Black Alibi (26 page)

Manning’s warning came back to her:
Don’t tangle with anyone, you may frighten him off
. “No, don’t!” she cried, so alarmedly that he drew back a step. “Please! Please don’t stand here, please leave this table—”

He was persistent. Business must have been rotten these nights, with everyone staying away. “Just one small dance the senorita refuses?” he coaxed.

She gave in finally, as the quickest and easiest way of getting rid of him. After all, of the two evils, it would look less suspicious—to out there—to be seen dancing with him than to have him stand parleying beside her table for any length of time.

She got up and he led her back inside on his arm like some kind of a living trophy. There were three others of his kind sitting disconsolately around the dance floor, one to a table. Probably they worked on a percentage basis.

She’d never tangoed before. She didn’t have to now. He tangoed for both of them. He was good at it, as one should be at one’s livelihood. Even the scissors step she found herself doing without realizing it. Over his shoulder she could still see the trees out there. Whichever way she turned, they were waiting, on three sides of her, out beyond the hedge, as if to say: “We’ll get you. You’re coming. We’ll get you.”

Even a gigolo, a gigolo to cling to, was better than being alone with the darkness lying in wait all around.

After they’d gone once around the black glass, she said: “What’s the name of that, they’re playing?”

He had to hum the words over to himself first in Spanish, to marshal them for translation.

Adios muchachos, companeros de mi vida,

Se acabaron para mi todas las farras—

“I do not speak the English very well. It is of someone whose life is soon to finish. It say, ‘Goodby, boys, my life companions, For me is ending—

Even the music. “Please don’t go ahead,” she said in a sick voice. “Will you excuse me now? I’d like to go back to my table.”

“I have displeased the senorita?”

“Not at all. I have a headache. Would you mind telling me how much I owe you?” They were back at the table by now.

He wasn’t in the least dismayed. “The senorita is too generous. She did not complete her dance—”

“Take this anyway,” she said, to get rid of him, and touched his hand briefly.

Then she was alone again, a motionless, doomed figure sitting passively under a blood-red lantern. She sat on for half an hour after she’d finished her coffee. That sense of being watched kept growing stronger all the time. Her very skin felt it, kept trying to crawl away from it. She had to keep fighting, not to turn her head and look. Once she almost had an impression of something luminous, phosphorescent, glowing out at her through the bushes. She had to throw down a spoon and then stoop for it, the impulse to turn and see was so strong. When she had straightened up in her chair again, she could resist, better. By then it was gone anyway, whatever it had been; the corners of her eyes no longer felt it.

It seemed so silly, somehow, expecting to meet violence, perhaps even death itself, face to face within a short while; expecting to have to claw and rake at it with your bare hands, in defense of your life perhaps; and yet to be sitting here now dipping those same fingers into a bowl of tepid water with a gardenia floating around in it. If she lived, she knew, she’d never be able to look at finger bowls again without thinking of this night, living it over again, if only for a moment or two. At some gay dinner party years from now, in the midst of the wine and the chatter, her face would suddenly pale and her laughter freeze as the dark memory came back, and people would wonder why and ask her.
If she lived
.

The last thing she did before leaving was to crumble up a roll, gather the pieces in a napkin. “For the swans,” she smiled at the waiter as she paid her check.

“At this hour?” The terrified, unspoken warning on his face was plain to read.

“I like animals,” she said. (“But not jaguars,” she added to herself.) She stood up, turned, walked slowly out toward the break in the hedge. The carriage glided up. She put her silver shoe to the step. “Here I go,” she thought sickly.

Then she was in, and the lanterns were withdrawing through the trees. One last one, a green one, lingered on longer than all the others, seen through a break in the trees. Then that snuffed Out too, and the Madrid was gone into the night.

He started to whip up his horse, anxious to get out of the accursed Bosque as fast as he could.

“Drive siowiy,” she ordered sharply. “It’s too nice a night to rush.” Then when they came to the side road, “Turn down this way.”

