The Black Angel (18 page)

The light wasn't very good, and at another time I might have wondered why he'd choose such a place. But I didn't then.

He must have heard the little sob of gratitude I gave, I passed so close to him, but he was too intent to notice.

I hurried down the street, and the intermittent sign back there behind me kept getting smaller each time it flashed on. Like this:

MIMI CLUB

Mimi      Club

mimi      club

I could tell because I kept looking back repeatedly, almost in synchronization with it each time it flashed on, as though fearful the spirit of disembodied evil itself would materialize and come after me out of that place.

But it didn't. Nothing did. That casual bystander stood motionless there to the last, lost in his newspaper, unable to tear himself from it. That was all.

Once I thought I heard a faint whistle somewhere back there behind me. Not a mechanical whistle, one pursed by lips. I couldn't tell from where, to where, for what reason, or what meaning it had had. Nor even if there really had been one at all. It didn't come again. A thing like that didn't alarm me. The night is full of such sounds. I had my own private terrors to contend with.

And this they called the Gem Theater, and it had a history, a past, I suppose, like men and buildings all do. Once tight-waisted ladies in ostrich-plume hats must have stepped from high-bodied, square-topped limousines to attend opening nights here. Then later, for weary seasons, lines of indifferent, underdressed girls had pranced back and forth across its stage, four, five, six times a day. Then it had outlived even that. Now it was senile, nearing the death that awaits even piles of stone.

Now homeless strays wandered in here to sleep and have the soles of their feet kicked awake by the ushers at regular intervals and sleep again until the next time they came by.

It never closed. Continually, throughout the night and throughout the day and around to the night again, lines of hissing, spitting, bluish motes given off by the livid screen ran downward in the darkness like rain, and cracked, mechanical voices, sounding just like voices talking outside in a rain, echoed hollowly through it. This was the conversation of ghosts in every sense of the word, for even the photographed lips that uttered the phrases were never even with them, moved long after or long before.

I stopped and bought a ticket for twenty-five cents. They had a man in the booth. They weren't allowed to use girls this late at night. Another man took the ticket from me at the inner entrance, and that ended the formalities of admission.

I went into the dark and glimpsed the pale blue opening the screen made in it, like a window, ahead of me, and a scattering of somnolent heads, buried low among the seat backs. Then I turned aside and went up the stairs that led to the balcony. The branch on the left-hand side, for there were two, facing one another. He'd said the left-hand side of the balcony.

The carpeting was still on them from former days of glory but worn to a pulp and clinging to the feet almost like something spongy now. The stairs turned, and just past there I met an old woman feeling her way down. She looked like a charwoman. She came very cautiously, holding to the rail and exploring the turn of each step well with the toe of her foot before she would trust herself down. She left a tracery of alcohol hovering behind her all the way to the top.

I heard a knell-like sound just as I gained it myself, and when I looked back she had stood an empty bottle very primly, very tidily, in the exact corner of the turn, out of harm's way. I saw her moisten her finger tips, touch them to the side of the bottle, as if in affectionate farewell, and then go on.

I came out on the balcony floor at the back of the seats. The “window,” the flow of ceaseless-falling light lines, was below me now, and a stout shaft of fuming white light, swimming with dust spirochete, was slanted downward over my head from a glowing eye at the rear to strike at it.

The majority of the scattered heads up here were in the first few rows. The last row, at least on the left-hand side, held no one in it. It was divided, like all the others, into two segments by the center aisle, and the strip I had to do with was completely vacant. Two rows below a man sat audibly sleeping. Then no one else for several more rows. I sidled into it, stood over the third seat in for a minute, then changed my mind, shifted back to the second. Why, I couldn't have told.

I looked around me, toward the stairs where I'd just come from, and saw no one. I looked forward and watched the window into the world of make-believe for a dulled, unhappy moment or two.

A man far down in the first row got up from his seat and made his way up the terraced aisle. He seemed not to look at me, however, and after the first quickly inquiring glance I took him for somebody simply on his way out of the theater.

For several more moments I sat looking forward. Then suddenly a tendril of smoke drifting close to me made me turn my head, and he was standing directly behind me, almost at my shoulder, arms propped on the wooden bulkhead that walled off the seats from the open transverse beyond. He was, or seemed to be, unaware of me, eyes directed downward at the screen. He'd posted himself there so subtly that I hadn't even detected his presence.

I didn't know which of us was to speak first; I hadn't been told. The non-existent scarf could have belonged to either of us. It wasn't late enough in the year, however, for men to be wearing scarves yet, as a general rule, so I took my cue from that.

“Did I drop my scarf under your seat?” I mumbled half audibly.

“That's right,” he said and deftly made the turn of the aisle gap and settled himself in the seat beside me.

He didn't remove his hat. He sat leaning outward, away from me, rather than in toward me, and still kept his eyes on the screen with a dissimulation that must have been second nature to him by now, I reflected queasily.

I fumbled in my bag and removed the last of the things Mordaunt had given me. I balanced it on the spindly seat arm between us and edged over as far away from it as possible. When next I looked it was gone, and I could have sworn he hadn't moved at all. His arms were folded across his chest, but they hadn't stirred.

“I hope I never, as long as I live, set eyes on another of those little white pa——” I was thinking with devout intensity, when suddenly an unscheduled interruption took place.

There was a single quick, muffled footfall directly behind us. I never saw who it was, for he must have remained crouched over there where the bulkhead opened into the aisle beside us. The whiteness of a hand suddenly spawned over my seat neighbor's shoulder from behind; a voice whispered with hot urgency: “Blow! She's a plant! I just spotted 'em coming in below!”

Then the hand and the voice and whoever they had belonged to all disappeared alike as swiftly as they had descended on us.

