Voyage into Violence (23 page)

Mrs. Macklin turned from the counter and walked back to the table. Her black eyes were, now, very sharp. Yet she walked to the place where she had played and did not, until she had reached it, stood behind Barron, seem to realize that her place was gone. When she did, she touched Barron on the shoulder, and said something.

He did not turn. His shoulders moved only slightly, in a shrug. She tapped his shoulder, and then he moved his head in a quick, impatient gesture, and said something which they could not hear.

“
Rien ne va plus
,” the croupier said, and the little ball bounced in the spinning wheel, and now Barron, like the others, seemed to have eyes for nothing else.

“—and black,” the croupier said, and his rake moved over the table, and four more chips joined Barron's four. This time he picked two of them up.

Mrs. Macklin took both of his shoulders and pulled at them. “Young man!” she said, and her voice was high, now; now her voice carried above the other voices in the room. “Get up and—”

The croupier made the faintest motion of his head. He said, “
Messieurs et mesdames, faites vos jeux
,” and seemed unperturbed as bets were placed.

“
My
place,” Mrs. Macklin said, and her voice was very high and shrill. “Show you you—”

“—and black,” the croupier said, as the wheel stopped.

Barron reached out and took two more chips from the board. He stacked those that remained. He paid no attention to Mrs. Macklin, although still she pulled at his shoulders.

A man in a white dinner jacket—a man with a young-old face and dark eyes which said nothing—came behind Mrs. Macklin. He touched her shoulder, very gently, with great politeness. He smiled, and the smile was pleasant. He said something in a low voice, and she turned and raised a sudden thin hand and plunged it into her disordered, improbable hair. The man's lips moved, and the smile remained. But his hand tightened a little on her shoulder. Across the room, they could see it tighten.

And they could see her body tense; could see the hand come down from her hair and, like the other, clench into a fist. The man's smile did not change; his eyes did not change. He seemed unconscious of the tenseness of the tight-faced woman, although he looked down at her. His lips moved again, very slightly.

Then, after an instant in which the tenseness of her body seemed to increase, Mrs. Macklin shrugged her shoulders, very slightly. He moved aside and she walked back to the bank's counter and stacked chips on it, and for the chips received bills—not many bills. The man in the white dinner jacket had walked behind her to the counter. Now, with the same smile, he stepped aside and bowed. Mrs. Olivia Macklin walked, very straight, toward the door. She did not seem to see the Norths and the Weigands near it. Like Folsom before her, she did not seem to see anybody. She went out of the gaming room.

“All very smoothly done,” Jerry North said. “All very much under control.”

“Oh,” Bill said. “Right. The government keeps an eye on things. Well—” But then he looked back at the roulette table. The wheel had stopped again.

“—and red,” the croupier said, and his rake came out and Barron's were among the chips garnered by the house. Barron watched them go and seemed without interest. He looked at the door through which Mrs. Macklin had gone. He stepped back, then, and nodded and smiled at the man who had waited longer. The man moved in. Barron walked to a dice table and stood looking at the play, but he made no offer to join it.

“The daughter had him come?” Pam said.

Bill hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “Yes. I think so. You might put it that way.”

12

They walked through the foyer and down the shallow stairs to the patio. The air was fresh, after the smoke of the gaming room, and the lights soft. And the show was on again. The girls, this time, wore long, much ruffled, white dresses (with no backs) and the men were in white, too—pleated white
guayaberas
, and white trousers and white shoes and white straw hats. They did an intricate samba—at least Pam, walking beside Bill Weigand, stopping with him on the bottom step to watch, thought it was a samba. It was very lively, certainly. It involved stamping. It was prettily gay under the spots; the dancers were in a pool of light with the tables and the people at them a low, dusky bank around the pool. From among the dancers, who parted to let her through, a dark girl danced—a girl incredibly slender yet softly shaped. She was not wearing a ruffled white dress; it was, at first glance, impossible to believe she was wearing anything at all, which would have been, Pam thought, perfectly appropriate. (It was not, on closer inspection, and by the narrowest of margins, true.)

