“Media — I can’t say it.”
“Midnight is what it means. Try it that way.”
“Okay, Midnight it is, then.” I went over to her and put my hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Well, Midnight, I don’t know what to say to you except — thanks.”
“Flowers on a grave,” she murmured, low.
I gave my hatbrim a final tug. “I better blow, I guess. The coast must be clear by now.”
“You better not blow, you mean. You’ll get as far as the first street corner before they spot you and jump on you again. What do you want to throw away all my hard work for?”
“I can’t hang around here the rest of the night.”
“Is there any other place in town you’ve got you can go to?”
“No, I don’t know any—”
“Then what’s the matter with it here?” She held out one hand, like you do when you’re trying to feel for rain. “It’s your life, chico. Go ahead and throw it away if you want to; it’s up to you. But then in that case, why didn’t you just string along with them in the first place? You would have saved yourself a lot of wear and tear.”
That was right; why hadn’t I? I lit a cigarette from her candle flame and went over and sat down undecidedly on the edge of the smallpox cot again. Even if it hadn’t been fumigated as she’d said, I was getting used to it by now.
We hung around like that in silence for a while, while the candle burned away. Me with my cigarette and she with her cigar. Two faces in the dusky pallor, thoughtful and unaware of each other. She was thinking of him, I guess, and I know I was thinking of her. A sort of wake of the underdogs.
After some time she spoke again. “How you figuring on getting out of town, even if you do get out of this place?”
“I don’t know; there must be some way—”
“If you do give them the slip on the landward side, what good does it do? You’re still on the island, water all around you.”
I nodded dejectedly.
“And if you try to get out by water, then you’ve got the customs and the harbor police to buck. They keep a closer watch on the waterfront than anywhere else in this town.”
I threw my cigarette away. “It looks like I stay in Havana.”
“It looks like you do. And if you do stay in La Habana, I give you about thirty minutes at the outside from the time you leave the door downstairs.”
“Some future,” I said.
More silence. After a while I looked up again. “It looks like I stay in Havana and clear myself,” I told her finally. “I wasn’t particularly keen on running away from something I didn’t do, anyway, even if it could have been done. Once you start running you never quit running. I’m going to stay here till I’ve got this thing licked.”
“There’s no law against trying,” she commented.
I started fooling around with my fingers, bending them in and out and looking at them, as if they were interesting.
After a while she changed hips against the dresser top. “You want to tell me about it?” she suggested. “We got nothing else to do right now, anyway.”
So I told her about it.
5
I’d been working for him for a week before I even saw her, knew that she was there.
It was funny how I got the job. Picked it up out of the gutter, you might say. Symbolic, I suppose, if you go in for that sort of stuff, which I don’t. That’s about where a job like that would be lying, come to think of it. I wasn’t even trying for it. I turned it over with my foot, and there it was.
I was in Miami. My name was Scott. That was about all I’d brought down with me. I had clothes. You get arrested if you don’t. I had one article of each basic garment, all on me and in use. Nothing left over. I had a coat of tan and a park bench. That was all I had to my name. The bench was mine, in a manner of speaking. It belonged to the city, technically, but I’d been picking the same one each night, so I had a priority on it. Once I even drove another guy off it, made him look for another.
I used to get up early, around dawn or a little after. Dawn is beautiful in Miami. All flamingo-pink and baby-blue. But you can’t eat it. I used to wash my face in a fountain there in the park and comb my hair with a broken half comb I had in my pocket and turn my coat back right side out, so the wrinkles wouldn’t show. And by the time I got through you could hardly tell. Or so I hoped.
I came out of the park the morning that I got the job, and I was walking along, following up my own shadow along the pale pink sidewalk, giving it its head, watching to see where it would lead me. I passed this resort, this night spot — I think it was called The Acacias, or something like that. I didn’t notice it much. Miami is a pleasure town, and it’s lousy with them. But this was a little bigger and a little classier-looking than the average; that was all I noticed about it. It must have only just closed about an hour or so before. You could almost smell the heat still coming out of it, as you went by, from the night-long blaze that had gone on inside it; it had hardly cooled off yet.
There was a little strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb, a sort of fancy border. I thought I saw something lying there in it, but the dew was flashing, so it made it hard to tell. I nearly passed it by at first. Then I changed my mind and went back and gave it a cuff with my toe. It turned over, and it was a wallet. I reached down and got it.
It was just a little bit out of true with the entrance of the place. As if somebody stepping into a car at that point, while it was still dark, had dropped it and never noticed it. It was black pin seal, with gold clasps on the corners. It said “Mark Cross” on the lining, which is a good place to get them. It had money in it, plenty, and for a minute that was all that interested me. Forty dollars, about.
I kept on walking.
It wasn’t anonymous by any means. It was loaded with identification. The driver’s license told whose it was right through the glossine, without even having to go into the various compartments. Edward Roman, and he was forty-four, and he lived at Hermosa Drive. And then in addition there were cards and scraps of paper with telephone numbers and disjointed memos on them, most of them meaningless and hieroglyphic except to the owner. No, it wasn’t anonymous by any means.
But I kept on walking. My ethics couldn’t argue with my stomach right then. I had breakfast without washing glasses first or loading trays, and when I got through there was a dollar and a half less in the wallet.
Then I let my ethics get the upper hand. It’s surprising how much easier it is to be ethical when you’re well fed.
I couldn’t even find out where the place was until I’d asked three people. The first cop I asked had never heard of it and at least was honest enough to admit it. The second one had, but in a vague way that wasn’t much good when it came to specific directions. A truck driver finally cinched it, after I’d been under way for some time. He said he sympathized with me if I was going to try to make it on foot; he would have given me a lift, but he was going the wrong way for that, coming in instead of heading out. I just kept going. It occurred to me there were easier ways to be honest, but I didn’t have anything else to do with myself, anyway, so what was the difference?
It was way out. You felt like you were halfway up the coast to Palm Beach already before you finally got to it. It was something when you did get to it, though.
I’d seen these big places before. It’s crawling with them down there. But this looked as though it had been laid out by someone who was all speed and no control. It had its own private driveway leading off the highway, which was why no one had been sure where Hermosa Drive was; that was it. The house was facing the other way, looking out to sea, with its back to the highway. It had its own private beach. It was an estate, let me tell you.