The two that were still in place were the monkey holding its mouth and the monkey holding its ears — the one that I’d bought, had had wrapped, and carried out of here in my inside pocket.
“See?” He beamed jovially.
“Well?” This was Acosta to me.
I wriggled violently all the way down, like a flag caught on a flagpole and trying to lash out. “You’re a liar!” I bayed at him. “You’re pulling a switch on me; that’s what you’re doing! I don’t know how you worked it, but—”
“No do nothing,” he protested querulously. “Only show this.”
“Yeah, but I’ll do something,” I raged, “if I can only get at that stomach of yours with my foot!” It swung up harmlessly in the air; they had me back too far.
“¡Quieto!” Acosta growled, and gave me the back of his hand across the teeth.
I didn’t even notice it; I had no soreness to waste on anyone but that blubber-faced Chinaman. “You heard me ask her! You even carried that roll thing over to her, where she was standing, and held it up for her to decide! You heard which one she said to take! You saw which one I took out and handed to you to wrap! You must have done a palm switch when you carried it over to the counter—”
“I leave others there by you, in case. I only take one over to lap it up. I only loll up case after you go out of store. You touch, maybe; I no touch.”
That was true; he had. That stalled me for a minute. That must have looked bad to them, checking myself like that in mid-argument. I couldn’t help it. Everything looked bad to them already, so they might as well add that to it while they were about it.
Acosta sliced his hand at me disgustedly. “What is the use of stringing this out any longer? No one else bought one of these knives but you. And the one that you say you bought has been back here in the store all the time. Come on. We have been lenient with you, given you every chance to clear yourself, because you are a stranger here. You should have been locked up an hour ago!”
“Don’t do me any favors,” I mumbled sullenly.
He lingered to ask Chin an additional question or two. For the record, I suppose.
“Tell me, how did they act, these two people, when they came in here?”
“Like people do in store. No diffelent. Señola go around, touch things all over place. Gentleman stand still, not move so much.”
“He asked to be shown a knife, or it was you who first offered them?”
“He ask for kimono for lady. I show; they look; they buy; I lap. Then lady, she go over in corner, touch a lot of little things some more.”
“Then?” I could see Acosta getting more interested. I started to store up steam pressure for another outburst at the lies I figured were coming.
“Then gentleman, he say: ‘You got something I could use in the way of a knife?’ He talk low.”
I’d talked low because he’d been standing right in front of me; you don’t call out loud to someone when they’re face to face with you.
“And?”
“I bring set; I show. He take one out; he feel to see if sharp.”
Acosta was all ears.
“He go over to lady with it. He do like this.”
He pretended he had a knife in his hand. He pretended Acosta was she. He drew his hand back and swiped it around toward Acosta’s heart, from the side, bearing upward a little from his own hip as he lunged. “He stop just in time, before it touch her. He say: ‘This is what you get.’ ”
“And the lady?”
“She close eyes. She say something in English. No can get; no can understand English so good.”
“As if she were frightened?”
“Was frightened, maybe — don’t know.”
What she’d said was, “From you it’d be a pleasure.” He’d taken all the playfulness out of it. He’d repeated the bare act itself, but he’d stripped it of all meaning. He’d left out the look in our eyes. How could anyone repeat that, anyway? He’d left out the playback of — I suppose you’d have to call it passion; I don’t know what else to call it — from me to her and from her to me again. He’d left out the tease in my voice and the come-on in hers.
He’d sewed me up beautiful.
The explosion never came. How could it? He hadn’t told them a thing that was partly untrue. He hadn’t told them a thing that was wholly untruthful. I couldn’t get him on it. He had me.
I kept looking at him and wondering. Did you do that on purpose? What’s behind it? What do you get out of it by twisting things around that way? Or is it just my blind bad luck? Did it just happen to come out distorted that way, through the filter of your sleepy observation?
He looked so sleepy; he looked so harmless. He looked benign. That was the only word for him — benign.
They started me out. When he saw that they were through with him for the present he bobbed his head about sixteen times in parting salutation and waddled back in the direction of the stool over in the corner.
The last look I had at him from the doorway, he was perched back on top of it again, the way he’d been when we’d first come in. His felt slippers were hooked on behind the rungs; his sleeves were relocked over his belly, and those little slantwise nicks in his face had already dropped closed again. He’d drowsed off before we were even over the threshold.
Acosta broke up my baleful scrutiny of him with a swing around the other way, by the back of my collar.
“Come on, Escott,” he said grimly. “Straight ahead.”
“Listen,” I said through my clenched teeth. “You’ve got me under arrest; you’re taking me down to get me booked, and you’re going to get me jailed. That ought to satisfy you. All I ask is one thing. At least give me the right initial; it begins with an S, not an E.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll get the right initial,” he promised. “You’ll get everything that’s coming to you.”
3
We were threading our way down the alley now, back to the car, and I was thinking it over. It was a funny time and place, maybe, to be thinking things over, but it was a lot better place for it, at that, than the jail cell waiting for me at the other end of this trip. I was still on my own feet and I was still out in the open. From what I’d seen of the other buildings around town that weren’t jails, I could imagine what the one that was a jail was going to turn out to be like. Something from the old Spanish days, most likely, with three-foot-thick walls, and once you got in you stayed in.
I thought it over and I came to a decision. I wasn’t going to any jail for something I hadn’t done. I’d go to the morgue for it, instead, if that was the way it had to be. Or I’d go on the lam for it. And those were about the only two alternatives that were offered. But I wouldn’t go, not even passively acquiescent, like I was walking now, into any jail.
She was gone, anyway, so what did I care? Make it tough for them. Let them work for their pinch. I had to take it out on someone, so it might as well be them.
According to their lights, I supposed, they considered they’d been fair to me. They’d leaned over backward to be fair to me. Maybe, as Acosta had said, because I was a foreigner. They hadn’t even booked me yet; they’d held off until after they’d brought me around to see the Chinaman first. They’d given me every chance to clear myself, and if it hadn’t worked out, that wasn’t their fault; that was — well, just the breaks, I guess. They’d given me every chance but the main one — my own freedom of action. I couldn’t ask them for that, so — I was going to take it without asking.