My eyes swerved back to him fast, dulled as they were. He was fumbling inside his jacket. He took out a greasy wallet. Out of that he took a glossy black photographic negative.
“It’s not a very good picture I show you,” he apologized.
He held it out toward me. I reached for it, and it was a little farther away than it had been. I reached for it again, and again it was just a little too far out of reach.
“Here, take it. I thought you vanted it,” he said. That was his idea of being funny. “First you vant it, then ven I give it to you, you don’t take it.”
I grabbed harder than before, and this time I went over flat on my face on the floor.
I could hear the thunder of their laughter up over my head. My eyes started to droop closed. I didn’t care; let ’em laugh.
They weren’t through, though. They hadn’t had enough. They picked me up again and sat me back on the chair, and with the reverse of equilibrium my eyelids went up again.
Paulsen was holding the negative up toward the light now, squinting at it fondly. “I tell vat’s on it,” he said. “You can’t see gude from vere you are. Is on it the lady’s face and yures. Is on it the lady’s—” He passed a hand down his own side.
Chin gave him the gutter word for it.
“Is on it the knife, all the way in. Is on it the hand of falla who holds knife. You can’t see his face. But on back of hand is small star with five points.”
Then he showed me his own, with the deeply inked original tattooed on it. “Yust like this.”
“You were the guy,” I told him, low. “You were the one did it. There was a cap like yours somewhere near us in the crowd; I can remember that now, but I didn’t before—”
He turned languidly to Chin. “You think I should keep this picture? My girl back in the States, maybe she don’t like it; it show me with other voman.”
Chin was simmering with amusement. “You’re prettier than the picture makes you look, Paulsen.”
Paulsen nodded. “Maybe I gat another taken sometime.” A match flared in his hand, and he brought the two slowly together, the film and the flame, watching me over the top of them to see if I was getting the full effect.
I was. I packed a fist and tried to launch myself at him. He was agile for a guy that tall. He hopscotched his chair back without getting up from it and still holding the flame and negative. I floundered short and would have gone down on my kisser again, but this time the two crewmen caught me around the waist and held me up off the floor.
They slopped me back again like dirty water across a deck.
“Now vatch close,” Paulsen grinned.
The flame and the negative came together. The film hesitated for a minute, then it started to pick up speed. It burned fast and smokelessly and with a very bright, concentrated flame, the way that stuff does. Then it died down and he was holding nothing between his fingers but just a little smudge.
I felt swell. My head looped down over my wishbone.
Chin’s voice was gurgitating with laughter. “Look at him, he’s all tired out. Maybe the climate down here doesn’t agree with him.”
One of the huskies standing behind my chair took a corkscrew twist in my hair, hauled my head up and around again. The pain made my eyes flicker open.
“He needs a change,” Paulsen said. “Maybe a little sea air vill brace him up. Nothing better than that. I take him vith me ven I go back tonight, him and that other falla in closet. I take them both vith me. They both very sick men.”
“For free?” Chin asked, ingenuous to the gills.
“For free. Part of the vay, anyway.”
That “part of the vay” roused me for a minute.
“Are you a good svimmer?” he asked me. “I bat you are not so good as some of the sharks they got between here and the Keys.”
Chin grimaced appreciatively. “He hasn’t got as good teeth as they have, either.”
My head did a side roll, then came back again.
Paulsen clucked concernedly. “He’s too tired even to listen to us. He don’t hear a vord ve say. Chin, that niece of yours should be ashamed of herself.”
Suddenly the tempo of their slow, sadistic baiting had busted wide open; a quick, hustling activity had taken its place almost before I knew it. My senses were too torpid to be able to keep up very well. The hinged flap at the side of the dummy wardrobe I’d come through myself earlier suddenly flew up without warning, and I got a blurred glimpse of a figure standing there, half in, half out, jabbering something in firecracker Chinese to Chin, then whisking back out of sight again.
Chin got a move on, caught up in the new pace. “Tie this guy up,” he flung at the two huskies. He could move quickly when he had to, in spite of that big bay window he carried. He sprinted out through the bead drops, called something in Chinese. A girl’s voice answered from up front somewhere. Then he came back again, ran through to the dummy wardrobe, and went in behind it. It was wide enough to admit him, though I hadn’t thought it would be.
He called some orders through at that end — quite a few of them — and I could hear pulleys squeaking and woodwork thudding, as though they were raising that detachable stair out there and obliterating the trap.
Meanwhile the two seamen had me helpless between them, were lashing my arms together behind my back with a length of rope.
Chin reappeared again, puffing now from his own quickness but with a complacent look, as though everything had been taken care of.
“Vat happened? Vat’s the row?” Paulsen asked him.
“We’ve got company. We’re having a little visit from the police downstairs.” Then at the nervous start the captain made: “Just sit tight. Don’t try to leave now. You’re all right while you stay up here. It’s nothing; we’ve had them before. It’ll be over in a minute or two. They simply go straight through from the back of the drink shop and keep going until they find themselves out in the open again, in the alley on the other side, like a puppy chasing its tail. They wouldn’t come up here in a million years. They never have yet.”
“I don’t like it, having ’em right under my feet like that,” Paulsen said skittishly and shifted a little, as though the floor were hot.
“There is nothing to attract their attention to us. People don’t look up at a ceiling when they come into a place; not even police on a raid. Not unless there is a stair line to draw their gaze up after it. Otherwise their eyes follow the lines that are already there; in this case, straight ahead. It’s very simple and very surefire.”
The hour. The hour must be up.
Chin motioned lazily toward the wardrobe. “Put him in there with the other one until they’ve gone. Then you can take them both with you in the truck, along with the other bales. We’ll fix up a couple of sacks.”
He came over close and peered into my face. “He’s still awake, but you can hardly tell it.” He smirked. “Just one little spark left. Watch it go out.” He rounded his cheeks and blew a puff of breath at me.
Then his face sort of slipped backward. I didn’t know if he was moving or I was. “What kick has he?” I heard him say from far away. “After all, it’s an easy way to die.”
I could still hear and feel longer than I could see. I could feel them pick me up and carry me between them, hoist me up into the big cavelike thing. Then I could feel a sort of halter they must have made between my arms in back catch onto something, and I swung there loose, stocking feet clear of the clothespress bottom.
Then it got dark, or rather the lingering red on the lining of my eyelids, which were down already, dimmed to purple and then to black. Wood closed against wood, and a key turned and withdrew.
Everything got blurred and comfortable. There was no more trouble in the world; there was no more murdered love; no more cops. No one you had to be afraid of, no one you tried to get, and no one who tried to get you. Twilight of the mind, with night coming on fast. Not the night of the calendar; the night of the being.