22
I kicked my stool back and stood up and jerked the gun out of the holster under my arm. But it was no good. My coat was buttoned and I was too slow. I’d have been too slow anyway, if it came to shooting anybody.
There was a soundless rush of air and an earthy smell. In the complete darkness the Indian hit me from behind and pinned my arms to my sides. He started to lift me. I could have got the gun out still and fanned the room with blind shots, but I was a long way from friends. It didn’t seem as if there was any point in it.
I let go of the gun and took hold of his wrists. They were greasy and hard to hold. The Indian breathed gutturally and set me down with a jar that lifted the top of my head. He had my wrists now, instead of me having his. He twisted them behind me fast and a knee like a corner stone went into my back. He bent me. I can be bent. I’m not the City Hall. He bent me.
I tried to yell, for no reason at all. Breath panted in my throat and couldn’t get out. The Indian threw me sideways and got a body scissors on me as I fell. He had me in a barrel. His hands went to my neck. Sometimes I wake up in the night. I feel them there and I smell the smell of him. I feel the breath fighting and losing and the greasy fingers digging in. Then I get up and take a drink and turn the radio on.
I was just about gone when the light flared on again, blood red, on account of the blood in my eyeballs and at the back of them. A face floated around and a hand pawed me delicately, but the other hands stayed on my throat.
A voice said softly, “Let him breathe—a little.”
The fingers slackened. I wrenched loose from them. Something that glinted hit me on the side of the jaw.
The voice said softly: “Get him on his feet.”
The Indian got me on my feet. He pulled me back against the wall, holding me by both twisted wrists.
“Amateur,” the voice said softly and the shiny thing that was as hard and bitter as death hit me again, across the face. Something warm trickled. I licked at it and tasted iron and salt.
A hand explored my wallet. A hand explored all my pockets. The cigarette in tissue paper came out and was unwrapped. It went somewhere in the haze that was in front of me.
“There were three cigarettes?” the voice said gently, and the shining thing hit my jaw again.
“Three,” I gulped.
“Just where did you say the others were?”
“In my desk—at the office.”
The shiny thing hit me again. “You are probably lying— but I can find out.” Keys shone with funny little red lights in front of me. The voice said: “Choke him a little more.”
The iron fingers went into my throat. I was strained back against him, against the smell of him and the hard muscles of his stomach. I reached up and took one of his fingers and tried to twist it.
The voice said softly: “Amazing. He’s learning.”
The glinting thing swayed through the air again. It smacked my jaw, the thing that had once been my jaw.
“Let him go. He’s tame,” the voice said.
The heavy strong arms dropped away and I swayed forward and took a step and steadied myself. Amthor stood smiling very slightly, almost dreamily in front of me. He held my gun in his delicate, lovely hand. He held it pointed at my chest.
“I could teach you,” he said in his soft voice. “But to what purpose? A dirty little man in a dirty little world. One spot of brightness on you and you would still be that. Is it not so?” He smiled, so beautifully.
I swung at his smile with everything I had left.
It wasn’t so bad considering. He reeled and blood came out of both his nostrils. Then he caught himself and straightened up and lifted the gun again.
“Sit down, my child,” he said softly. “I have visitors coming. I am so glad you hit me. It helps a great deal.”
I felt for the white stool and sat down and put my head down on the white table beside the milky globe which was now shining again softly. I stared at it sideways, my face on the table. The light fascinated me. Nice light, nice soft light.
Behind me and around me there was nothing but silence. I think I went to sleep, just like that, with a bloody face on the table, and a thin beautiful devil with my gun in his hand watching me and smiling.
23
“All right,” the big one said. “You can quit stalling now.”
I opened my eyes and sat up.
“Out in the other room, pally.”
I stood up, still dreamy. We went somewhere, through a door. Then I saw where it was—the reception room with the windows all around. It was black dark now outside.
The woman with the wrong rings sat at her desk. A man stood beside her.
“Sit here, pally.”
He pushed me down. It was a nice chair, straight but comfortable but I wasn’t in the mood for it. The woman behind the desk had a notebook open and was reading out loud from it. A short elderly man with a dead-pan expression and a gray mustache was listening to her.
