Murder for the Bride (12 page)

I had no choice. I could either hang around and wait
for the distinctive silhouette of Haussmann, or I could go on in. They wouldn’t be such fools as to leave the street unwatched. Hanging around might turn out to be exceedingly unhealthy. And there was the additional factor that Haussmann might enter by some other way. It wasn’t likely that such a setup would depend on only one entrance and exit.

By my watch it was almost eleven. One hour to kill. I walked a block and a half to the Café Lafitte. I walked by, slowly, and looked through the windows that front on the sidewalk. There were several groups of customers, and one burly man who stood alone next to the open fireplace in the middle of the room. I didn’t care for his looks, for his air of endless patience. Police patience, it seemed. I kept right on walking, right down Bourbon. At the first bar that looked dimly lighted, I turned in. I found a small table in the shadows. The waiter brought a Scotch. I nursed it along, made it last. The minutes seemed endless.

When at last it was time I left and headed back. I reached the green gate at ten minutes of twelve. The place seemed as deserted as before. I rapped. It was a lonely sound on the quiet street. Nothing happened. I wondered if Jimmy had made himself a fast ten dollars. Just as I started to rap again, the gate opened. The hinges had been well oiled. There wasn’t a sound.

“What do you want?” a cold low voice asked.

“I’m looking for Abner.”

“Step in. I’ll see if he’s here.”

I stepped into a darkness like the bottom of a mine. No sound. A harsh white light blinded me. It clicked off and the darkness was greater than before.

“Who told you Abner might be here?”

“Jimmy.”

The light came on again and was turned on me at waist level. Enough of it reflected from my shirt so that I could see the pale oval of a face behind the light, but I could make out no features.

“Count it out.”

A fifty, two twenties, and a ten. He took the money. The light went out. In a matter of seconds soft footsteps
approached. I guessed that some signal had been given. I was ordered to follow the new one. He took me back through darkness. My left hand brushed the shaggy wall of the warehouse. I didn’t like any part of it.

I
t was in the warehouse itself, on the second floor. We rounded a corner and ahead was a narrow aisle between packing cases, a light at the end of the aisle.

“Go in and find a seat,” my guide whispered. “No talking.”

I went slowly down the aisle. At first I could smell dust, a tang of rodents, a scent of mildew and damp rot. Then slowly a musky incense grew stronger. It did not cancel out the warehouse smell. It floated strongly on top of it, like a heavy sustained trumpet note riding on a dim rhythm beat.

The aisle led to an open space. Directly ahead was a raised stage. Two underpowered floodlights were mounted on the front edge of the stage, slanting back toward a dusty wine-colored backdrop that could have been the curtain from some movie house long extinct. I could get no clear idea of the size of the room. Just the impression of a high ceiling. I could feel expectancy around me, but I could not see the audience. I shut my eyes tightly for ten seconds, then opened them wide. It worked—a little. Audience chairs became visible. Little uncomfortable folding chairs. The kind that can be rented from undertakers.

The occupied chairs were merely heavier shadows. I moved up and found an empty chair. Slowly my vision improved. I saw that I was four rows from the improvised stage. Around me I could hear the stir of breathing, an infrequent rustle of cloth, the shuffle of feet, the scrape of a chair leg. On my right, two feet from my right hand,
was the red glow of a cigarette end. It moved upward in a low arc to waiting lips. It brightened, made a pinkish glow on a face. A woman’s face. It lasted just long enough for me to see that she was young, that she wore a black mask across her eyes. The cigarette went back down in the same slow arc.

There was nothing to do but wait. I tried to pierce the darkness and find the oversized shadow that might be Haussmann. A pair of new customers arrived. And then a single. And then a trio. They found chairs and settled themselves to wait. I counted the house. I couldn’t be completely accurate, but it seemed to be more than thirty.

Better than three thousand dollars. As near as I could guess, there were ten chairs in each row, and six rows. A full house would bring in six thousand. It wasn’t the sort of business you’d want to make tax declarations on.