“Ah, no, senorita,” the old fellow almost whimpered. “Not down there. That is exactly where it happened the last time.”

I ought to know if anybody does, she thought dismally. Aloud she said, “Don’t you read the papers? It’s on the other side of town now. It’s not in here any more!” This in English; then in her capsule Spanish, and with gestures to complete the thought: “No here.
Otra parte
.”

He understood, language not being the barrier between human beings that is commonly supposed. “They may be mistaken,” he whined.

“In, in!” she insisted.

He headed his horse around and reluctantly turned in where she had told him to. It was a long leafy tunnel in the moonlight, tree meeting tree above. A greenish-black tube, freckled with silver. Infinitely beautiful, infinitely dangerous. The horse’s hoofs resounded along its empty length like a knell.

It was lifeless. The public was giving the Bosque a wide berth these nights, all but the one main driveway that led straight out. It stretched on for a while, straight as a ramrod. Then it started making that leisurely turn at last that told the lake was coming near.

The moon wasn’t as bright as the other night, it was waning now, but the lake still flashed out beside her like a sheet of hammered silver when at last they had reached that place where the road drew nearest to it and it could be seen. That unforgettable place. The screen of trees drew back, like a curtain parting for the last act of a tragedy, and there was just a grassy slope left between her and it.

She could hardly breathe any more, she was choking with rigidly suppressed yet steadily mounting terror. “Stop here,” she managed to articulate.

He either didn’t hear her or pretended not to, as an excuse for going on past with the least possible delay. She had to strike him lightly and repeatedly on the back, as if she were knocking on a door. “
Para, entiende?
I said stop here. Wait for me. I want to feed those birds a minute.”

“Ah no, senorita, válgame dios!” he wailed almost in falsetto. “That is the very way in which it happened to that other—”

“Did you hear what I said?” she snapped. “You won’t get a centavo that’s coming to you if you don’t do as you’re told!”

The carriage fell motionless. She rose up in it, stepped down to the ground. The stillness was unearthly now that the horse had stopped. It was malign in itself, it was so unnatural. One foot forward, the next forward, the first forward again. The roadway changed to turf, but the ground remained level the first few steps. Then it started downward, in a gentle, grassy decline. It wasn’t hard to manage even in high-heeled silver slippers, it wasn’t steep enough for that, but it was all she could do to keep walking in a straight line, she felt like reeling unsteadily from side to side. She was almost drunk with terror. “I must keep my head clear; if I don’t, I’m a goner,” she warned herself.

The carriage was slowly going up over her head, behind her, as the roadway rose. She could never be so frightened again for the rest of her life. She had to keep talking to herself inwardly. “Manfling’s somewhere around you, you know it, even if you can’t see him. Look for the locket first. Then stray out of sight of the coachman. Smoke a cigarette. Shoot through your bag, without pulling it out, if you have to— Is it that bush there, over to the left, coming up toward you? No, that’s just a bush.”

The carriage had gone up as high as it could now. It was starting to sink from sight behind the top of the rampart.

The gleaming water was coming slowly up toward her. The swans, already detecting that she had something in her hand for them, were starting to course gracefully in to meet her along its moon-burnished surface.

For over three hours now those same swans, floating asleep, had been the only signs of life around Manning, inert as they were. The rest was just a piebald still life of moonlight and shadow. Not a stir came from the reeds where Belmonte crouched concealed, and if he hadn’t told him where he was going to be, Manning wouldn’t have known anyone was in them.

The circulation had long ago begun to leave his own extremities. He pinched and kneaded them from time to time, in preference to shifting his position to ease them, but it was a losing battle. He could scarcely feel the pinches themselves after a while.

The moon was waning now from the full that had witnessed Sally O’Keefe’s death, but it was still large enough to cast an aluminum sheen where it was unobstructed. He looked down along his own curved length carefully, to make sure none of the coinlike disks of it that splattered through the leaves struck him in any place that might be revealing from the ground: the white of his hands, the dull sheen of his silk socks, the glossy toecaps of his shoes. The slightest thing like that might have been sufficient to indicate, to a wary antagonist, something that didn’t belong up in a tree.

