Then all of a sudden I heard something, and my neck went up. Nothing moved in the whole room for a minute except the cigarette that dropped in a plumb line from my fingers to the floor, and the foot that pinned it where it had fallen.
It was someone on the stairs, and for some reason I had a good hunch it wasn’t she. I think it was the rhythm of the tread told me; it was slower than hers. True, I’d never listened to her climb before, had never taken the count of her footfalls, but somehow I felt she would at no given time have come up any stairs with that lethargic, almost somnambulistic beat. The rhythm of the walk is an index to each personality; it is as distinctive as fingerprints or the timbre of the voice; no two alike. Hers might be as stealthy as this, as soft-purred, particularly if she were stalking someone, but there wouldn’t be that excruciating lag between each drop. Almost as if the climber had frozen each time before going on to the next pace. It didn’t match her.
There was no leather in the texture; it was the slurred sibilance of felt, such as in those moccasins she wore or the slippers that the Chinese featured around here. It should by that token have been altogether inaudible, but it wasn’t; there was enough grit upon the aged stair surface and enough hardened coating of wear upon the underside of the sandal to give that little whispered betrayal each time they ground together. Particularly in such a silence as this, and to such wary, hunted ears as mine.
I was erect now at a crouch, holding the cot frame down by my palms along its edge to keep it from singing out as I left it. I let it up very easy, and it grumbled only a little.
It had left the stairs now, was coming on toward the door on a flat plane — don’t ask me how I knew; you can tell things sometimes without being able to tell afterward how you told at the time.
I started to cross the room in time with it, fitting my own stifled paces into its falls out there on the other side, so that the one might possibly cover up the other, just as those church bells had confused me before.
I pinched the candle flame dead between my fingers in passing, and then I was at the door. Like I had been before, when I first came in here. But the police had been easy to figure; you knew where they were heading from a mile away; this you couldn’t tell what it was.
It went: Sh — one — two — two and a half; sh — one — two — two and a half. About like that. It might have been a palsied totter, as of someone about to fall flat on his face between each step, but I wasn’t counting on that. It might equally have been somebody very sneaky, but not quite sneaky enough, trying to get up within grappling distance outside a door before he was detected.
It stopped. The two and a half ran up to three, four, five, and the break didn’t come. It must be right out there in front of my face, at a halt.
A part of my coat moved a little against my body, and the shock was like that of feeling a weapon’s touch go against you. I managed to hold still, and then I saw that it was the knob trying to turn and carrying the goods of my coat partly around with it, where they were pressed close together.
Then a hand tested the door for give, pushing at it here and there to force it through. There was a sharp, scratching sound that made me jump as though it had opened my skin; it was the head of a match being carried across the door to ignition point. The seam suddenly stood out, as though a long yellow thread had been unraveled.
But this was no longer as furtive as the approach had been, and it reacted in kind upon me. The tension I had been under channeled itself suddenly into a desire to come to grips, to retaliate. She had told me not to open the door, but you’re always your own man when you get sore enough.
I toed up the foot grip, ripped the yellow threat of the door seam wide, and braced myself to crash into whoever it was. And then I didn’t. There are some figures that are too awesome even to tangle with in fight. This one was so uncanny I couldn’t have brought myself even to touch it, much less hit it or grab at it.
I couldn’t tell if it was a ghost, or something alive that had come up out of the grave, or something already dead that was on its way down into the grave and had stopped off here first by mistake. It was an emaciated, cadaverous-looking Chinaman. I couldn’t tell if he was old or young. The match rayed down over him, but its rays didn’t make any too much sense. He wasn’t white and he wasn’t yellow either; the color of his face was a grayish green. His eyes were sunk in deep pockets, as big as the sockets in a skull. His clothes hung loose on him, like the rags on a scarecrow. He must have been just tined ribs under them, without any skin to web their dorsal projections together.
A curious sort of odor came from him, like — well, there’s a certain sort of clay; if you mix it with water it gives that same brackish, pottery-like reek.
He acted stupefied. He said something between his teeth, but I couldn’t get what it was. “Otla puelta.”
“Beat it,” I cursed low. “Get out of here, you walking spook!”
He turned uncertainly, like he was going to fall over any minute, and started to feel his way along the wall with one hand, toward the next door down. The match went out before he got there, and I closed the door and fastened it again. He was bad enough in the light; I didn’t want him coming back again in the dark.
I listened warily and I could hear the other door softly open and close again. Sounds of someone moving quietly around in the adjoining room filtered through the partition for a minute or two after that, and finally complete silence descended, as though the thing had died in there.
Then after a short pause that same peculiar, acrid odor was around me again, just like I’d noticed it at the door, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from this time; it was sort of disembodied. Then that drifted away, too, or at least lessened to the point of not being noticeable any more.
I wiped the stickiness from my face and relighted the candle and sat down on the cot to wait for her some more.
It seemed like she’d been gone half the night, but it might have been only three quarters of an hour or so. Then when she did come she was better at it than he had been. I didn’t hear her on the stairs at all; just her knock came cautiously through all at once, the way she’d said she’d give it.
I went over and let her in fast. She was loaded down with junk; there were two big bulges under her shawl, one on each side of her, that she was holding up with her arms. She was looking watchfully behind her, to make sure the stairs had stayed empty, when I opened the door. I was surprised at how glad I was to see her; you’d think I’d known her weeks or months already.
She gave me a knowing wink as she brushed by. Meaning: It’s okay; everything’s under control — or something like that. I refastened the door after her, and she dumped a couple of bundles of stuff on the table where the candle was and thinned out under the lines of the shawl again as a result.
“I found out what you need to know, chico,” she began with breathless satisfaction.
“Go easy,” I cautioned. “There’s somebody right on the other side of the wall here from us.”
“Oh, him?” she said unconcernedly. “He’s all right. He scares the hell out of you when you first look at him, but he’s harmless. He smokes opium, but he minds his own business. He’s out of this world half the time; that’s why he’s a good guy to have in the room right next door to you. I feed him sometimes; otherwise he’d starve to death.”
I just gave my collar a stretch and let it go at that. “What luck’d you have?”
She lowered her voice in spite of what she’d just said to me about his other-worldliness. “The picture-postcard shooter that works Sloppy’s is called Pepe Campos. He wasn’t there any more; he’d called it a night, but I got all the necessary dope on him out of one of the barmen, with the help of a short beer and a little eyelash work. He’s got a little hole-in-the-wall room somewhere along Calle Barrios that he uses for a combination studio and sleeping quarters. I couldn’t find out the exact house, but it’s a short little lane — I know where it is — so that shouldn’t give you too much trouble. I also found out something else. This guy I was talking to told me someone else was in there asking for Campos just a little while before I was. Some man.”