He had a wire strung diagonally across the tiny cubicle, from curtain pole to wall, that he’d used for hanging negatives on to dry, like wash on a line, but they’d all been pulled off by somebody, as if in hasty examination, and then thrown down. They lay all over the floor, like curled-up black celluloid leaves.
I didn’t bother retrieving them and taking them out into the light and going over them individually to see if the one I wanted was among them. I didn’t have to. There was a short cut to finding that out. I counted up the negatives at sight from where I stood: there were eight lying around me. Then I counted up the “clothespins,” the little wooden grips he’d used to fasten them with, that were still hooked onto the line. There were nine. One negative had gone out of here — up through the skylight.
So had he. The cot had been slept in; it was easy to see that. The lower end of the coverings still retained the funnel shape his legs had hollowed out in them; the upper end had been ravaged, violently cast asunder, as if by a startled leap to upright position. At the sound of glass sundering and spilling down into the room on the other side of the curtain, most likely.
He hadn’t had time to dress. His coat and shirt and tie were lying on the floor, all mangled and stepped over. They must have taken him with them just as he was. Or at least just lingered long enough to force his kicking legs into pants and shoes and then hoisted him out with them the same way they’d come in. There was no sign of these last two items anywhere around.
He hadn’t gone docilely. The condition of the outside part of the room showed there must have been quite an unheaval, a weighted staggering back and forth and flinging around, before he’d gone at all. Then maybe when he had at last, he’d gone out senseless, they’d had to do it that way. In here, to show for it, there was a little slap of blood on one of the sheets that lay trailing off the cot toward the curtain, as though caught around someone’s foot. I pressed my thumb down on it, and the linen was soggy yet there where it was. Just now. Just a little while before I got here, maybe after I was already well on the way over. Just a little too soon. Good timing. But not for me.
Well, he hadn’t gone submissively. I gave him credit for that much, anyway.
I went out slow, even slower than I’d gone in, and I’d certainly made my way in slowly enough. I reached back over my shoulder and gave the light cord a disgusted tweak as I drifted by below it, and the room went back into the oblivion it had been in before I came here. Just a glimpse in the night of a strange room in a strange town. Someplace you’d never seen before and would never see again. And yet the memory of it would probably stay with me far longer than of many another far more familiar place.
There went my last chance. I elbowed the door closed behind me and teetered through the dark toward the place where I last remembered leaving the stairs.
9
The way back across town I kept wondering why I was bothering to make the trip back at all. Why annoy her any more? I didn’t have any claim on her. She’d done enough for me already. More than once, especially when I’d come to elbows or bends, when my course would change directions, I was tempted to just keep straying on at random and not bother with my memorized road map any more. Especially when I cut across streets that I could tell led straight down to the waterfront. It’s funny how water, or rather its margins, always attracts you when you’re at a loss, don’t know what to do or where to go next. Something about it.
I kept away, though. It wouldn’t have been a good place for me. They know that about it too. They expect you to do that. They were probably keeping watch down there along the docks and loading platforms.
So I kept to my course, in reverse. It didn’t seem nearly as arduous as the first time, nor nearly as risky. Perhaps that was because I’d already covered it once, and familiarity breeds contempt. Or perhaps I was more indifferent than I had been coming out, didn’t care so much whether I made it or not any more. I was already licked and just needed to be pushed down to stay down. You have to go somewhere, so I went back toward where I’d started from.
A lot of the bloom had been taken off the cafés; they weren’t as bad this time. It was getting late, even for an all-night town. Several were dark now, and several more were dimmed down to the extinction point, tables being stacked back to back. The trolleys didn’t hound me any more the way they had, either; they’d either stopped or were running on a slower schedule.
Once a prosperous-looking colored man in a natty white suit came up to me in the gloom and asked me something. It was legitimate, whatever it was; I could tell that by his aboveboard manner, but I couldn’t get it. Standing there, he looked like something printed on a photographic negative — I guess I had pictures on my mind after what had just happened — but he was all white where he should have been black, and all black where he should have been white. He repeated himself twice, then at my “Don’t know what you’re saying” gave me up as hopeless and went on to try the next person, if any, to be found at that hour. He might have just wanted a light, for all I know, but I wasn’t lighting up my face for anyone. That was the only thing that happened the whole way back.
They weren’t on duty at the alley mouth any more; they’d been called off. I could tell the way was clear from all the way back at the outermost limits of visibility, which wasn’t such a great distance at that; the walls were evenly toned there where it opened, no dark spots against them. They might, of course, have shifted around the corner to the inside, but I doubted that. A cop usually stays where you first find him, so long as he doesn’t know you’ve found him there.
I turned the corner and went in myself, and there was no one on the inside of it either. They’d given up and called off the chase, at least for the present.
The rest was easy. I found my way in and up the stairs, and I knocked the same way she had when she’d come back before, so she’d know that it was me. She took a minute or two — but you couldn’t hear her — and then she opened it up, and there we both were, right back where we’d started again.
I guess she could tell by the look on my face and the boneless way I was propped there against the doorframe, before she even asked me anything.
“Mala suerte, huh?” she grunted.
“If you mean no good, that’s it.” I thumbed my cap visor still farther up on my head. Otherwise I didn’t move.
“Well, come in, don’t stand there; what’re you waiting for — the rainy season to end?”
“What’ll I do inside?”
“Well, what’ll you do outside?”
I moved a little sluggishly, and she got the door fastened up behind me.
“Somebody beat me to it,” I said disgustedly. “They not only took the picture, but they took him with it.”
“Carajo,” she breathed sympathetically.
“You can say that again, once for me, whatever it is. It proves one thing, even if nothing else,” I told her. “Something did show up on that picture, and there would have been an out for me in it, or they wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble just to get hold of it. They hijacked him along with it to shut him up because he’d already developed it and seen what was on it for himself. Otherwise they would have just knocked him out and left him there. It’s developed on the film now and it’s also developed on his mind; that’s why they had to take the two things with them. Too bad I didn’t get the idea an hour sooner; I could have gotten in under the wire.”