I hoped it looked like a guy who was out of breath and all in trying to lift himself up off the floor by grabbing at something to raise himself against.
It worked. He spoke to the dead hand. He said, “Are you all right, Ed? Did I get him, Ed?”
I spaded the back of my own hand in flat behind the wire from the lamp that ran down beside the wall, close to where my head was resting. Just as his feet were ready to come out past the lower corner of the bed I jerked my wrist out. The lamp came down and went out with a pop and a hiss of glass.
It didn’t hurt the rest of the room much; he had the door wide open, but it made it dim and shady down there in that little lane where we were both lying.
He made the turn around the foot of the bed and stopped and looked. I think he could see the pajama stripes across Roman’s back even in the half-light. They were uppermost.
He couldn’t shoot. There was too much of Roman and not enough of me. He started to lean over, to try to find out what was keeping his boss down like that. That was his mistake. That was just what I wanted him to do.
I grabbed for his ankles, one hand for each. I got them and I jerked. The gun went off again, but in a sort of loose, unguided way. You could tell it was already half out of his hand when the finger guard pulled home. I saw the trajectory of light it spit go upward, on a slant toward the ceiling, instead of downward toward me.
It hit the floor before he did. His arc of descent was wider. It made a neat little rap; he made a heavy sprawling thud.
I wasted a minute to grab for it. Then I skated it deep under the bed, with the curve of my hand for a hocky stick. I didn’t want it. I had a funny kind of heat on. I wanted to get at him with my hands.
I tipped Roman, like the dead weight of a mattress lying on you, and pulled myself out from under. He was up again by that time himself. We killed the distance between us with a double-headed rush, came up fiat together. We went at each other in the old kind of a fight, the basic kind. Doing your own work yourself.
I would have thought he was no good without his gun, but he was all right. I guess he’d had to fight this way in his green days, before he’d ever had a gun, and it wasn’t new to him. My head would jar, and I’d feel it go all the way down my spine and die out, so I knew he’d hit. But that was the only way I knew. I had that sort of frozen-up feeling as much as ever. I was as dead to pain as I was to reason. Maybe it helped; I don’t know.
One of mine broke him away from me, sent him all the way back to where the window line ended the room. But they were all open, and he hit one of the open places and went through without interference and kept going out onto the terrace beyond. I went out after him, and it went ahead out there.
My arms were tired and I couldn’t feel anything any more when they hit him, but he’d jar back away from me and my shoulder would sort of recoil; that’s how I knew when I had.
One time he went back up against the balustrade I’d climbed over before and bent a little too far out from the waist up. Then recovered and pulled himself forward again. But that made his timing go haywire; he went right into my arm head-on. Added his own momentum to that of the punch, so that he was coming forward to meet it, instead of just standing still. It was a bombshell.
My shoulder wrenched itself almost out of gear, and I could see his face going back away from me. It was the last time I saw it. It looked all dopey from the blows; just round and doughy, with the features all tucked in small behind it. What did I care about what his face looked like, anyway? It went back into the night. And then went out, in front of my punch-blurred eyes.
I missed the rest of it. He wasn’t up there with me any more. I knew he’d gone over. Just one straw sandal had stayed behind.
I looked, and he was already down there. The fall wasn’t enough to kill him, and there was a lawn there where he was lying. The dog was at a taut half crouch and bristling; I could see that from where I was.
I don’t know if there was blood on Jordan, and that was what did it, or his senses detected the heat of the fight still reeking up from him, and that excited him.
I hollered down, “Get him, Wolf!” I didn’t think he would. He was Job’s dog, not mine.
His head flattened; his ears lay back, and he went in for his throat like a streak.
The arms and legs came together, like when an insect’s helpless on its back, and then opened out again. The dog was busy there in the middle of them!
I turned and went back into the room. I walked zigzag along a straight line back to the bed. The freeze was beginning to thaw, and I felt all mushy.
I turned Roman over with my foot. It was too much trouble to bend down. Something blinked at me in the shadowy light, and for a minute I thought one of his eyes was open again and he was shamming.
Then I saw I hadn’t killed him after all. It was just in front of his ear, a little too far over to be one of his regular eyes. It glistened sleekly, as though somebody’d smudged him there with a dab of wet tar. His own bodyguard had done the job for me.
I couldn’t make it out the way I’d come in any more. I went slowly out of the room, leaving the door open behind me, the way Jordan had stood it, and down the upper hall and around to face the stairs.
It was lit up down there now. Job was standing down there in the lower hall at the foot of the stairs. His face was tilted toward me in a static sort of way, as though he’d been standing there motionless like that for some time past.
I looked down at him. “Go ahead,” I said dully. “What are you waiting for?”
He just kept looking at me. He didn’t say a word until I got all the way down to him.
Then his head hitched curtly toward the end of the hall, where you went out. “I’ll unlock the door for you. Go ‘head, man. Then I’ve got to go up and find them and do some phoning in, I reckon.”
I passed close by him, eye to eye. “Don’t forget to tell them what I look like,” I said gruffly.
“I ain’t seen no one to tell them about,” he said. “They been rowing with each other up there ever since they first come home; I knew it was going to end up like this.”
He opened the door for me. Then he said, “She was a lovely lady. I heard them talking about it today; that’s how I know.”
I went on out into the dark. I looked back at him over my shoulder. “You won’t hear them talking about it any more.”
He closed the door.
I went around by the side of the house and headed down toward the beach. The dog saw me and left Jordan and came trotting up and fell in beside me. His muzzle was all wet and clotted; he seemed to have grown a stringy beard.
“It was my job,” I said, “not yours.”
I skirted where Jordan was lying. It was just as well it was dark. It wasn’t good to look at him very close any more.
I found the low place in the wall, where it ran down across the sand and into the water; the wall that hadn’t been good enough to keep death out. I gave the dog a thump on the ribs, and I hoisted myself up and over.
I could hear the dog running back and forth on the other side, looking for a way to get through so he could come with me. He whined a little.
I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have wanted to stay behind in there either, with just two dead men for company.
15
Morro Castle was like a stubby chunk of pink chalk standing on end in the early-morning light. We drifted in slow past it, so slow we hardly seemed to move at all. But it finally worked its way around behind us, and we were in the harbor, and there was Havana back again. After a night that felt as though it hadn’t happened at all.
I came off the ferry and passed through the customs. It was the second time in three days. The guys just looked at me.