“I wish Jerry hadn't come,” Pam said. “Dorian—even Dorian—probably wishes you hadn't come.” She looked at the slender, dancing girl again. “It isn't fair,” Pam North said. The girl, dancing now before the others, with the others as a swaying background of white against her exquisite darkness, rippled. “My,” Pam said. “Oh my oh my. Such a gay people. And so—direct.”

She took Bill's arm and led him toward their table. She said, “You know, don't you? You get a certain way.”

“I think so,” Bill said, and held out a chair for her, and then a chair for Dorian. “It seems to add.”

“A common denominator?” Pam said, and they looked at her. Very slowly, very carefully, Jerry poured scotch into their glasses; very carefully, he added ice and soda. “Between elephants and apples,” Pam said.

“Oh,” Bill said. “No. It's more deciding what to add—what is extraneous. You see—”

He was interrupted. Respected Captain J. R. Folsom approached and looked down at them. He had entirely regained his ruddiness and seemed in enviable spirits. “Lost my lady friend,” he said. “Red-haired lady friend.” He looked at Bill Weigand. “Thought you might like to know,” he said.

“Did you?” Bill Weigand said. “Pull up a chair.”

Folsom shook his head. He continued to stand.

“Went for broke, the lady did,” he said. “Like they say.”

“She tell you that?”

“Nope,” Folsom said. “But—I heard. I don't say flat broke. Just bent down. Maybe not that. But she dropped a wad.”

“And you,” Bill said, “made a wad.”

“Didn't see you there,” Folsom said. “But have it your way. Baby's in shoes.”

“And,” Bill said, “shoe boxes?”

Folsom looked down at him. The gray eyes seemed now, as they had seemed before, by far the coolest thing about J. R. Folsom.

“Never out of shoe boxes,” Folsom said, “if you want to beat around the bush.”

“It seems,” Bill said, “to be your bush. If you want to tell me something, tell it.”

“Nothing to tell,” Folsom said. “I told you there wasn't. Only, nobody minds having a little ready cash. What with this g.d. income tax. Sorry, ladies.”

“That's quite all right, Mr. Folsom,” Pam said. “One hears so many expressions.” He looked at her sharply. She was very innocent.

“Like I was saying,” Folsom said, giving Pam up for Bill Weigand. “If there was any little difficulty—not that there was—if there
seemed
to be any little difficulty, the galloping dominoes took care of it. The old s.o.b.—sorry, ladies.” He looked suspiciously at Pam North, who said nothing. “The gentleman we were talking about, he's up the creek with his little scheme. See what I mean?”

“At any rate,” Bill said, “I hear what you say, Mr. Folsom.”

“Thought you would,” Folsom said. “Not to change the subject, you see that little dark girl?”

“Yes.”

“Wow!” Folsom said. “All I can say is, Wow. Wouldn't go in Worcester. All the same—”

“Right,” Bill said, and then Mr. Folsom left them. He kept his hands carefully in his pockets, presumably to hold the money down.

“Meaning,” Jerry said, “that he won enough to square his accounts?”

“Which don't need squaring,” Bill said. “Yes, that seems to be the size of it.”

“Except, of course,” Dorian said, “that he could hardly have known Saturday night that he was going to win money today.”

“Right,” Bill said.

“And,” Pam said, “elephants or apples—or good red herring?”

But Bill did not seem to hear her. The show had danced away, the lights had come up around the tables. Bill stood and looked around.

Captain Cunningham was alone at the table, where previously he had sat with the Furstenbergs. People were trickling to the dance floor, and the Furstenbergs were not among them. Barron was, again with the blond girl. But, as Bill watched, he led her to the edge of the floor, bowed to her, went off among the tables. Folsom was moving, with some resolution, toward the foyer—Bill thought it likely that he was taking his money home, and thought it was wise of him, although Havana is safer than many cities. Mrs. Macklin was not in sight, and when he discovered that, Bill Weigand frowned slightly. There were, of course, many places she could have gone—and one of them, of course, was back to the gaming room. If she had, it might account for the absence, also, of Hilda Macklin. On the other hand, they might both have gone back to the ship, although it was only—Bill looked at his watch on his wrist. “Only” was perhaps not the word to use. It was after one in the morning.

