“The man said, ‘We couldn’t help it; there was a hitch at the other end.’
“Roman thought for a minute, then she heard him say, ‘Well, as long as it’s already unloaded, stay there with it where you are. I’ll have the truck down as soon after daylight as I can. How many cases of the guava are there?’
“She heard the man say, ‘Five dozen; three and two.’ And that was about all she listened to. She hung up and went back to sleep. She mentioned it to me in passing, but it didn’t add up; neither of us could figure out what was behind it.”
“To me it sounds very much like smuggling.”
I nodded. “A launch. Some lonely spot on the beach at night. Then he sends a truck down to pick it up, whatever it is. What does this guava look like; how does it come?”
“You can see it in all the grocery stores here; it’s a standard confection. They pack it in layers, in cigar-sized plywood boxes, about so.” She shaped her hands about an oblong. “And not more than a couple of inches deep, as a rule.”
“I don’t get it. Those clubs of his — there was no outlet for it there.”
“There’s no duty on it, no reason to smuggle it in. It was something more than just guava.”
“Yeah, but what? I thought at the time that maybe it was rum or something that he was trying to beat the Federal tax on. That was before I knew how this stuff was packaged. But rum would have to come in barrels; it couldn’t come in little flat thin slabs.
“About ten days later,” I added inconsequentially, “he gave her a walloping diamond bracelet, a regular sling for a broken wing. Whether it had any connection with that phone call or not, I don’t know. She yanked it off, I remember, and nearly skinned her arm raw, and threw it on the back seat and spit after it, while she was sitting there in the front with me.”
“So there was a big return on the stuff, whatever it was. It paid off better than rum or anything else, if he could do that. Keep at it, keep with it, see if we can get it.”
I don’t know how long we sat trying to puzzle it out. I haven’t got much imagination. I’d thought of rum, and I couldn’t seem to get much past that. What they used to call white slavery cropped up in my mind once, but I junked that; it wouldn’t fit in with small cigar-sized boxes.
The place smelled bad, and I shook my head to try to keep it clear for the job we’d picked out. I wrinkled my nose at her. “Gee, it stinks in here. What is that?”
It was the same acrid odor that had bothered me before while she was out and I was waiting for her, alone. It seemed to have come back again, or else it was still hanging around. A little bit like burned feathers, a little bit like sour dough.
“Oh, that’s him inside there. Don’t pay any attention to that.” She thumbed the wall behind her back, the dividing one between this room and the next. Something that sounded like the low-voiced groan of a sleeper tossing in distress came through in the moment of silence that followed. Then a soft thud, then nothing. “He probably just came to and lit up again. That goes on off and on all—”
She shut up abruptly, looked at me. I looked at her. We both got it together, in one of those sudden flashes that sometimes strike two people at one and the same time.
“That’s it!” she said, and gave her fingers a snap. I knew what she meant.
“Opium! Raw opium embedded in the guava! Probably between the two layers of it, in those little flyweight boxes you told me about. There’s his source of income! Not the clubs and tracks up there. A thousand percent profit on every nugget. Ten thousand percent.”
“There’s the tie-up with Chin. Chin imports antiques and curios, jars and vases and fancy boxes from the East. I bet half of them with fake bottoms. Then he reships from here. This is a way station. It doesn’t come from here. But it’s a lot easier to get it in from here than it would be straight over from China. They keep a closer watch for it from that direction. Chin’s the — how do you say it in English—?”
“The middleman.” I was thinking of her, though. No wonder she’d hated those jewels he’d showered on her. No wonder she’d wanted to drop them overside into the water, right tonight when we were coming ashore. She hadn’t known; I was sure of that. But her instinct had told her there was something about them; it must have, for her to loathe them so. I remembered how she’d said they’d spoken to her at night in the dark, from the dresser top in funny, squeaky, piping voices. The voices of lost souls going down into hell.
I took my hand away from my eyes, uncovered them. She’d stopped for a moment, short of the door, on her way out. She dipped, hiked up the bottom of her skirt so suddenly, I thought she was going to take it off altogether for a minute. She fumbled with the top of her stocking, let the skirt drop again. “And now I know of some good use for that money you tried to wish on me before!”
I saw where she was going, knew what she was going to try to do with it. “Can they talk to you when they’re that way? Can they understand you? Can they tell you anything?”
She flourished my own wad of bills at me. “This talks, even in nightmares. I’m bringing him a handful of new dreams, aren’t I? And maybe even a new fellow customer to share his dreams with him!”
10
She was in there a long time. She had a hard time with him. I don’t know how she did it. She seemed to know how to do it, though. Bring them down to earth again from the poppy clouds they float around in high up above. Maybe she’d had to do it before at one time or another. Or maybe it was just her instinct and practical common sense that told her what to do. Just like a woman in the upper sunlit regions will know how to nurse someone who is ill, intuitively, without ever having taken a nurse’s training, so she, down here in the shadowy underworld, seemed to know how to cope with an opium fiend without ever having been tainted by addiction herself.
I could hear her intermittently through the wall while the process went on, and it made my blood run cold at times with sheer reflex horror. Not that the telltale sounds in themselves were horrifying — they were commonplace enough — it was knowing what the basis of the situation was that made my stomach turn.
Her voice reached me by itself at first, unaccompanied, monotonous, insistent, saying the same thing over and over. It would stop, then it would go on again. Perhaps close to his ear. I quickly blinked that thought out of my mind as the memory of what he had looked like returned to me. One phrase, over and over, until you wanted to go nuts and grab hold of the top of your head, even though you were a room away. Maybe “Wake up,” or maybe “Talk to me,” or maybe just calling him by his name; I don’t know what it was.
Then I heard a tin gasoline can clonk once on the floor and the splash water made being poured from it into some smaller receptacle. She must have found some way of heating it; perhaps he had a small alcohol stove in there. This took awhile. And meanwhile the voice went on, mechanical, like a record when the needle is stuck in one place. Then the water again, sloshing more softly this time, as though some rag or other were being saturated in it. Then a sodden, slapping sound, as though someone were being belabored with an improvised hot towel.
A groaning and eerie whimper now underscored her voice when it sounded. Then she seemed to lose him again; he must have slipped back into oblivion. There was a thud, as of someone falling prone from a semi-erect position.
My heart thudded with him.
The slapping became sharper, like a whipcrack; it wasn’t with a saturated cloth now; it was with the flat of the hand.
Suddenly everything stopped and she’d come back to our own room. The door flapped open and she was standing in it, breathless, her forehead sequined with moisture, a strand of her hair down out of place over one eye.