Waltz Into Darkness (22 page)

That
she failed to see him out there was incredible. All but the pupils of
her eyes alone were bearing straight toward him. They must have been
deflected, unnoticeable at that distance, toward one or the other of
her table companions, to miss striking him.

The
waiter dropped his restraining hand, the curtainside swept to the
wall, the cameo was blotted out.

He
stood there as stunned, as blasted, as robbed of his powers of
motion, as though that white, searing glimpse--there, then gone
again--had been a flash of lightning which had struck too close and
fused him to the ground. All its effects lacked was to cause him to
fall flat in front of everybody, then and there.

Then
a waiter, hurrying obliviously by, jarred against him, and that set
him into motion at last; as one ball strikes another on a billiard
table, starting it off.

He
was going back the other way, the way he'd come, now, unsteadily,
jostling into tables and the backs of chairs that lined his route,
past momentarily upturned, questioning faces, past a blurred
succession of table lamps like worthless beacons that only confused
and failed to guide him straight through their midst.

He
reached the other end of the raucous place, and the same steward as
before came solicitously to his side.

"Did
you fail to find your party, sir?"

"I--I've
changed my mind." He took out his money-fold, crushed an
incredible ten-dollar bill into the man's hand. "I haven't been
here asking for them. You didn't see me."

He
stumbled up the steps and out, lurching as though he'd filled himself
with wine in those few minutes. Wine of hate, ferment of the grapes
of wrath.

36

He
had at first no very clear concept of what he meant to do. The black
fog of hate that filled his mind clouded all plans and purposes.
Instinct alone had kept him from rushing in through those curtains,
not calculation.

Alone.
Alone he must have her, where no onlookers could save her. He wanted
no hot-mouthed denunciation, quickly over. What was one more
denunciation to her? Her path must have been strewn with them
already. He wanted no public wrangle, in which her coolness and
composure would inevitably have the better of him. "I've never
seen this man before. He must be mad!" One thing and one alone
he wanted, one thing alone he'd have. He wanted her death. He wanted
the few moments just ahead of it to be between the two of them alone.

He
stood for a while outside their hotel, hers and Worth's, to calm
himself, to compose himself. Stood with his back to it, looking out
to seaward. And as he stood, motionless, inscrutable of attitude in
all else, over and over and over again he brought his hand down upon
the wooden railing. At stated intervals, like a pestle, pulverizing
his intentions, grinding them fine.

Then
it slackened, then it stopped. He was ready.

He
turned abruptly and went into the brightly lighted lobby of the
place, purposefully yet not too hurriedly. He went undeviatingly
toward the desk, stopped before it, drummed his fingernails upon its
white-veined black marble top to hasten the clerk's attention.

Then
when he had it: "I'm a friend of Colonel Worth's. I've just left
him and his party at the Grotto."

"Yes,
sir. Can I be of service?"

"One
of the young ladies with us--I believe she's stopping here-- found
the evening chillier than she expected it to be. She's sent me back
for her scarf. She explained to me where it's to be found. May I be
allowed to go up and fetch it for her?"

The
clerk was professionally cautious. "Could you describe her to
me?"

"She's
blonde, and a rather small little person."

The
clerk's doubts vanished. "Oh, that's the colonel's fiancée.
Miss Castle. In Room Two-six. I'll have a bellboy take you up
immediately, sir."

He
jarred a bell, handed over a key with the requisite instructions.

Durand
was taken up to the second floor, in a ponderous latticework
elevator, its shaft transparent on all sides. He noted that a
staircase coiled around this on the outside, rising as it rose,
attaining the same destination at last. He noted that, well and
grimly.

They
went down a hall. There was a brief delay as the bellboy fitted key
to door and tried it. Then as the door opened, the most curious
sensation that he had ever had swept over Durand. It was as though he
were near her all over again. It was as though she had just this
moment stepped out of the room on the far side as he entered it on
the near. She was present to every faculty but vision. Her perfume
still lay ghostly on the air. He could feel her at the ends of all
his pores. A discarded taffeta garment flung over the back of a chair
rustled again as she moved, in memory, in his ears.

It
whipped his hate so, it steeled him to his purpose. He made no false
step, wasted not a move. He went about it as one stalks an enemy.

The
bellboy had remained deferentially beside the open door, allowing him
to enter alone. He remained, however, in a position from which he
could watch what Durand was about.

"She
must be mistaken," Durand said plausibly, for the other's
benefit but as if speaking to himself. "I don't see it over the
chair." He raised the taffeta underslip, replaced it again. "It
must be in one of these bureau drawers." He opened one, closed
it again. Then a second.

The
bellboy was watching him now with the slightly anxious air of a hen
having its nest searched for eggs.

"Women
never know where they leave things, did you ever notice ?"
Durand said to him in man-to-man confidence.

The
boy grinned, flattered at being included into a stage of experience
which he had not yet reached of his own efforts.

Durand,
secretly desperate, at length discovered something in the third
drawer, withdrew a length of flimsy heliotrope voile, sufficient at
least for the purposes of his visit if nothing else.

"This,
I guess," he said, concealing a relieved smile at his good
fortune.

He
closed the drawer, came back toward the door, stuffing it into his
side pocket.

The
boy's eyes, inevitably, were on his prodding hand. His were on the
edge of the door, turned inward so that it faced him. It had, above
the latch-tongue, a small rounded depression. A plunger, controlling
the lock. Just as his own room door, in the other building, had. He
had counted on that.