Captain Cunningham stood up and looked around. He saw Bill standing, and briefly raised his glass in salute. Then Cunningham walked toward the wide stairs. The Buckleys from Kansas stood at the top of the stairs and looked into the patio, and, even from the distance, there seemed to be a kind of delighted wonder in their young faces. Then, hand in hand, they walked toward the dance floor. The North American orchestra was back, swinging through “The St. Louis Blues.” The dance floor filled and the night was young, dressed in gay colors for youth.

And, over the music, over the voices, someone screamed. The scream was wordless—high pitched, rising higher. It seemed to come from a distance and from the air.

In the instant, as the scream ended, everything stopped. The music stopped, and the voices stopped. It was, oddly, as if someone had switched off all the lights, although the lights burned. Then the scream came again.

People around the tables were standing, by then. On the dance floor, people were frozen for a moment, then broke from the postures of the dance and looked around and looked up. One man on the floor held his hand up to his forehead, as if to shield his eyes—as if he were trying to see something in the sun.

“There!” Jerry North said, and pointed, but by then Bill Weigand had seen, and had started to run among the tables toward the castle tower—the make-believe tower, which had seemed pleasantly ridiculous, and did not now—not now with two figures swaying, struggling on the narrow observation platform, against the platform's low rail—fifty feet above the flagstone pavement around the tower.

The scream came again. It was impossible to tell which of the two struggling at the top of the tower was the one to scream. It was impossible to identify the two. They swayed, grasping each other, in the soft green light which washed the tower. Their shadows elongated, struggled against the glass housing the platform circled.

Several were running toward the tower now—dark figures racing among the tables, then among the dimly, prettily colored palm trees. Someone knocked a chair over, and it clattered on the paving of the patio. And someone dropped a glass, and the sound was shattering.

Tenuous in the pale light, the two at the top of the tower seemed, from below, to be locked in a grotesque dance. There was a kind of unreality about their movements, as if theirs were the pantomimed struggle of ballet. But then one of them—it was impossible to tell which—screamed again, and the scream was real—hideously real. It seemed to shatter the night. It was a woman's scream.

Then, from somewhere in the area of the dance floor, a shaft of light leaped into the air and went questing over the top of the tower. It lost itself in air. It dropped to a point midway of the tower's column and climbed up—climbed slowly, as if climbing were an effort.

By then many had reached the paved area beneath the tower and stood there, staring up, reflected greenish light on their faces. A man shouted. “Watch out!” he shouted, meaninglessly. “Watch out!”

The shaft from the light climbed to the platform and held there, and held the figures in it. One was shorter than the other—the shorter was a woman, bent back against the low railing now, arched over it; hair hanging down. She screamed up at the sky, and now there was a strange note in the screaming, as if it came through water.

She clutched at her adversary—taller, slender, clad also in white. The light steadied, and the taller, the one who struggled silently, seemed to move like a woman too. But she was shadowed, as the light rose from beneath them, by the one she struggled with. And who held, who thrust away, that was concealed by their swaying bodies.

One of those who looked up from below—this one a woman—gave a shuddering cry—a long, shaking “Ahhhh!” of terror.

The woman pressed against the rail seemed to lean farther back, seemed to teeter on the rail. As if a signal had been given, those nearest the tower's base backed from it—backed into those behind them, so that the whole increasing crowd of those staring up swayed back, in a motion like a wave's.

But then the two swirled away from the rail, still in their strange dance. They swayed on the narrow platform which circled the light housing—the housing in which, it appeared, there was no light. It seemed now, from below, that the taller of the two tried to push free. They moved part way around the top of the tower, and, momentarily, the light lost them.…

Bill Weigand and Jerry North ran among trees. They ran on grass, then on the circle of flagged pavement around the tower. Jerry led, because he knew the way. But when they reached the door into the tower, Bill Weigand checked him, and Bill went first.