The Black Angel (15 page)

His tread scraped the gritty areaway, returning; the iron barrier creaked, clashed into its frame, and riveted closed, and all further freedom of choice in the thing had been taken out of my hands.

I was in now. Good and in.

His foot came down heavily on one of mine in passing. It felt for a minute as though several of those brittle little bones out at the end of it had been pulverized. He didn't apologize, though he must have felt it.

“It's so dark, Doctor. I can't see.”

He was already ahead. “Just follow me,” he said ungraciously. “You can do that much, can't you?”

I moved after him along warped wooden flooring. I thought from footfall to footfall he'd stop and turn without warning and I'd feel those cruelly powerful hands closing in a pincers movement at my——

The shaft wall of an enclosed basement stair sidled past to one side of us. I could feel the lathe and plaster encroachment it made on our right of way and guess what it was by its shallowness and yet continued length.

“Aren't we going up to your office, Doctor?”

“What for?”

That clipped “What for?” sent a redoubled chill through me. He wasn't even making a pretense of continuing the other day's consultation, sketchy as it had been. Whatever was to happen to me was to happen down here, safely belowstairs, where no marks of struggle—or accomplishment—would as readily meet the eye of the Finnish woman or anyone else.

Suddenly the passageway was at an end; we had arrived. I had a single moment in which to notice a difference in texture of the flooring underfoot—the foot can be wonderfully acute in the dark. It was as rotted as before, but perhaps the planks had been laid in a different direction or there was a thin layer of worn-out oilcloth covering them. Without any further warning than that a light suddenly flashed on, and his hand came down again to his side, leaving it swaying restlessly to add to its blinding effect.

A protector of ordinary brown wrapping paper had been rigged around it, and this helped temper its devastating suddenness still further, once the first shock on the eyes had worn off. But it also created a curious tidal mark of shadow evenly around the walls, at about half height, giving a macabre overtone to the scene. Above all was gloom, and we were as in an illuminated pit or fish tank. Then, too, unless we stood directly centered under it, it cut off our heads and upper parts at varying lengths, so that I had the additionally terrifying experience of confronting a half being with a pair of disembodied eyes glimmering wanly in the dun oblivion above the rest of him.

We were in a windowless room at the back of the basement, used either for storage or debris originally and now both. It was impossible to tell which purpose had preceded the other, since there was an equal amount of both categories in sight. There were cans and small sacks of provender, empty glass jugs filmed with dust that must have once been receptacles for the more common medicinal ingredients and solutions, rusted in tin olive-oil drums, broken chairs. I noted, among other things, a discarded sewing machine rusted to a spiny reddish skeleton that once must have made leg-of-mutton sleeves and skirts that trailed along the floor under the diligent fingers of some long-gone feminine dweller in this place.

“Close that,” he said tersely. “Where's your head?”

I drew the door after me and shut us in.

There was a small table there, grimy with age but apparently still reserved for use down here where it was, for it was placed right side up and stood clear. He made several short, swift trips to the outer dimness, so that the shadow severed him like a guillotine knife each time, returning with what looked like a shoe carton, which he placed upon it. And then a slip of paper, which he retrieved from some safekeeping place known only to himself in the surrounding litter and too quickly for me to detect where it was, had I been intent on doing so. And finally, moving between me and the table briefly, but in such a way that I couldn't tell whether it had come from his person or from some shallow drawer beneath, as it cleared into view again it suddenly bore a revolver where there had been none before. It lay at his cuff's end as he seated himself, and, perhaps by accident, its vicious snout was pursed directly at me.

He saw the rotary swirl of panic the pupils of my eyes gave, then glanced at the gun as if identification of the cause were necessary to him. “I always have that in here,” he said. Which, if intended for explanation, was no explanation at all.

He shot his sleeves back to more comfortable length. “Now,” he said. He said it flatly, as though: “The preliminaries are over; now we begin.”