The man next to me was suddenly standing erect, his face, turned my way now, an almost luminous grimace of incandescent rage. I didn't see his hand coming in time. It struck like a snake. The only lucky thing was he didn't have time to close it himself; it lashed against me open. The slap echoed all over the silence like a firecracker going off, and all the somnolent heads came up higher and turned one by one. A scalding wash of pain spread out all over my face and even down my neck on that side, and my eyes watered and made me lose him for a minute.

“Wait, give me what you were supposed to!” I cried blindly and tried to grasp at him.

“I'll get you for this!” I heard him hiss. And then he, too, went. The row lay empty. After a second or two of time lag my eye caught a flurry of motion, something dark against the dark, ricocheting down the tiered outside aisle, far over against the building wall itself. A door giving onto a fire escape squeaked a little, scarcely seeming to move inward at all, then settled heavily still again.

And then nothing happened. A slap must have been a commonplace in that milieu, even against a woman's cheek. The heads slowly turned away again, took up once more the thread of the more public drama being presented in that direction.

I crouched there uncertainly a moment longer. Then I was on my own feet and out on the carpeted passage behind the seats, not knowing which way to turn. A plant, a plant, what was that?
They?
Who were
they
downstairs?

I was afraid to go down those stairs now. I was even more afraid to go out the way I had seen him go, down the outside fire escape; afraid of what I might find waiting for me when I got to the bottom of it, in the dark alley it probably descended to.

I stood there at the head of the stairs a long time, my eyes alternately on them and on the balcony seats I had left behind. No one came up. No one came near me. That bottle was still standing down there where the crone had placed it.

I summoned up courage and started down them at last. I felt my way down almost as she had. Step by step and with both hands to the rail beside me, one following the other. How quickly you learn. How quickly you become part of the scene, fit into it.

I was at the turn now and I must either quicken my descent or not go down at all. I mustn't creep down like this, for I could be seen from below, from here on down.

I found myself almost wishing there had been something left in that bottle, so I could nerve myself with it. But I had to go the rest of the way on cold courage. I braced myself and struck out. The lower floor slowly opened into view. Those same somnolent heads, like raisins studding a dark pudding. Would one or more of them suddenly rise up, come after me, as I gained a level with them?

The steps were ticking off under me now in a quick, rippling, final descent. It carried me off them and over to the main center door. No one moved. I got out slantwise through the door, keeping it to its narrowest possible seam in order to let as little light in as I could and avoid attracting attention to myself.

Nothing happened. No one came out after me. No one was there before me, waiting on the outside. No one at all. Not even a man reading a newspaper this time.

No one seemed to be looking, only New York and the night and me.

The thought that it might be dangerous to go back was slow in coming, but it came finally: dangerous to go back to where I was supposed to. Mordaunt's house.

In the lawful world what I had to tell might have been believed. I wasn't in that world any more; I wasn't dealing with it now. In the jungle they didn't believe you. Where money was involved they would have lied to you, and they knew it, so they acted on the supposition you were lying to them. No allowances were made, no quarter given.

But then if I didn't go back——

No, I had to. He'd have to believe me.

There was nothing left of that ghastly night by the time I tottered home and barricaded myself behind the door. I couldn't have slept if there had been. I was afraid of whom I'd meet in my sleep if I did. “Let Beulah fix you up, child; she'll show you how.”

I sat there holding my head in both hands—it seemed to throb and burn so with remorse—an untouched glass of water with a few drops of spirits of ammonia sprinkled in it standing beside me. After a while the world switched over to sunlight again, and that made it better, made it more bearable. I drew up the shades and hooked back the curtains; I couldn't get enough of it into the room. It seemed so healing and so cleansing. It was like God's own soapsuds, sparkling on the panes and lathering the walls, rinsing my face and tired eyes.

After a while I dozed, sitting there like that, fully dressed in the chair and with a pillow packed behind me, and when I woke up was when I first started to be afraid to go back.

It would be tonight, and tonight was coming soon. Awfully soon.

“He won't do anything to you if you go,” I kept reassuring myself. “It's if you don't go that—something's liable to happen to you.”

And again I was overcome by the same argument that had proved so effective outside his house the second time I went there. “If you're going to give the undertaking up now, then why did you begin it at all in the first place? You mean all last night's terror of soul is to be for nothing? No, you've got to go ahead with it now, finish it out to the end, come what may.”

Night came down like a series of curtains one behind the other. First transparent, simply filming the daylight, then deeper, so that it could scarcely peer through any more, finally black with accumulated density, blotting it out altogether.

It was nearly time now. I couldn't eat, and the pits of my hands were cold.

I rose and crossed the room in the dark, and I went over to restore the curtains and shades to their normal position now that the sun was gone. Then I stopped in the act and looked intently out. I knew the look of the street by night so well already; that was the only reason I saw him there. I knew that doorway down there should not have a darkened curvature to it. It should be a straight up-and-down line, not go in and out and in again, like a projecting shoulder, then waist, then hipbone. There was someone standing in it.

It brought back last night too vividly to mind, and perhaps for that reason rather than any current logic of disbelief I forced myself to turn away from the window. If there was someone there, it had nothing to do with me; why should it have?

“You know it does. You and no one else. You alone, of all the dwellers on this street.”

I sat for a while in the depths of the unlighted room, curbing continual impulses to go back and stealthily pry again.

Someone sent by Mordaunt, to make sure I kept the appointment, didn't abscond with the rest of his profit? It must be that; who or what else could it be?

I said to myself, “Sometimes a car turns that lower corner down there on too wide an arc, and if its lights are on high enough their beam will flicker along that entire side of the street, wash over the walls and doorways as it swings into position. I've seen that happen myself. He doesn't know that, isn't expecting it. I do.”