The strain had become almost unendurable. He wondered whether Belmonte was feeling it as much as he. Worse, probably; he had nothing to rest his back against. He didn’t bother looking at his watch. That was a fool’s stunt, which always made time seem to stretch out longer than it was. When she came, that would be the right time. Until she came, they’d wait—even if it meant staying up here in this tree until he fell out of it from numbness. They weren’t in this for fun.

The slow clop-clop of a horse sounded far off in the distance somewhere, and sound had come back into the world. It was like something carried through a hollow tube or bore, it had that sort of blurred resonance to it. It died out again, then came back once more, clearer, nearer, than before. Was that she, now? It must be, who else could it be? A carriage alone on the Bosque at this hour, and coming this way. Nothing else had traversed that road up there since he had taken up his position. Pleasure drives were a thing of the past in the Bosque these nights.

The hoofbeats were clear and ringing now, belltoned almost, for there was nothing in the vast stillness around to compete with them, and approaching more closely every moment. Manning caught himself taking deeper breaths than he had a minute ago; that was his body instinctively trying to store up oxygen for possible approaching action. On they came, jewel clear, so calm, so unhurried—in the evenness of rhythm that is nature’s gift to the horse, clop-clop, cloppety-clop. In other circumstances there would have been something almost soothing in their cadence. At last he could even make out the slight creak of the axles, the whisper of the rubber-tired wheels along the roadbed.

A woman’s voice said something. The hoofbeats faltered to a stop. There was a slight protest from the carriage step, weighted down, released again. He could hear her next remark plainly, for she had raised her voice slightly: “You won’t get a centavo if you don’t do as you’re told!”

He couldn’t see the vehicle itself, for there was too much overhanging foliage in the way obscuring it, but a moment later the white of her gown came into full view, coruscating in the moonlight, up there on top of the rampart, and she started to walk slowly down the open grassy slope under his very eyes.

If she felt fear—and she must have—she gave no sign. Her bearing was matchless. Her grace, the fluid dignity of her carriage. To him, at any rate, there was nothing strained or rigid in the way she moved. Just the precautionary hesitancy of a woman dressed in her best, picking her way delicately in order not to soil her shoes or gown.

He narrowed his eyes in admiration of her poised self-control. It took a woman to put on a show like that, a man never could have, never in the wide world.

She came abreast of the tree that hid him, passed on down without a glance over at it. She couldn’t, of course, know exactly where he was. All she had to rely on was his assurance that he and Belmonte would be watching from somewhere close by.

The swans were gliding in to meet her, each leaving a spreading fan of ripples in its wake. They’d already spotted the little white ball the napkin of crumbs made in her hand.

She reached the water’s edge at last. Manning was now roughly midway between her and the carriage. He was watching the terrain around him on all sides, now, more than he was her. Nothing could get at her from in front, across the water, and to reach her from the rear it would have to pass his tree first. Belmonte’s position protected her on the right, and his tree, again, did as much for her on the left.

He saw her looking for the locket. With her free hand she had lifted the hem of her skirt a little to avoid wetting it and was picking her way along the water’s edge, head attentively bent. The hungry birds, meanwhile, were banked nearly solidly around her on the water side, jostling and nudging one another aside, and the whole body of them moving first up the shore, then down it, in company with her own slow coursing.

Behind her heroically oblivious back, nothing stirred, nothing moved. There wasn’t a rustle from the dark feathery masses of bush and underbrush all about. Not the snap of a twig.

She’d found it at last. He saw her dip suddenly, draw something from the outermost inch or two of water that winked in the moonlight as she straightened with it, holding it semialoft. She hovered with proprietary delight over it for a moment or two, in clever pantomime. Drying it, turning it this way and that. Then she put it in the bag on her wrist. Now she began her feeding of the swans. Her arm went out toward them, in toward the napkin; held back a moment, then out toward them, in toward the napkin, while she slowly strolled along, a bountiful lady on the banks of the Styx.