There’d been a lull; now there was a sudden rampage again. They must have finished casing the roofs, or as many of them as they could reach. The sound of their heavy footsteps recrossing the lead or whatever it was came through to us, it was like somebody thumping on a washtub. Then the chain ladder started to sluice around.
“Here comes payday,” I said.
She threw down her cigar, went into high gear. She could move fast when she wanted to. She took a jerk at my sleeve as she brushed by me. “Come here. Over here. Lie down on this cot over here. I’ve got an out for you. Get rid of your stuff from the waist up; take off everything.”
I didn’t get it, but I took her word for it. That was all there was time for. They were holding a confab, giving out instructions or something, out there at the foot of the ladder.
She dived into the gloom, over in one of the far corners of the big barnlike room. I heard a wooden drawer rasp out. “Where’s that smear-stick I used to use when I was still going around with Manolito?” I heard her say.
I used the buttons on my shirt front like a zipper; just wrenched from top to bottom, and they all flew off.
They were on the last lap out there now. They were pounding on a door; it must have been the next one up from this one. Or the next one down below — I don’t know which.
She came hustling back to me.
“Undershirt too,” she told me.
I skinned that off me too.
“Now lie down flat there, face to the wall... That’s it. Keep your face pressed as close to the wall as you can. Whatever happens, don’t turn around this way. Keep your arm up over your head, like that, so they can’t see you from the side either. Wait a minute; first let’s get this coat and stuff underneath the covers you’re lying on. They may recognize that suit you were wearing.”
I felt her stuffing it underneath me. Then she sat down on the edge of the cot, alongside my bared back. Without any warning something cold and slippery started to typewrite all over my back and shoulders, and down the hollow of my spine, and along the outside of one arm. I jumped at the unexpected feel of it. She pushed me flat again with a vicious swipe. “Lie still!” she hissed. “There isn’t very much time.”
She kept going dab-dab-dab all over me, a mile a minute. I stole a look around over my shoulder at an acute downward angle, and she seemed to be printing out coin dots all over my skin with a lipstick. I didn’t get it; Quick-Brain didn’t get it. When she’d hit my backbone with it I’d jump a little; I couldn’t help it. It was like a spinal anesthetic.
They were in the adjoining room now. We could hear them scuffing against the partition wall here and there as they walloped their way around in it. They were giving it a good, thorough going-over, by the sounds of it.
She flung the covers back over me, nearly to the top of my head. “Hold it, now. Don’t rub against the covers. Keep your face to the wall.”
She shifted the candle farther over to the other side of the room, bringing down the curtain of darkness that overhung us still lower, so that the line where the light ended and shadow began fell across me and cut me off at the neck. Then I heard her pick up some kind of a bottle standing against the wall somewhere off in the recesses of the room. An overpowering reek of some strong disinfectant welled up unexpectedly as she moved back and forth around the cot with it. I looked backward out of the corner of my eye, and she was sloshing out a few drops left over in the bottle this way and that on the floor.
They were at the door now. It almost seemed to bulge and swell inward to bursting point with the lambasting they gave it. Somebody bellowed something through in Spanish.
She made a quick pass at me, meaning: This is it now. Here we go, sink or swim. I was still glimpsing her out of the far corner of my eye. She took the shawl and elevated it, changed the hang of it, so that it draped the top of her head and her shoulders. Then she flung the end of it around back on itself, so that it covered her mouth. She looked back towards me, and I got the effect. The transformation was magical. The underworld girl had become a shrouded figure of sorrow, almost nunlike in its austerity. She even changed her walk; sort of crept submissively. She grabbed up a string of beads from somewhere as she went by — and whatever they were, they weren’t religious beads — and folded them into the shawl, and after that you could hear them clicking faintly, sight unseen, while her lips moved in accompaniment, mumbling a prayer that never quite came to boiling point but kept simmering away down in her throat. Her coifed head was piously inclined.
For such short notice it was a very good act.
I rolled my face back full-compass to the wall and got the rest of it from then on by my sense of hearing alone.
She prodded up the foot latch; the door creaked wide, and there was a questioning masculine growl from two or three voices at once. The original two must have added to their number.
She went “Shhhh!” in a long-drawn breath of pleading remonstrance. I could even visualize her placing a cautioning finger against the shawl over the place where her submerged mouth was, but maybe she didn’t.
That wasn’t enough to hold them. I would have been surprised if it had been.
There was an inward surging of footsteps as they elbowed her aside and fanned out into the room. Then a halt again as they sighted me, floating half submerged in the gloom, just over the watermark of candleshine. Then a sharply barked question, obvious enough to translate itself without aid: “¿Quién es eso?” Who’s that?
She wined a long-drawn-out answer in a weepy undertone, with sniffles for punctuation marks. All I could get out of it was the couplet “mi hombre,” repeated a couple of times over. My man. I was her man.
There was a pause when she got through, ominous rather than reassuring. I could feel their sharp, shrewd policemen’s eyes boring into me from about six different angles at once, fluoroscoping me through the covers and all. It wasn’t a very comfortable feeling. I forced myself to lie there huddled and inert, the way she’d posed me. Gee, it’s hard not to move a muscle when you’re dying to. It was tougher than if I’d been standing upside down on my head. The damp plaster of the wall smelled rotten that close to the button of my nose. It tickled the inside of it, too, and I was afraid the old sneezing itch that you invariably get when you’re trying not to attract attention would hit me any minute, but fortunately it didn’t develop.
I opened one eyelid guardedly, under the shelter of my upcurved arm, and watched the wall, like you do the rear-sight mirror in a car. The dividing line between candlelight and gloom suddenly shot way up high. I could get what that meant. One of them had picked up the candle, was holding it aloft so they could all get a better look at me.
She was remonstrating in a plaintive, melancholy voice, but that didn’t do any good, it stayed up where it was.
I knew what was coming in another minute after that, and it did. A looming form started to swell upward on the wall, creeping up from below, as one of them came slowly over toward me to take a look at contact point. The nearer he got, the darker and bigger his silhouette got. The tread stopped right up against my backbone, or practically so, and he was standing there, looking down at me. I was afraid to close even the half eye that I had open now, although it was on the inside of my face, away from him.
The silhouette suddenly crumpled, foreshortened, and I knew what that meant. He was bending his head down now, to examine me from even closer quarters. I could feel his breath on a strip of my neck that wasn’t covered.