She opened the door and revealed this flickering, candlelit picture of horror. You expected it to blow away like smoke, but it stayed there upright.
“Here’s my friend, Quon. I told him you’d fix him up. He’s been a long time without his sleep.”
The cadaver didn’t answer, just looked me over. I couldn’t tell if he really saw me or not.
To me she said, for stage effect, “Come back and see me when you wake up.” And pretended to close the door.
I motioned to him to go down the stairs first, before me. I didn’t want to have him falling on top of me when we got halfway down.
He stopped down in the street entrance and took root. Just stood there, as though that was as far as he was going.
I fumbled in my clothes and handed him some money. He fumbled in his and then he got under way again, went out into the alley. So that was the lubrication that had been required.
We shuffled along, down to the mouth of the alley and around it. All of a sudden he spoke to me without turning to look at me. His mouth was sort of half open all the time, anyway, as if he were panting for air; you couldn’t tell when he was getting ready to speak and when he wasn’t.
“You know La Media Noche long?”
I saw I’d have to watch myself. He wasn’t as dopey as he looked.
“From before, when I was in port. I knew her hombre too. I was the friend of both.”
It must have been the right answer. I saw him nod shrewdly.
“He lives on in her. She is not for love. The whole street knows that.”
We came out of the alley together, turned down the other way, the opposite way from that which I’d taken the time before. Two strange shapes sidling along side by side, bound for a strange place, and with a strange purpose best not inquired into: spread-legged merchant seaman and hunched, bedraggled specter.
There was no light around, and yet he must have been looking at me when I wasn’t aware of it. He no longer was, though, when he spoke. That made it all the creepier, as if he had eyes at the side of his head.
“You have never slept before. You haven’t any of the marks on you. Our eyes know each other.”
My throat tightened up for a minute. “I begin tonight. Life is hard, and I want to forget it for a little while.”
He shrugged with the bony epaulets that were his shoulders. “You have paid me.”
We went down a new alley, a little wider, a little straighter than the one Midnight lived on. Only a little, though. Ahead, at about the approximate distance that Chin’s shop lay from the mouth of the other one, ribbons of light spoked across this one, glimmering through the interstices of an unfurled bamboo blind stretched across an entryway. I knew that must be it, before we’d gotten to it, because of its parallelism to the hidden curio store on the other side. I was scared and started to feel crawly long before there was anything to be scared or feel crawly about.
It was like a last port of call. And the path that had led me to it through the night had been so black and so full of fear, and downgrade all the way, lower and lower, until at last it had arrived at this bottomless, abyss, than which there was nothing lower.
The bars of light made cicatrices across us. He reached in at the side and slanted up one edge of the pliable blind, made a little tent-shaped gap, and bowed his way in through there. His hand, lingering behind a moment, made a hook to me to follow.
For a second I stood alone, livid weals striping me from head to foot. I kneaded my face with one hand in a half circle, starting up at my forehead and ending around past my mouth and chin. Then I hiked up the blind and stooped through in turn.
11
It was a dive the like of which I’ve never seen before or since. There are wild spots all over the world — the Vieux Port at Marseille, the Casbah at Algiers, the Boca down at Buenos Aires; this was a distillation of them all, stewing in one small suffocating caldron, smelling and sweating and swearing and snarling. Outside, at least, the night had been clear, even in the reeking alley. In there it was like stepping into a lighted fog. A sort of vapor illuminated from below. You could see everything through it, but nothing was clean-cut; it was all hazy and slanted.
Poor Sloppy’s, with its harmless raffishness, seemed like the Ritz by comparison. It was crawling with humanity; they made you think of maggots, squirming all over every square inch of space under the flashing, blurred oil lanterns. Black, brown, tan, yellow — every race — and all of them garbage of each particular race. There were whites there, too, but they were in a minority to the others: beachcombers, tramp seamen, wharf rats, thugs. The race lines cut across the sexes, but that was only one more horror added to the rest. At least I got no second looks as I slouched in after him from the street, cap pulled low.
We wormed our way through to the back, he in the lead, stepping between people and over them, and sometimes on them, to get there. A hand reached for my shoulder — a woman’s, I suppose — but then trailed weakly off it again as I kept going without looking around.
He sat down on a wooden bench against the back wall that had a displaced table partially before it, the other end weighted down by someone’s inert, sodden head. I spotted a momentarily unclaimed chair and drew it up and sat down to the side of him.
No one paid any attention to us; we were just two more maggots in the squirming mass.
“What happens now?” I said finally.
“Nothing yet. It is too soon. They see you with me.”
A waiter in a sweat-mildewed silk shirt brought us two rancid beers that smelled as though the keg they’d come out of had grown moss on the inside. It was the sort of place where you paid for what you got as it was brought up, otherwise it wasn’t left on the table. They had to do it that way, with their sort of clientele.
There was an inconspicuous door offside to us, giving through the rear wall. Beside it there was a cashier of sorts, sitting poring over a Chinese newspaper. The waiters would go to him one by one and transfer their takes, when they had accumulated sufficiently to make it worthwhile.
“Do we have to drink this stuff?” I said finally.
“You smoke cigarette,” he said. “I show you.”
We both lit up a couple, and I watched to see what he’d do. He didn’t seem to do anything, just sat there somnolent, letting it burn away between his fingers. He didn’t bother to knock off the end. After a while a cone of ash dropped of its own weight and fell there on the table top.
I looked around at the cashier. He was still engrossed in that up-and-down Chinese newspaper. You could see only the top of his face over it, just the eyes. They didn’t seem to see anything but what was printed there below them.
“Do not turn your head so.”
I turned back again.
He rested his forearm flat on the table and brushed the ashes off with a swirling motion of his whole sleeve, using his elbow for a pivot. Two swipes one way, then two swipes the other.
The fastidiousness didn’t go with his mangy condition, so I figured that must be the password right there. I gave my cigarette a snap to unload it over the table, then I put my own arm down and swung it, twice one way, twice the other.
I looked around. The cashier had left his perch, as though he’d gotten tired of reading just then. He opened the door, went in, and started to close it after him. His head gave a little quirk, from our direction over to his, just before he did so. Then it closed after him.
Quon’s bony fingers landed on my arm, held it down. “Wait, not yet. There are many eyes in this place.”
We sat there a minute longer. Then he took the brake off my forearm. “You go first. In through there, where he did. Walk slow. Say nothing. I will follow.”