“Sit down on something. That packing case.” The shoe carton, if that was what it was, had descended to his lap, out of my sight. The small oblong of paper he held in one hand; tattooed it diagonally on one point, as though seeking to blunt it against the table top.

“Do you know anybody?”

I moistened my lips, unable to answer. It might have seemed, though, as if I were racking my memory.

“Anybody that would be any good to us?” he added.

I still couldn't find my voice.

“Well, you said the other day that you didn't know anybody she did. I simply wondered if you had any—any contacts of your own.”

This time he answered for me. “No, you haven't.” Then, “It doesn't matter. I can keep you busy.”

From the unseen shoe carton, apparently—though I had no direct proof of this—he took a small envelope. It was the diminutive size that a visiting card or a gift card would be enclosed in. Or perhaps a doctor's prescription, written on a once-folded leaf from a small tab. It had not, however, been left open. The flap was sealed. And so firmly sealed that the mucilage had rippled the edges of the flap a little in drying. It was lumpy with some uneven content, the envelope, so that it was rather bloated at the bottom, squat, but at the top paper-thin, flat, as it was meant to be. Yet as he tendered it to me its gravity of weight shifted so that, receiving it upside down from him, in my hands it became clogged at the top, paper-thin at the bottom, with a sensation of granular shifting.

“How often should I——?”

Sometimes you are saved by the slightest things. He answered me too quickly; that was all that saved me. I had been about to ask, “How often should I take this?”

“As often as you conveniently can.” He was already extending a second one to me.

Simply to free my hand of the first I opened my handbag and mechanically prodded the packet in.

“What're you going to do, carry it in there?” His tone was irritably uneasy, I thought.

There was a semihidden compartment in it, as in many bags, controlled by a zipper running along under the frame on the inside. I drew the zipper across to show him. “Will this be all right?”

“Let me see it.” He took the bag from me, probed with four fingers down within this newly provided orifice. Then he removed the entire bag from my sight, lowered it to his lap in company with the carton. I saw his upper arm moving slightly in its socket, as though its lower extremity were engaged in some transaction. Then I heard a familiar snapping sound I knew by heart, as if the jaws of my bag were being closed by him.

A moment later he had returned it to me, inscrutably shut. “There,” he said, “that'll do for now.”

When my head came up from replacing it on my own lap he locked eyes with me. “Two hundred fifty dollars, understand?”

I didn't. I looked at him.

He said sharply, “Well, don't look at me! Two hundred fifty dollars, understand?”

My mouth said, “Yes, Doctor.”

His finger tips left the slablike handle of the gun; it was only as they quit it they first revealed to me they
had
been on it, so deftly had they sought it.

He handed me the slip of paper. “Now memorize this list a minute and then burn it.” I righted it and looked at it. I heard him say, “After a while you won't need it.”

He waited. “Got it? Now say it back.”

I cleared my throat, recited uncertainly like a kid in school: “Spotless Cafeteria on Canal Street, between eleven and twelve, shredded wheat, the last table against the wall as you go toward the back——”

“You know how to eat shredded wheat, don't you?” he interrupted. “You crumble it up between your fingers until it makes a little pile of crumbs on the plate; don't dig into it whole with your spoon the way some people do. Now go ahead.”

“The Oregon Bar on Third above Forty-ninth, around twelve-thirty, answer a call for ‘Flo Ryan' in the second pay booth.”

“Go on. No, don't look at it.” He pinned it down to the table.

“Ladies' room of the Mimi Club over on Eighth, near Columbus Circle, ask the attendant if she knows Beulah——”

“You left out something.”

“Any time from two on.”

“Just one more. Come on, get some speed into it.”

I groped, finally recalled it. “The Gem all-night movie house on Forty-second, from three o'clock on, last row in the balcony to the left-hand side; ‘Did I drop my scarf under this seat?'”

I drew a deep breath.

“You didn't mention the total,” he said with something like a baleful threat in his eyes. He'd summed up the amounts.

“One thousand,” I said.