Around me was sickness. A disease of the soul. I could taste it. Not an uncommon disease. Cans of movie film can be rented. Still pictures are distributed furtively. The market is always big. It seems strange that this should be so. It is the visual perversion of an elemental drive. It is filth. It is social cancer. I could sense the dry-mouthed waiting around me, the impatient thud of pulse.

When the man moved onto the stage there was a slow sigh from the darkness. He was a magnificent Negro, his body an oiled symmetric blackness, his heavy face full of the elemental and regal dignity of the Watusi. He wore a loincloth and a necklace of bone and feathers. A bright red stick pierced the central membrane of his nose, forcing the wide nostrils even wider. Across his gleaming chest were three broad bands of pale aqua. He carried a squat barbaric drum from which dangled heavy chains of copper coins, jangling faintly as he walked. He sat cross-legged in the center of the stage, his back almost touching the curtain, the drum in front of him. He looked out into the darkness with somber contempt.

The room grew very still. The man touched the drum lightly, the faint boom barely audible. And he touched it again, as though casually. After a long pause he tapped it twice in quick succession. Thus was the basic thread of the rhythm born. Slowly he increased the beat, and
as he began to use more force, the strands of coins added their faint music. Comfort left his face as he began to lose himself in the increasing complications of the beat. His eyes grew glazed with concentration and lips pulled back from teeth that blazed white.

I had planned to be the objective observer. But that drumbeat reached back into that part of you that is forever a savage, that still dances on the jungle floor while beasts cry shrilly in the night. The rhythm took you out of objectivity and made you one with the sick pulse of those who sat near you in the darkness.

A woman spun into the light. She was as black as the man. Frantic white showed all the way around the pupils of her eyes, and the cords of her throat were taut. Her breasts were heavy, dark-nippled, her loins like the night. Every motion was built upon the drumbeat, was complementary to it, and the slap of her bare feet on the floor was a rhythmic offbeat.

The rhythm drugged me so that I barely noticed the second man who spun out into the night. I barely noticed the short stick, the whir of the three-thonged whip.

When the blow landed across the naked back, when the blood gleamed dark, it was as though someone had dashed ice water into my face. It brought me out of it, brought me back to shame that I could have been lost for so long. The blows continued to land, and nausea thickened in my throat. Once again I became conscious of the people around me as individuals instead of a dark entity. What had sobered me instantaneously seemed only to heighten their intense identification with the act. I remembered reading of the cult of the flagellants, of bloody Easters in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Not for me. Not ever for me.

I sat and fought physical illness as the frenzy on the stage continued, as more actors entered on cue, as unmentionable acts began to be mingled with the pain and the blood. I tried to keep my eyes turned away from the stage, but it was much the same as the horrid fascination of an open wound. To look at it makes you ill, and yet you cannot cease looking at it.

I grew abruptly aware of the masked woman at my
right when, with a low moan of torment, she began to clutch at me with her hands, began to writhe against me. I pushed her away with such force that she fell from the chair. No one seemed to notice. I began to detect other stirrings of sodden violence in the dark audience. The woman got up from the floor and plunged forward to the stage. Within an incredibly short time she was on the stage, wearing only the mask. She was spectator and participant. As I saw the manner of things that were being done to her, I dropped from the chair onto my hands and knees and crawled back into the greater darkness. With my face close to the dry wood of the packing cases, I was gaspingly ill. I got weakly to my feet and turned to look back at the stage. Strangely, it had lost the power to touch me. They were white and brown and black marionettes. They were not real. They could not be human beings. Just toys that writhed and jerked as the clever strings were pulled.

A voice said, close to my ear, “Soon it will be over. You can leave now, if it makes you sick. The others will leave, one by one, in the darkness.”

“I’ll wait until it’s over,” I said thickly. The stranger moved away. After enduring all this, I could not stand the thought of missing Haussmann. But if it remained dark, I would never find him.

