her arm, Charity followed and saw that there was in the recession a metal door which was now standing open, and she went through the doorway onto the concrete floor of a long dark building, a single enormous room, that was or had been almost certainly a garage. High, small windows at the far end were like blind eyes reflecting the feeble light from a lamp on the street outside. A single dim bulb burned in a conical tin shade at the end of a cord descending from shadows at the ceiling and cast upon the stained concrete a dirty yellow perimeter of defense against the darkness.
Sweeney brushed by, opened a door to a small enclosure that was mostly glass above a low wall of rough boards fixed vertically. The enclosure projected from one side of the room and was or had been the improvised office of what was or had been the garage.
“In here, please,” Sweeney said. “It will probably be a while yet, so you had better sit down and take it easy.”
“Yes, my dear,” Oliver said. “Here is a chair with a cushion beside the desk. I’m sure you will be quite comfortable in it.”
She sat down and folded her hands in her lap. It was hot in the small and dark enclosure, but she felt icy cold. Quietly she waited for the bad end of the bad night. Regret she felt, and fear and despair, and the greatest of these was despair.
Chapter 15
The drum and the piano were tired. In the shag end of the night, in the rise and drift of sound from a litter of people at a litter of tables, the die-hards, the last dogs, the ones who never wanted to go home, their voices lagged and faltered and fell silent. The drum, in the end, had the final word. The piano, too tired to care, declined to answer. The litter heard no silence that was not its own.
In a tiny room off the short hall to the alley, Chester Lewis put a hat over his wiry hair, lit a cigarette, looked with his expression of chronic surprise at the miracle of thin blue smoke that issued from his lungs.
“It wasn’t good tonight,” he said. “I wasn’t with it.”
“You were all right,” Joe said. “You were fine.”
“No. It wouldn’t come. Not the good stuff. What came was gibberish.”
“You’re tired, that’s all. We’re both tired.”
“That’s right, Joe. We’re both tired. We’re a pair of tired guys, Joe.”
“Everyone gets tired.”
“Everyone doesn’t stay tired.”
“All right, Chester. You better get some sleep and forget it.”
“Sure, Joe. You better, too.”
“I’ll get along in a little.”
“You going to play again?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll skip it.”
“How about a sandwich and a glass of milk somewhere?”
“I don’t think so, Chester. Thanks anyhow.”
Chester drew on his cigarette, examined with astonishment the miracle, of smoke.