If she’d only passed me that knife of hers before she let them in, I kept thinking, I might have been able to jump him, turn him around and use him as a shield against the others, force my way out right through the middle of them. No, I knew better than that. How far would I get? Down to the foot of the stairs, maybe, at best. Then I’d simply walk into the arms of those who were waiting down there around the entrance.
In a half minute now it would be all over. I almost felt like turning around of my own accord and giving up, but I didn’t
I saw the grasping, open-clawed shadow his hand made on the wall as it hung poised over me for a moment, about to come down and pull the covers back, fling me around so he could see my face.
It dipped, and I felt the covers go off me. The air played over my unprotected back, crinkling the skin.
There was a startled gasp, not just from one but from four or five different throats at once. The wall brightened; the shadow had suddenly snapped back to a distance, like stretched elastic. He must have given a backward broad jump, to move that fast.
Somebody choked out a question in a curdled voice.
I heard the girl utter a single musical-sounding word in answer. She rolled it on her tongue as though she enjoyed it. Gee, it was a pretty word. Their language is full of them, but this was so liquid, so melodious, it had even the others beat. “Viruela,” she said.
There was an equine scream, a whinny of dismay. Somebody else let out a hoarse yell to go with that. There was a floor-throbbing stampede of heavy feet that quivered the cot I was on, all converging toward one point, all trying to get out of the room at, one time. You could hear loose arms and legs strike against the doorframe before they were pulled through after their floundering owners. The backdraft bent the candle flame over flat, teetered the whole structure of light and shadow in the room.
Then the door slammed shut like a bomb; their sound track faded to a whisper, and the two of us were alone in there again.
I could tell we were, but I didn’t move for a minute, just to make sure.
They kept going, outside in the hall. The panic was on them bad. The whole rickety building seemed to vibrate with their headlong tumbling down the stairs out there.
Then a little of the clamor came up from the outside, from the front way, when they first hit the open air, and that meant they were out altogether; they were back in the alley where they’d started from.
She hadn’t given me any signal yet, but I turned slowly and looked. The candle flame had only just managed to straighten up again after the suction of their exit, was still jiggling crazily. She was head-bent by the door, listening. I saw her thumb her nose at it in a sort of blanket farewell to them. She slurred something under her breath, but it was no prayer this time.
I rolled over and sat up. “Good work,” I said cheerfully.
She turned around and looked at me. She gave me the wink with one of her big black eyes. “Not bad, eh?” she agreed. She dropped the shawl back to where it had been before and became the street Arab again. Funny what a little touch like that can do sometimes. She chucked the beads back into the discard.
She moved aside from her listening post, revealed a small yellow placard dangling from the doorknob that had been hidden from me until now. It was still swaying lightly on its cord from the ferocious exit slam they’d given it just now. On it, it had the same pretty-sounding word, printed in big black capitals that I’d heard her mention to them before: VIRUELA.
“Say, what is that?” I asked her. “What does it mean?”
“Smallpox,” she said unconcernedly, giving the card a little flick aside with her nail. “It’s a Board of Health warning to keep out. You know, a sort of quarantine sign. It should have been on the outside of the door, not in here, but they were too excited to stop and think about that. I knew they wouldn’t have the guts to take hold of you and turn you over and look at your face.”
“It sure did the trick.” I grinned. I was sitting on the edge of the cot now, pulling my shirt down around me again, rouge spots and all. “How’d you happen to have it handy like that?”
She shrugged offhandedly. “It was left over. The sanitation people forgot to take it away with them last time they were here. You see, somebody really did die of smallpox on that cot a couple of weeks ago.”
I got up off it fast, with a sort of spring; finished my dressing someplace else.
She smiled a little when she saw the querulous way I was looking over at it and dusting off my seat. “Don’t worry, they fumigated everything before they left. I’ve been sleeping on it myself ever since, and I’m all right. It worked, anyway; that’s the main thing.”
“Just the same,” I admitted, “I’m glad I didn’t find out about it until after it was over.”
She went over to one of the wooden drawers, opened it, and retrieved the unfinished cigar she’d dunked in there just before she let them in. It must have died lingeringly. A whole lot of pent-up smoke came up out of the drawer with it.
She socked the dead ash off it against the edge of the drawer, jacked it into her mouth, pulled a match out of that endless frontal reservoir she seemed to carry around with her, and lit up with a grateful sigh. She was back in the underworld full-time again. Then she leaned there slantwise, with her back and both elbows against the wooden chest.
“What do you do, smoke cigars all the time?” I asked her curiously. “Don’t you ever go for cigarettes?”
She curled her lip at me. “Cigarettes are for babies. I was smoking cigarettes when I was nine years old.”
“Wow,” I said softly.
“I didn’t inhale until I was ten, though,” she qualified it virtuously.
I just took that in. That was about all you could do with it.
“I used to work in a cigar factory in Tampa,” she added. “That’s where I got used to them. About every tenth one I made up I’d smoke myself.”
I was knotting my tie now, sight unseen. I kept looking at her, trying to figure her out. “Why’d you go to bat for me like that just now?” I asked curiously.
She gave one shoulder a slight push. “Different reasons. Like I told you, I hate the police. I’m always on the side that they’re not; I don’t care whose it is.” She followed a trajectory of smoke upward with her eyes. “Flowers on a grave, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s hard to explain. It’s my way of doing something for someone that isn’t around any more, I guess. It’s the only way I have. I don’t know any other way... You see, I know what it is to lose someone you love, too, just like you. It happened to me only a couple of weeks ago, right here in this same room.”
I thumbed the fumigated cot. “Is that the—?”
“Yeah, that was Manolito. We were deported from Miami after we both did a stretch there. We had an old record hanging over us here, and they were just laying for us. They hounded us — him especially. For weeks and months they wouldn’t let us alone. He got it in jail, where they were holding him for something they found out later he hadn’t done. Then when they saw how sick he was they threw him out like a dog and let him crawl back to me here to die.”
You couldn’t tell how deep it went except by her eyes. They flashed like the beacon of Morro Castle on an overcast night. The rest of her face stayed impassive, didn’t show anything.
I didn’t know what to say. I turned away and tucked in my shirt. “What’s your name?” I asked her finally, with my back turned.
“My real name? I forgot it long ago. I’ve got a dozen of them, one for every place I go. I’d better give you the one for this district, as long as we’re in it. Around here they call me Media Noche, because I always hang around late by myself — since he’s gone.”