And then I got the idea. The only way I could pick out Haussmann was to get between him and the lights. The back row of seats was empty. I took the one on the end and slumped down to bring my eyes on a level with the back of the chair in front of me. The fourth chair I tried disclosed a massive silhouette two rows in front. I moved a bit to the side. They had told me his blond hair was worn long in back. The silhouette of the head matched. One more test. I moved up directly behind him. He sat like a stone image of a man, absolutely motionless, his eyes on the stage. I tipped over the chair I was sitting on, and rammed my shoulder against the back of his chair.

He turned his head sharply and in a high voice said, “Excuse me, please.” It was accented. Not much. Not enough to be “Eggsguse me, blease,” but with a bare
suggestion of the memory of Weber and Fields. It was good enough for me.

Now I had to stick with him. And that might be more of a trick than I bargained on. The hour-long act had passed its crescendo. The stage crowd was thinning, and the drumbeat was subtly slowing. When he moved with surprising lightness and quickness for his great bulk, I nearly lost him in the darkness. He moved toward the left of the stage. I scrambled after him, careless of noise. He stopped and bent over a figure that lay on the floor in the darkness. At this angle the light was stronger on his face. I saw his blond hair. Some of the customers were beginning to leave. I saw him fumbling in the darkness and it took a few moments to figure out that he was gathering up garments. He lifted the figure by the stage, and I saw the mask across her eyes. She stirred weakly as he clumsily fitted the clothes on her slack body.

The drumbeat had dwindled almost into silence. Sweat had almost removed the aqua bands across the chest of the savage drummer.

In the silence I heard the woman say, “Who are you? Who are you?”

“Put your arms in the sleeves,” Haussmann said.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Her voice was thin, querulous.

His shoulder moved a trifle and I heard the smack of a hard palm on flesh. “Be still. You come with me.”

She made no further protest outside of the occasional thin whine. He got her to her feet just as the drummer stood up, picked up the drum, and stalked slowly into the shadows, his feet scuffling with weariness.

“Let me help you with her, sir,” I said, hoping he’d mistake me for part of the management.

“Take her other arm,” he said arrogantly.

“You came with her, of course, sir.”

“Of course.”

We walked her back around the chairs toward the beginning of the corridor between the packing boxes. The management said, “One at a time.”

“We’re helping this woman,” I said casually.

“O.K. Get her out of the neighborhood as fast as you can.”

“Take her,” Haussmann said. He walked ahead, his shoulders almost brushing the packing cases on either side. I struggled along with the woman. She was like a rag doll. She was making feeble efforts to walk. I sweated and cursed her in whispers.

Outside the night air was a bit cooler. Someone held the green gate open and we went outside. Haussmann turned to the left and walked almost to the corner before he stopped and waited. As I came up he yanked her away from me.

“All right,” he said.

“I want to go home,” the woman whined. The street light was near enough so that I could see that her clothes were of good quality.

He shook her. “Shut up! I take you home.”

“Who are you?” she asked forlornly.

“Please,” Haussmann said to me, with a small bow from the waist. “You are not needed any longer.”

I shrugged and walked back into the darkness. They went around the corner. I waited ten seconds, then hurried diagonally across the street and went up to the corner. He was hurrying her along. I could still hear her thin complaints. I followed them for a block and a half. He turned down a narrow alley. I risked a look. Thirty feet down the alley three wooden steps led up to a blue door. The woman sat on the bottom step, her head on her knees. Haussmann was inserting a key into a lock in the blue door. The door swung inward. He reached down and lifted her by one arm with effortless strength. The door swung shut, and as it clicked the low-wattage bulb over the door went out.

I went cautiously down the alley. A tin can rolled noisily as I kicked it. I froze. A cat made a hideous sound in the darkness and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I wanted to find some window I could look into. Three other doorways opened into the alley. I went to the end and found that it was blocked by a high stucco wall.

As I turned back I saw, outlined against the faint light of the street, the bulky towering figure of Haussmann.

“Who is there?” he called softly.

I did not answer.

He took three slow steps toward me. “Who is there?”

I sang to him. I made it ripe and slurred and off key. “You’re the flow-ah of my hear-r-r-rt, Sweet Ad—o—line!”