Before
the boy was aware of it, Durand had relieved him of the duty of
reclosing the door; grasping it by its edge, not its knob, directly
over the plunger, and drawing it closed after the two of them.

He
had, while doing so, changed the plunger, pressing it in, leaving the
door off-lock and simply on-latch no matter whether a key was used or
not.

He
then allowed the boy to complete his appointed task of turning the
key, extracting it and once that was done, distracted him from
testing it further by having a silver half-dollar extended in his
hand for him.

They
went down together, the boy all smiles and congenitally unable to
harbor suspicion of anyone who tipped so lavishly. Durand smiling a
little too, a very little.

He
nodded his thanks to the clerk as he went by, tapped his pocket to
show him that he had secured what he'd come for.

There
wasn't a glint of pity in the stars over him as he came out into the
open night and his face dimmed to its secretive shade. There wasn't a
breath of tenderness in the humid salt breeze that came in from the
Gulf. He'd have her alone, and no one should save her. He'd have her
death, and nothing else would do.

37

He
went from there to his own room, unlocked his traveling bag, and took
out the pistol. The same pistol that one night in New Orleans he'd
told Aunt Sarah he would kill her with. And now, it seemed, the time
was near, was very near. He cracked it open, though he knew already
it was fully charged; and found that it was. Then he sheathed it in
the inside pocket of his coat, which was deep and took it up to the
turn of the butt and held it securely.

He
looked down and noted the heliotrope scarf dangling from his side
pocket, and in a sudden access of hate he ripped it out and flung it
on the floor. Then he ground his heel into the middle of it, and
kicked it away from him, like something unclean, unfit to touch. His
face was putrefied with the hate that reeks from an unburied love.

He
tweaked out the gaslight, and the greenish-yellow cast of the room
turned to moonlight tarnished with lampblack. He stood there in it
for a moment, half-man, half-shadow, as if gathering purpose. Then he
moved, the half of him that was man became shadow, the half that was
shadow became man, as the window beams rippled at his passage. There
was a flicker of citron from the lighted hall outside, as he opened
the door, closed it after him.

He
went up the stairs to the second floor without meeting anybody, and
the hubbub of voices from the several public parlors on the main
floor grew fainter the farther he ascended. Until at last there was
silence. He quitted the staircase at the second, and followed the
corridor along which the page had led him before, with its
flower-scrolled red carpeting and walnut-dark doors. Here for the
first time he nearly met mischance. A lady coming out of her room
caught him midway along it, too far advanced to turn hack. Her eyes
rested on him for an instant only, then she passed him with
discreetly downcast gaze, as befitted their distinction of gender,
and the rustle of her multi-layered skirts sighed its way along the
passage. He gave her time to turn and pass from sight at the far end,
stopping for a moment opposite a door that was not his destination,
as if about to go in there. Then swiftly going on and making for the
door he had in mind, he cast a quick precautionary look about him,
seized the knob, gave it a rapid turn, and was in. He closed it after
him.

There
were the same low night lights burning as before, and she wasn't back
yet. Her presence was in the air, he thought, in faded sachet and in
the warm, quilted voluptuousness the closedfor-hours room breathed.
He couldn't have come any nearer to her than this; only her person
itself was absent. Her aura was in here with him, and seeming to
twine ghost-arms about his neck from behind. He squared his
shoulders, as if to free them, and twisted his neck within his
collar.

He
stood at the window for a while, safely slantwise out of sight,
staring ugly-faced at the moonlight, his face pitted like a smallpox
victim's by the pores of the lacework curtain. Below him there was
the sloping white shed of the veranda roof, like a tilted snowbank.
Beyond that, the smooth black lawns of the hotel grounds. And off in
the distance, coruscating like a swarm of fireflies, the waters of
the inlet. Overhead the moon was round and hard as a medicinal
lozenge. And, to him, as unpalatable.

Turning
away abruptly at last, he retired deeper into the room, and selecting
a chair at random, sank into it to wait. Shadow, the way he happened
to be sitting, covered the upper part of his face, running across it
in an even line, like a mask. A mask inscrutable and grim and without
compunction.

He
waited from then on without a move, and the night seemed to wait with
him, like an abetting conspirator eager to see ill done.

Once
toward the end he took out his watch and looked at it, dipping its
face out into the moonlight. Nearly a quarter after twelve. He had
been in here three full hours. They'd stayed the evening out without
him at the supper pavilion. He clapped the watch closed, and it
resounded bombastically there in the stillness.

Suddenly,
as if in derisive answer, he heard her laugh, somewhere far in the
distance. Perhaps coming up in the lift. He would have known it for
hers even if he hadn't seen her in the alcove at the restaurant
earlier tonight. He would, he felt sure, have known it for hers even
if he hadn't known she was here in Biloxi at all. The heart remembers.

38

He
jumped up quickly and looked around. Strangely enough, for all the
length of time he'd been in the room, he'd made no plans for
concealment, he had to improvise them now. He saw the screen there,
and chose that. It was the quickest and most obvious method of
effacing himself, and she was already nearing the door, for he could
hear her voice now, merrily saying something, close at hand in the
hallway.

He
spread the screen a little more, squaring its panels, so that it made
a sort of hollow pilaster protruding from the wall, and got in behind
there. He could maintain his own height, he found, and still not risk
having the top of his head show. He could see through the perforated,
lacelike, scrolled woodwork at the top, his eyes came up to there.