Even her perfume was still here. But she wasn’t. Everything had lasted longer than she had. Even my poor, clumsy love.
They dumped them all together into a large handkerchief and tied the four corners up and tossed it across the room to Acosta, like a beanbag, for safekeeping.
Then they picked her up and started her on that long last trip she had to take alone. I tried to go with her at least as far as the morgue truck they had backed up outside, but they wouldn’t let me; they held me fast there. She’d never liked the dark; I remember her telling me that many times. She’d never liked to be alone in it, either. And now she had to go there, where that was all there was, just those two things. I stood there, very still and very straight, with my eyes on her to the last.
So she went out that way, into the black Havana night, without diamonds, without love, without dreams.
I don’t know how many minutes went by after that. They seemed like a lot, but maybe they were few; they hit me so slow and empty. Then somebody said something to me; I didn’t hear what it was.
“Let me alone, will you?” I answered dully. “I don’t know whether I’m coming or I’m going.”
“You’re coming,” Acosta answered. “You’re coming with us.” A hand that weighed a ton clamped itself onto my shoulder. “jAdelante!” Meaning, start moving. “You are under arrest for murder.”
2
The Chinese section of Havana makes up in noise and overcrowdedness for what it lacks in size. It makes the Chinatowns of our cities up North look like lifeless ghost towns by comparison, and some of them aren’t slouches when it comes to being thickly peopled. But this was a veritable anthill of swarming humanity; I’d never seen anything like it. The police car, with me in the back seat between Acosta and one of the other department men, had to crawl along at a snail’s pace through the crooked, teeming streets. It would have been quicker to walk it, but maybe they felt that the car, with its official license plates and one of the men riding supercargo on the running boards, added prestige. It was certainly no help. The man at the wheel drove with one hand, his other tapping the signal button like a telegraph key. I don’t think we covered a soundless yard along the way. The continual blats coming from us only added to the din all around us. It was enough to wreck your nerves in short order — that is, if you still cared whether they were wrecked or not. I didn’t, so I wasn’t affected by it.
Where the way was wide enough they could get out of our way by flattening themselves against the walls on either side of us. But plenty of the time even that wouldn’t do it; they had to get in altogether, back up into doorways, until we’d passed by. And when they were street peddlers — and enough of them were — and had a lot of truck piled up on their heads, even that wouldn’t do it; they had to hoist themselves up on something and let us glide by below. And the man on that side of the seat had to lower his head. Several times like that we cruised by beneath momentary umbrellas of fly-active sweets or pyramided panama hats held agonizedly aloft over us. It was a peculiar way to be taken anywhere under arrest, to say the least.
This, I kept reminding myself, was supposed to be my last chance to clear myself. They were giving me this last chance, unasked. Or, rather, I had mentioned it once earlier back there at the bar, but by now it was strictly their own idea, not mine; I didn’t much care any more. What they were out for was verbal substantiation, from the Chinaman from whom I’d bought the knife, that I’d actually left there with the hear-no-evil one, that that was the one he’d wrapped for me, that he’d absent-mindedly made out the wrong receipt. Even that wouldn’t be enough to clear me altogether any more; I was in too deep by now. But at least it would make the odds more even. By supporting this one feature of my story it would indirectly strengthen all the rest of it at the same time. Any story is always as strong as its weakest detail. This detail mayn’t have been the weakest one, but at least it was the most easily proven. In fact, it was the only one that I could get a witness for. The rest was just my own unsupported word.
I wasn’t much worried about getting his corroboration; I knew I could count on it, but the strange part of it was I didn’t particularly care by this time one way or the other. These guys in the car with me were looking at it from the police point of view; I was looking at it from my own personal point of view.
She was gone, so what difference did all the rest of it make? The hell with the rest of it. I just sat there staring woodenly ahead. They could get there fast or they could get there slow or they could get there never; to me it was all the same.
We hit this Pasaje Angosta finally and sealed it up by stopping lengthwise across it. At that it only reached from windshield to the hinges on the rear door; the rest of the car was all overlap. If I’d thought the streets before this were narrow, they were parade grounds compared to this. It was more like a slit inadvertently left when two buildings are put side by side and don’t quite come together. We had to stop the way we did, broadside; to have tried to turn the car and wedge it in there would have either shorn the hubcaps and the fenders off or gouged the plaster and fill out of the walls on each side.
As though we weren’t jammed up enough, already, right away, as soon as we became static, the place started to choke up around us with onlookers. And there’s nothing so passively immovable as a Chinese crowd.
Acosta got down and peered into the chasm facing us.
“This is it, isn’t it, Escott?” he said briskly.
I turned my head. I’d still been looking forward until now. “This is it.”
He hitched his elbow at me, and I got down and stood next to him. Then the other guy got down in back of me. They both took a grip on me, and they led me forward and into it, very much the prisoner, with one of them making a tourniquet of the slack of my coat collar and the other one making one of the back of my sleeve. At that we couldn’t go three abreast; we went sort of on the bias, with me the middle link. The others stayed with the car.
It fooled you. It kept going and kept going. It even got a little wider than it had been at its mouth; not much, but just a little. It smelled; boy, how it smelled. Like asafetida, and somebody burning feathers, and the lee side of a sewer. It wasn’t of an even darkness; it was mottled darkness. Every few yards or so an oil lamp or a kerosene torch or a Chinese paper lantern, back within some doorway or some stall opening, would squirt out a puddle of light to relieve the gloom. They were different colors, these smears, depending on the reflector they filtered through: orange and sulphur-green, and once even a sort of purple-red, were spewed around on the dirty walls, like grape juice. But don’t get me wrong; it was mostly shadow; these were just the breaks in the darkness.
Shuffling figures in felt slippers and black alpaca trousers would stop against the wall to make way for us and turn and stare after us as we went by. Sometimes they tried to follow in our wake, but the rear man of our party would fang a curt word of dismissal at them and they’d drop off again.
Once a projecting sign or iron bracket thrusting out over one of the doorways — I’m not sure which it was — clipped off my hat, but they let me stop, and one of them picked it up and gave it back to me.
We got to it. I knew it when I saw it coming from up ahead, darkness and all, even though I’d only been there once before. It was just a doorway — no show window — but it was a little wider than the others and it spilled out a brighter gash of lantern light than the rest. It had a vertical panel of black sandpaper running down each side of it, with gold-paint Chinese hieroglyphs on one side and the equivalent Spanish lettering on the other. Both were Chinese to me.