We turned off there and we went in. The alley went on the rest of the way without us, still smelling as bad as ever. In here it wasn’t so noxious. It smelled of incense — dead incense, though — and of sandalwood and of stale boxes, and that was about all.
We stopped short like a three-car train, piling up on one another a little.
Acosta said curtly: “This is it, Escott?”
“This is it,” I answered wearily.
“How did you happen to find such an out-of-the-way place, off the main streets, right after landing from your ship?”
“We didn’t. A steerer brought us here. He kept tugging us and pestering us. Finally we let him bring us here more to get rid of him than anything else.”
She hadn’t wanted to come — I remembered that now — I’d been the one. I’d wanted to buy her a little present to celebrate our landfall, and I hadn’t known my way around. “Let’s stay out of these corner pockets,” she’d urged plaintively. “The whole town’s a corner pocket,” I’d reassured her. “Come on, let’s give it a spin.”
“Himph,” Acosta said. Which meant simply: Himph.
It looked pretty much the way it had the first time. A little deader, that was all. The same soapstone Buddhas ranged along the shelves, the same carved teakwood boxes, the same brass urns and ivory thingamajigs. The same potbellied tangerine lanterns strung along in a row from the rafters, each with a single black character inked on it. The same fat, kewpie-like Chinaman, with stringy white mustache braids dangling down nearly a foot from his upper lip, was dozing on the same stool over in the same corner as the first time we’d come in; sleeves telescoped across his paunch, a taffeta skullcap with a button on his pate, slippered feet tucked in behind the rungs of the stool. His handless sleeves would go up and down every time he breathed.
“Hey, patron,” Acosta roused him gruffly.
A couple of little slits of eyes, like diverging accent marks, opened up in his satiny face. Otherwise he didn’t move at first. You could just see a twinkle behind them; that was about all the life they showed.
“Si señoles,” he said in a singsong squeak, and busted his sleeves open in the middle. A long skinny hand came out, yellow as a chicken claw, and swept around three sides of the room. Meaning: Help yourselves. If you see anything you like, time enough to wake me up then.
That wasn’t enough for Acosta. He was the police, after all.
“Take it off there,” he barked, “and step over here!”
It took a lot of doing. I don’t know how he’d gotten up on the thing in the first place, the trouble he had getting down. First the felt slippers unhooked themselves and dropped with a little flop, as though they were empty. He had the smallest feet for a fat man I’d ever seen. Then the belly came down next, threatening to tear loose from its moorings. Then his head and arms followed it, with little floundering gestures.
He was all down now and about shoulder-high to the rest of us. He came puttering over to us, shaking like jelly and bobbing his head ingratiatingly. He was a character. It occurred to me fleetingly he was too much of a stage Chinaman; it must have been partly an act. They aren’t that way; they’re just people, like we are, not bobbing Billikens. I let it go again. What did I care what he was like? The stuff that had to do with me was coming up now, anyway.
Acosta said: “You’re Chin?”
He wobbled all over and beamed. He stuck a finger into himself. “Si. Chin. At your slervice.”
So the Tio prefix wasn’t part of his Chinese name; I caught on. I found out later it was Spanish for “Uncle.” That was his trade name or his nickname, whatever you want to call it: Uncle Chin.
“If it’s going to be about me,” I said, “make it in English. He speaks a few words of it. He did the last time I was in here.”
He ducked his head, as at a compliment. “Lilly bit,” he said. You’re phony, I said to myself. Nobody could be that quaint. They’d even kill them in China if they were.
Acosta said, “Take a look at this man here.”
He took a look through the slits under his eyebrows.
“Was he in your place earlier tonight?”
“Yes, gentleman was.” The mustache strings rippled all the way down.
“Did he buy anything?”
“Yes, gentleman do.”
“All right, tell us. What did he buy?”
“Gentleman buy knife.”
That was all right; I’d never said I hadn’t.
“Describe the knife. You know what means ‘describe’ in English?”
He simmered comfortably down over his boilers. “Oh, shu. Ornlamental knife. Knife with jade handle. For to cut letters. For to cut fluit. For to hang on wall, maybe.”
“Describe the jade handle.”
This was it now. I wasn’t as bored as I thought I was, after all. My chin perked up a little, and I looked at him.
He brought it out in piecework. It struck me he was trying to get a buildup out of it for some reason or other.
“Jade handle have monkey.”
“We know that, but describe the monkey.”
His hands streaked up and blotted out the upper half of his face. “Monkey hiding eyes, so.”
It hit me slow. Everything always seems to have, all my life. Like when she’d died. I’d been the last one to catch on. They were all through nodding to one another and giving the “I-told-you-so” office, Acosta and the other Cuban, before I finally got it.
Out went the ray of hope, and it got plenty dark. A bass roar that I hadn’t known I possessed myself came up slow through me — all the way up from my feet, it felt like. “You’re crazy! What’s the matter with you? What’re you trying to do to me, you fat hunk of—?” I strained forward at him from between the two Cubans who’d still been hanging onto me all this while. I upset a teakwood taboret with a lot of brass things on it, and they sang out like tocsins. “I bought the one holding its ears! You know it! You saw me—”
They shut me up. They were handling this.
“Whoa! Take it easy, now,” Acosta said, and there was a glint of toughness under the calm of his manner. He forked his thumb crevice to the front of my neck and pushed me back with that. The other guy paid in his grip on my arm by twisting it around behind me, and they got me still like that.
Tio Chin shrugged amiably. “Come by threes,” he said. “First one sold is to gentleman. Others still got. Can show you.”
“Can lie through your teeth,” I slurred at him. My arm took another quarter turn behind my back, like a crankshaft. I swallowed the rest of it. It was mostly about his mother, anyway.
He waddled over to a stock cabinet, slid back a pair of panels, and groped around inside of it. He was way over at the back, where the lantern light couldn’t reach so good, anyway.
When he came back he had a roll of thick quilted silk tucked under his arm. I knew what it was; I’d seen it before. But I didn’t see how he was going to prove his point by it. There had to be one missing, and I knew which one it was I’d walked out of here with.
“Imported from Hong Kong,” he said. “Come flum there to Panama to here. Only order three sets. Cost too high; never make sale; no demand. Got invoices to show, in Spanish and Chinese. Can prove only order three sets for store. Show you invoices later.”
He undid the roll first; it was fastened at both ends. Then he let it drop down, open out into a square. Or, rather, a long oblong strip. Threaded through this, on the inner side, ran a succession of silk loops, in two long parallels, top and bottom. They held a row of knives, the top ones the handles, the bottom ones the tips of the blades. All the handles were carved in the same monkey design. It was repeated three times over in three different substances: in ivory, in ebony, and in jade. There were eight: three ivory ones, three ebony ones, and two jade ones. One of the jade ones had been taken out; there was a gap where it belonged.