“Well, keep that in mind. I wouldn't advise you to show up here short——” He didn't finish it.

I was supposed to come back here with a thousand dollars; I was supposed to get it at these various places. That was the most I knew; the sight of the gun there at hand, imminent, even though he didn't touch it again after that once, its reptilian little bore pointed at me from first to last, drove all coherency of thought beyond those two points out of my mind, wouldn't let my faculties mesh them into any sort of consecutive meaning.

“Give it to me.” He took the piece of paper from me. He struck a kitchen match and burned it to a crisp, shifting his hold on it as it flamed so that it was all consumed. Then he crumbled it between his hands, rolling it like a sort of black meal, until there was nothing of it, just the streaks it had left on his palms. Then he cleaned these by spitting into them and stroking them down his sides.

Some doctor, I thought, controlling the grimace that tried to distort my face.

My eyes sought the gun in veiled speculation. True, it was so close to him he had only to shift his wrist, and I was at the far side of the table, but if I distracted his attention to some distant point in the room and made a quick grasp for it——

Suddenly it had sidled over the edge of the table, was gone, without, however, dropping of its own free weight to the floor, and his hand came up again, empty, from wherever it had withdrawn to, drummed there where it had been.

It wouldn't have done me any good, anyway, I realized; I couldn't force what I wanted out of him simply at gun point. As the gun point left him it would simply be retracted again. It had to come by some more valid means.

“Doctor, I——”

I didn't finish it, because I didn't know what I'd wanted to say.

He seemed to, however. “All right, here,” he said grudgingly. He handed me a filthy-looking ten-dollar bill. “That comes off,” he said.

He rose and his arm went out toward the paper-dimmed light. “Now hurry up and get out.”

He let me open the door and cross the threshold. Then the light was gone, and the scene had never existed at all; everything that had been said, everything that had been done, the way it had all looked became a bad dream, badly remembered.

His footsteps sounded after me as I groped my way down the long, Stygian passage, thrusting it behind me with a continuous motion of one arm. I was frightened of those close-at-hand footsteps of his, fully as frightened again as I had been on the way in; I wanted to break into a run, to fly from them, but I curbed myself, telling myself there was a barrier ahead that would only block me if I did and undo me, to be brave and keep my nerve up a moment longer and then it would be past. Just a moment longer and then it would be past; it would be over; I would be out.

And behind me the footfalls crunched, stealthily surly, at my heels.

It came at last, and he opened it at last, and then as my body almost tried to lurch out, it was in such an ecstasy of impatience, he stayed me with a curt downward chop of his arm and looked carefully about first.

Then finally the brake of his arm dropped and I was free to go. “Monday night, same time,” he said gutturally. “See that you don't forget to show up.”

I clambered up the two steps to sidewalk level.

The last thing he said to me was, “Watch it.”

It was said without compunction, without any fellow feeling of risk shared in common whatever; in a harsh, cruel, calloused sort of way; almost, it was a minor threat in itself. As if: “Be careful of yourself; you're to be the means of bringing me money; that's all I care about.”

I was hurrying up the street now on curiously stiff legs. And as the numbness wore off, for that was what it was, I knew they were going to become weak, refuse to hold me any more. I must get a seat on a bus before that happened. One came to the stop without much delay, fortunately, and the two things blended: the end of my own nervous energy and the thrusting under me of a leather-covered tier to sink back on. So that momentary collapse was averted.

I'd come out of there alive. Nothing had happened to me. That was all I could realize at first. Almost, that was all that mattered. I couldn't get enough air into my lungs. I levered down the bus window beside me to breathe it deeply. Passengers around me turned their heads, annoyed; to them it was a draft, chilly, uncomfortable. To me it was free, grateful, restoring.

That was a dangerous sort of relief. It blurred the memory of many details. It cast a film over the issue. Above all, it made only that one house the focus of danger and construed all current surroundings as thenceforth innocuous, not to be questioned or looked at askance.