Amthor was standing by a window, with his back to the room, looking out at the placid line of the ocean, far off, beyond the pier lights, beyond the world. He looked at it as if he loved it. He half turned his head to look at me once, and I could see that the blood had been washed off his face, but his nose wasn’t the nose I had first met, not by two sizes. That made me grin, cracked lips and all.
“You got fun, pally?”
I looked at what made the sound, what was in front of me and what had helped me get where I was. He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth and the mellow voice of a circus barker. He was tough, fast and he ate red meat. Nobody could push him around. He was the kind of cop who spits on his blackjack every night instead of saying his prayers. But he had humorous eyes.
He stood in front of me splay-legged, holding my open wallet in his hand, making scratches on the leather with his as if he just liked to spoil things. Little things, if they were all he had. But probably faces would give him more fun.
“Peeper, huh, pally? From the big bad burg, huh? Little spot of blackmail, huh?”
His hat was on the back of his head. He had dusty brown hair darkened by sweat on his forehead. His humorous eyes were flecked with red veins.
My throat felt as though it had been through a mangle. I reached up and felt it. That Indian. He had fingers like pieces of tool steel.
The dark woman stopped reading out of her notebook and closed it. The elderly smallish man with the gray mustache nodded and came over to stand behind the one who was talking to me.
“Cops?” I asked, rubbing my chin.
“What do you think, pally?”
Policeman’s humor. The small one had a cast in one eye, and it looked half blind.
“Not L.A.,” I said, looking at him. “That eye would retire him in Los Angeles.”
The big man handed me my wallet. I looked through it. I had all the money still. All the cards. It had everything that belonged in it. I was surprised.
“Say something, pally,” the big one said. “Something that would make us get fond of you.”
“Give me back my gun.”
He leaned forward a little and thought. I could see him thinking. It hurt his corns. “Oh, you want your gun, pally?” He looked sideways at the one with the gray mustache. “He wants his gun,” he told him. He looked at me again. “And what would you want your gun for, pally?”
“I want to shoot an Indian.”
“Oh, you want to shoot an Indian, pally.”
“Yeah—just one Indian, pop.”
He looked at the one with the mustache again. “This guy is very tough,” he told him. “He wants to shoot an Indian.”
“Listen, Hemingway, don’t repeat everything I say,” I said.
“I think the guy is nuts,” the big one said. “He just called me Hemingway. Do you think he is nuts?”
The one with the mustache bit a cigar and said nothing. The tall beautiful man at the window turned slowly and said softly: “I think possibly he is a little unbalanced.”
“I can’t think of any reason why he should call me Hemingway,” the big one said. “My name ain’t Hemingway.”
The older man said: “I didn’t see a gun.”
They looked at Amthor. Amthor said: “It’s inside. I have it. I’ll give it to you, Mr. Blane.”
The big man leaned down from his hips and bent his knees a little and breathed in my face. “What for did you call me Hemingway, pally?”
“There are ladies present.”
He straightened up again. “You see.” He looked at the one with the mustache. The one with the mustache nodded and then turned and walked away, across the room. The sliding door opened. He went in and Amthor followed him.
There was silence. The dark woman looked down at the top of her desk and frowned. The big man looked at my right eyebrow and slowly shook his head from side to side, wonderingly.
The door opened again and the man with the mustache came back. He picked a hat up from somewhere and handed it to me. He took my gun out of his pocket and handed it to me. I knew by the weight it was empty. I tucked it under my arm and stood up.
The big man said: “Let’s go, pally. Away from here. I think maybe a little air will help you to get straightened out.”
“Okey, Hemingway.”
“He’s doing that again,” the big man said sadly. “Calling me Hemingway on account of there are ladies present. Would you think that would be some kind of dirty crack in his book?”
The man with the mustache said, “Hurry up.”
The big man took me by the arm and we went over to the little elevator. It came up. We got into it.
24
At the bottom of the shaft we got out and walked along the narrow hallway and out of the black door. It was crisp clear air outside, high enough to be above the drift of foggy spray from the ocean. I breathed deeply.
The big man still had hold of my arm. There was a car standing there, a plain dark sedan, with private plates.
