She even looked pretty down there. The shadow of the overhanging bar cast a soft, peaceful twilight over her. I tried to pick her up in my arms, and she made an indifferent little pass with her hand, as if to tell me there wasn’t time.
“Just stay with me a minute. It won’t take long.”
I got down close and kneaded her to me; I didn’t know what other way to try to keep her with me. I didn’t know; I didn’t know.
“I’ve got to go out alone in the dark,” she sighed, “and I’ve always hated the dark.” Her lips tried to find mine, then they gave up. “Scotty,” she breathed, “finish my drink for me. It’s still standing up there. And bust the glass. That’s the way I want to go. And, Scotty — let me know how that picture you and I took turns out.”
Her chin gave a dejected little dip, and I was by myself without her; she’d gone somewhere else.
Hands were reaching down, and I slashed them away. What was left there was mine; they couldn’t have it.
I picked her up in my arms, and I staggered to my feet and looked around. I didn’t know where to go or what to go there for.
Somebody pointed, and I looked down at the floor under her. Small dark red drops were falling one by one, very sluggish, very slow. You couldn’t see them drop; you could only see them after they hit. They made intricate little patterns, like burgundy snowflakes or midget garnet starfish on a beach. There was something sticking out of her side, like an ornamental brooch or clasp to her dress. But it thrust out a little too far; it couldn’t have been meant to jack out like that. It was jade, and it was vibrating slightly as I held her. Not with her own breath — there wasn’t any more of that — but with the shaking of my own trembling hold upon her.
It looked vaguely familiar. It was carved in the shape of a small, squatting monkey holding paws to his eyes. I couldn’t think for a minute where I’d seen it before. I only knew it had no business to be where it was. I tightened my hand around it and pulled at it, and it grew bigger. At my pulling there was more of it and more of it and more of it, like in some horrid nightmare. It was like pulling her apart with my bare hand; pulling her flesh apart, pulling her insides out — I don’t know how to say it. The steel part showed up below the monkey and kept coming, kept coming, by eighths of inches. And my sweat kept coming out on my forehead, as though this obstruction were coming out of me. It came slowly free, the rest of it, the stinger, the tail part; steely, straight, graceful and thin and deadly. It was like looking at death to look at it. It was death. Suddenly it had finished coming; there wasn’t any more. It had ended. And there was just a hole there, where it had been. With blood down inside it, but too lazy to come out any more. Or already too old.
My palm stretched out, under and beyond her body, as if it were asking alms. And in it the monkey. And out beyond that, the long steel thing with her blood upon it. Making a sort of moiré surface.
I opened my fingers spasmodically, and it dropped to the floor with a clash.
I finally got it. Don’t laugh; I was slow. When you’re in love you’re slow like that.
I saw their faces there before me and I wanted help, anywhere I could get it.
“She’s dead!” I shouted at them. “She doesn’t move! She’s been knifed right in my arms!”
My pain was in English. Their fright was in Spanish. There are no different languages for things like that. They’re all the same.
I heard the word go up from a dozen different throats at once, and I knew it, though I’d never heard it before.
There was a sudden stampede that nearly burst the flimsy seams of the place. Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. This wasn’t for them; this was mine, and I could have her. They went stumbling and floundering all over each other in their hurry to get out into the street and avoid being snagged as witnesses. I suppose that was it mainly. And the chance to skip without paying for their drinks was too good to be missed; that must have been partly it too. And the rest was just sheer panic, catching from one to the other. Panic, which is fear without any real reason to be afraid.
I even saw one of the hindmost miss his footing and go down on hands and knees. Then he picked himself up and went scampering outside after the rest.
I was left alone in there with my dead. Just me and her and a long, long row of abandoned drinks lined up along the bar, all sizes, shapes, and colors. And the men behind the bar who’d had to stay there because they couldn’t get out fast enough.
I guess I stood there. I don’t think I moved. Dimly I realized there wasn’t any use going any other place with her, because she’d be dead in that other place, too, just as dead as here.
It didn’t take long. Havana’s a fast town for anything: love, and life, and death too.
Then the screech of police cars came careening into the narrow reaches of Zulueta Street, from way up at the far end, and whistled down it and stopped outside. And the uniforms of cops and duck and pongee suits of plain-clothes men came spilling in between the supporting posts that along most of its street front is all Sloppy’s has for outside walls. And the brave ones ganged up again now and came in once more, but behind the police and not in front of them. Which makes a good deal of difference when it comes to the detention of witnesses.
They took her from me and stretched her out on three chairs slung together in a row; that was the best the place could provide in the way of a bier. Her skirt had hitched up a little too high on one side, and I gently freed it and paid it down to where it belonged. Gee, that hurt; I don’t know why. I turned my back and stepped across to the bar.
While they were milling around her, and their police medical examiner — I suppose he was that — was busy with her, I picked up the daiquiri she’d left standing on the bar. I saluted her with it, not where she was but up a little just over my eyes, and drained it to the bottom. And that hurt too; what a bitter drink. Then I snapped the stem of the glass off short. Good-by. It wasn’t much of a funeral service. It was all there was time for just then.
They closed in around me and my afterlife had begun. The new, lonely stretch without her. All by myself in a strange town. Two of them had revolvers out, I noticed vaguely. I wondered why. There wasn’t anyone in there that could hurt them or threaten them. I was the only one in there, in the middle of all of them. The rest of the crowd had been pushed back outside again.
They tried saying a couple of things that I couldn’t understand. Then when they saw that they called for someone by name. “Acosta,” they kept saying and turning their heads. I guess it was a name, anyway. Some new guy stepped through their ranks and took over.
He was in plain clothes: an alpaca suit. He had horn-rimmed glasses and he looked studious. I guess he was one of their ace detectives; there was a sort of overtone of deference all around. He had a good working knowledge of English, the kind that you don’t get from books but that gets rubbed into your elbows from knocking around. It was spiced with accent, but his word patterns came out like ours do. He must have been educated up in the States or gone to one of our police schools up there.