I looked from this building to the driver and said, “Is this it? Do I get out here?”
Nothing. He didn’t even move his head.
For the benefit of the microphone in my stomach, I said, “This Chinese church here, or whatever it is, with the gilded doors, this is where I’m supposed to go?”
I still got no answer from the driver, but an answer did arrive from a different source. The gilded doors I’d mentioned now opened, and a flashlight flicked on and off three times.
“Thanks,” I said to the driver, not sure whether I was being sarcastic or not. I climbed out of the car, shut the door, and it immediately drove away and around the corner.
This neighborhood was as different from Jack Armstrong’s as Jack the Ripper from Peter Rabbit. Every battered garbage pail seemed to teem with rats, every under-stairs recess with junkies, every rooftop with rapists, every entranceway with perverts, every shadow with thugs and murderers. I entered this Asiatic church, temple, mosque, whatever it was, because frankly it looked like the least dangerous place on the block.
The entrance steps were slate. No light at all shown within the open gilded doors. I passed through, and the doors shut behind me, and the darkness was complete.
A hand, thin-fingered, spidery, closed on my right wrist. A sibilant whisper, as of Peter Lorre at his most exultantly manic, sounded at my side: “Pleasss, thissss way.” The spidery hand tugged at my wrist.
I followed, crossing a floor that echoed like stone. I was taken forward, and then to the right, and then stopped. The hand left me, and I surreptitiously covered several of what I considered my vital places, and stood blinking in the dark.
A thin crack of light, directly ahead of me, thickened, broadened, became light spilling through an opening doorway. A small thin silhouette, apparently male, motioned me to step through this doorway into the light. I did so, and my guide followed me and shut the door. We were in a small Oriental-looking room with tapestries on the walls and a mosaic figure in the floor. My guide, a small thin Oriental of no particular age, dressed in a loose black tunic and black trousers, barefoot, turned to me and said, “Take off your shoes.”
I said, “What?”
“It is necessary,” he said, and there aren’t s’s enough in the world to record the way he said “necessary.” “This is,” he hissed on, “a holy place.”
“A holy place,” I echoed, while the watch on my left wrist tingled and tingled. Distracted, I raised the offending member to my ear and heard the tiny tinny voice saying, over and over, “Don’t take off your shoes. Don’t take off your shoes. Don’t take off your shoes.”
“Idiots,” I said savagely.
My inscrutable companion, thinking I meant him, bristled scrutably and said, “The shoes must be removed. Forcibly, if necessary. I shall call for assistance.” Spraying s’s like a Flit gun.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll get them back, won’t I?”
“Of course. In the meantime, you may wear these slippers.”
The slippers he extended toward me were straw, cane, wicker; you know the kind of thing I mean. They’re sold at beaches in the summertime.
I exchanged my wonderful electronic shoes for a pair of lousy straw slippers, and saw my new friend put the shoes very carefully and neatly on the floor in a corner of the room, where, he assured me, they would be perfectly safe until my return.
The watch had stopped tingling.
“This way,” my guide told me, opening another door on the far side of the room, and, shuffling in my new slippers, I followed him.
(Did you ever notice how important shoes are in stories of magic? Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz, for instance, is relatively safe from the Wicked Witch so long as she keeps the red shoes given her by the Good Witch, and similar elements are to be found in children’s stories from all over the world. Much wisdom lies in children’s folk tales, as any scholar will portentously tell you, and I spent the next few minutes considering the warnings of this folk wisdom as relates to magic and/or protective shoes, and the dire results attendant upon not having the good shoes any more.)
But that’s an aside, a tangent, one of the things I’m trying to avoid from now on. Back, back.
My guide, as I said, led me through another door. Beyond it was a long narrow hallway done all in beige and devoid of side doors. After a considerable distance this hall made a right turn, and so did we. Small dim ceiling lights at intervals illuminated our way.
A broad heavy metal firedoor barred our path at the end of the hall. This my guide pushed, with much stern-faced heaving and with labored grating sounds from the door, until it was entirely open, when he motioned me through to another hallway exactly like the first. “You go down there,” he said, pointing, and strained the firedoor shut again, with himself on the other side of it.
Now I was alone. I said, experimentally, “Hello?” and put the watch to my ear. It ticked at me, the moron. I was alone.
There was nothing for it but to press on. I walked down to the end of the hallway, discovered that it turned left and led to a flight of stone stairs going downward. The lighting now was from infrequent bare light bulbs strung along a wire at head-height on the right side, and the walls deteriorated to rough masonry. A slightly bitter, slightly salty scent was in the air, vaguely reminiscent of the ocean.
At the bottom of the stairs a curving corridor led away to the right, crowded between hunching walk of stone. Somewhere, water dripped. The light bulbs were at such a distance from each other now, that some small segments of this bending corridor were totally unlit.
At last another flight of stairs, this of wood and going upward. No more electricity; burning brands in wall-holders lit my way and filled the air with a smell like tar.
At the head of the wooden stairs an arched doorway led to a narrow metal catwalk extending out into and over echoing blackness. At the far end of the catwalk, there was another lit doorway. Cautiously, I moved across the catwalk.
Rusted railings flanked me on both sides. The metal underfoot was slick and damp. I had the impression of a great drop beneath me, but nothing showed in the total darkness down there. A similar impression of a high — arched? domed? — empty expanse above me was equally incapable of being proved.
The next doorway led me into a soft and furry room all enclosed in thick drapery and tapestries of various strong dark colors, and thick rugs scattered about the floor two and three deep. The ceiling was painted black. Small tables, on which candles burned, were the only furnishings and the candles the only light. Large orange and red cushions, pillows, were scattered about.
A multicolored shadow moved, separating itself from its background, and became a voluptuous and beautiful Oriental girl in some sort of complex and all-encompassing traditional garb. She bowed to me, as candlelight glinted in her raven hair and her almond eyes, and motioned silently for me to follow her.
Oh, Lord, would I follow her? With her and Angela, I’d have the complete set...
She led me down a long broad nicely carpeted hall, well lined by doors, all of them closed, some of them releasing various sounds of pleasure: music, laughter, etc., etc. At last she stopped at a door on the left, knocked discreetly, bowed to me, and went back the way she had come.
I looked after her, lusting for her, until the door opened and yet another Oriental face showed itself to me. But this one I immediately remembered; he’d been one of the people at the meeting! I hadn’t remembered him to tell the Feds about, but now that I saw him he came back into my mind at once; some sort of splinter-group Communist organization he led, it seemed to me, but both his name and that of his group were lost.