The big man opened the front door and complained: “It ain’t really up to your class, pally. But a little air will set you up fine. Would that be all right with you? We wouldn’t want to do anything that you wouldn’t like us to do, pally.”
“Where’s the Indian?”
He shook his head a little and pushed me into the car. I got into the right side of the front seat. “Oh, yeah, the Indian,” he said. “You got to shoot him with a bow and arrow. That’s the law. We got him in the back of the car.”
I looked in the back of the car. It was empty.
“Hell, he ain’t there,” the big one said. “Somebody must of glommed him off. You can’t leave nothing in a unlocked car any more.”
“Hurry up,” the man with the mustache said, and got into the back seat. Hemingway went around and pushed his hard stomach behind the wheel. He started the car. We turned and drifted off down the driveway lined with wild geraniums. A cold wind lifted off the sea. The stars were too far off. They said nothing.
We reached the bottom of the drive and turned out onto the concrete mountain road and drifted without haste along that.
“How come you don’t have a car with you, pally?”
“Amthor sent for me.”
“Why would that be, pally?”
“It must have been he wanted to see me.”
“This guy is good,” Hemingway said. “He figures things out.” He spit out of the side of the car and made a turn nicely and let the car ride its motor down the hill. “He says you called him up on the phone and tried to put the bite on him. So he figures he better have a looksee what kind of guy he is doing business with—if he is doing business. So he sends his own car.”
“On account of he knows he is going to call some cops he knows and I won’t need mine to get home with,” I said. “Okey, Hemingway.”
“Yeah, that again. Okey. Well he has a dictaphone under his table and his secretary takes it all down and when we come she reads it back to Mister Blane here.”
I turned and looked at Mister Blane. He was smoking a cigar, peacefully, as though he had his slippers on. He didn’t look at me.
“Like hell she did,” I said. “More likely a stock bunch of notes they had all fixed up for a case like that.”
“Maybe you would like to tell us why you wanted to see this guy,” Hemingway suggested politely.
“You mean while I still have part of my face?”
“Aw, we ain’t those kind of boys at all,” he said, with a large gesture.
“You know Amthor pretty well, don’t you, Hemingway?”
“Mr. Blane kind of knows him. Me, I just do what the orders is.”
“Who the hell is Mister Blane?”
“That’s the gentleman in the back seat.”
“And besides being in the back seat who the hell is he?”
“Why, Jesus, everybody knows Mr. Blane.”
“All right,” I said, suddenly feeling very weary.
There was a little more silence, more curves, more winding ribbons of concrete, more darkness, and more pain.
The big man said: “Now that we are all between pals and no ladies present we really don’t give so much time to why you went back up there, but this Hemingway stuff is what really has me down.”
“A gag,” I said. “An old, old gag.”
“Who is this Hemingway person at all?”
“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”
“That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said. “For a private dick you certainly have a wandering kind of mind. Are you still wearing your own teeth?”
“Yeah, with a few plugs in them.”
“Well, you certainly have been lucky, pally.”
The man in the back seat said: “This is all right. Turn right at the next.”
“Check.”
Hemingway swung the sedan into a narrow dirt road that edged along the flank of a mountain. We drove along that about a mile. The smell of the sage became overpowering.
“Here,” the man in the back seat said.
Hemingway stopped the car and set the brake. He leaned across me and opened the door.
“Well, it’s nice to have met you, pally. But don’t come back. Anyways not on business. Out.”
“I walk home from here?”
The man in the back seat said: “Hurry up.”
“Yeah, you walk home from here, pally. Will that be all right with you?”
“Sure, it will give me time to think a few things out. For instance you boys are not L.A. cops. But one of you is a cop, maybe both of you. I’d say you are Bay City cops. I’m wondering why you were out of your territory.”
“Ain’t that going to be kind of hard to prove, pally?”
“Goodnight, Hemingway.”
He didn’t answer. Neither of them spoke. I started to get out of the car and put my foot on the running board and leaned forward, still a little dizzy.
The man in the back seat made a sudden flashing movement that I sensed rather than saw. A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night.
I dived into it. It had no bottom.