Veda stands there against the wall, the smoking gun in her hand, moaning: “You have killed a god!” If she really worshiped that thing, her whole world has come to an end. The gun slips from her hand, clatters to the floor. I swoop for it and get it again. She sinks down to her knees, her back against the wall, very still, looking at me. Her breath is coming very fast, she doesn’t betray her feelings in any other way.
Sometimes under the greatest tension, in moments almost of insanity, you can think the clearest. I am almost insane just then. And, in a flash, the whole set-up comes to me, now that it’s too late, now that the old man and the kid are gone. That lunge at the blanket just now has told me the whole story. The thick flannel I found in her drawer!
She held that before the opening in the crate and extracted the venom that way—when the cobra struck. Then she mixed it with her rouge in the little wooden mortar. Then she waxed her lips with camphor ice, freezing the pores tight shut, forming an impervious base for the red stuff. Then she kissed them, smeared them with it, offered them a cigarette to smoke—
They’re still there on the dresser, her long, thick-tipped cigarettes. I take a couple out of the box. Then I take the little bottle of mucilage, standing with all the perfumes, and I let a drop of it fall on the end of each cigarette. She did that too—I know that, now.
It dries in no time, but the moisture of the human mouth will dampen it again and cause the paper to stick to the lips. She sees me do all this, and yet she doesn’t move, doesn’t try to escape. Her god is dead, the fatalism of the East has her in its grip. Almost, I relent. But—“Charlie, I dowanna die!” rings in my ears.
I turn to her. You’d think nothing had happened, you’d think the kid was only asleep back there in his room, the way I talk to her. “Have a cigarette.”
She shakes her head and backs away along the wall.
“Better have a cigarette,” I say, and I take up the gun and bead it at her forehead. This is no act, and she can tell the difference. I won’t even ask her a second time. She takes a cigarette. “What have I done?” she tries to say.
“Nothing,” I answer, “nothing that I can prove, or even care to prove any more. Doll up. You have it with you.”
She smiles a little, maybe fatalistically, or maybe because she still thinks she can outsmart me. She rouges her lips. She raises the cigarette. But I see the half-curves it makes. “No you don’t, not that end. The way it’s supposed to be smoked.”
She puts the glued end in and I hold the match for her. She can’t tell yet about it but the smile goes and her eyes widen with fear.
I light my own—that’s glued, too. “I’m going to smoke right along with you; one of these is no different from the other. See, I have a clear conscience; have you?” I’m going to match her, step by step—I want to know just when it happens. I didn’t know I could be that cruel, but—“Charlie, I dowanna die!”
She begins by taking quick little puffs, not letting it stay any time in her mouth, and each time she puts it in at a different place. She thinks she’ll get around it that way. That’s easy to stop. “Keep your hands down. Touch it one more time and I’ll shoot.”
“Siva!” she moans. I think it is their goddess of death or something. Then to me: “You are going to kill me?”
“No, you are going to kill yourself. You last through that cigarette and you are welcome to your insanity plea when they get here from L.A.”
We don’t talk any more after that. Slowly the cigarettes burn down. I don’t take mine out, either. A dozen times her hands start upward and each time the gun stops them. Time is on my side. She begins to have trouble breathing, not from fear now, from nicotine and burnt paper. Her eyes fill with moisture. Not even an inveterate smoker can consume a ten-inch fag like that without at least a couple of clear breaths between drags.
I can’t stand it myself any more and out comes my own, and there’s a white-hot sting to my lower lip. She holds on, though, for dear life.
So would I, if death was going to be the penalty. I can see her desperately trying to free hers by working the tip of her tongue around the edges. No good. She begins to strangle deep down in her throat, water’s pouring out of her eyes. She twists and turns and retches and tries to get a free breath. It’s torture, maybe, but so were the thousand red-hot needles piercing that kid’s body upstairs— awhile ago.
All at once, a deep groan seems to come all the way up from her feet. The strangling and the gasping stop and the cigarette is smoldering on the floor. A thread of blood runs down her chin—purer, cleaner than the livid red stuff all around it. I lay the gun down near her and I watch her. Let her make her own choice!
“There’s only one more bullet in it,” I tell her. “If you think you can stand what’s coming, you can pay me back with it.”
She knows too well what it’s going to be like, so she has no time to waste.
She grabs for the gun and her eyes light up. “I am going, but you are coming with me!” she pants.
She levels my rod at me. Four times she pulls the trigger and four times it clicks harmlessly. The first chamber and the last must have been the loaded ones, and the ones in between were empty.
Now, she has no more time to waste on getting even. The twitching has already set in. She turns the gun on herself.
“Once more will get you out of it,” I say, and I turn away.
This time, there’s a shattering explosion behind me and something heavy falls like a log. I don’t bother looking. I wrap my handkerchief around my throbbing hand and go downstairs to the front door to wait for the men from L.A. to show up. I don’t smoke while I’m waiting, either.
(1935)
Red Liberty
Katie must have been out of humor to say a thing hke that, but it sure rankled. “And that’s why you’re no further than you are,” she went on. ‘Ten years from now you’ll still be a second-grade detective pinching pickpockets. Movies and beer—^that’s all you ever think of whenever you have any time to yourself Why don’t you improve your mind? Why don’t you read a book? Why don’t you go to a museum once in a while and look at the beautiful statues?”
I nearly fell over. “Look at statues!” I gasped. “What for?”
I seemed to have her there for a minute. “Why—why, to see how they’re made,” she said finally, looking bewildered.
There didn’t seem to be much sense to it, but anything to keep peace in the family. I reached for my hat and gave a deep sigh. “You win,” I said. “I’ll try anything once.”
Riding down in the sub I got a bright idea. Instead of wasting a lot of time looking at a flock of little statues I’d look at one big one instead and get the whole thing over with. So I got out at the Battery, forked over thirty-five cents for one round-trip ticket and got on the little ferry that takes you down the bay to the Statue of Liberty. It was the biggest statue around, and if there was any truth to what Katie said, it ought to improve me enough to last for the rest of the year.
There were about ten others making the trip with me, and as soon as everyone was on board, the tub gives a peep with its whistle and starts off, graceful as a hippopotamus. First the statue was about the size of your thumb. It came gliding over the water getting bigger all the time, until it was tall as an office building. It was pea-green, just like on the postcards. Finally the ferry tied up at a long pier built on piles that stuck out from the island, and everybody got off. There was another crowd there waiting to get on and go back. It seems the trip is only made once every hour.
It was certainly an eyeful once you got close up under it. The stone base alone was six stories high, and after that there was nothing but statue the rest of the way. There was just room enough left over on the island for a little green lawn with cannonballs for markers, a couple of cement paths, and some benches. But on the other wide, away from the city, there were a group of two-story brick houses, lived in by the caretakers I suppose.
Anyway, we went in through a thick, brutal-looki
ng metal door painted black, and down a long stone corridor, and after a couple of turns came to an elevator. A spick-and-span one too, that looked as if it had just been installed. This only went up as far as the top of the pedestal, and after that you had to walk the other seventeen stories. The staircase was a spiral one only wide enough to let one person through at a time and it made tough going, but several times a little platform opened out suddenly on the way up, with an ordinary park bench placed there to rest on. There was always the same fat man sitting heaving on it by the time I got to it, with not much room left over for anybody else. When I say fat, I mean anywheres from two hundred fifty pounds up. I’d noticed him on the boat, with his thin pretty little wife. “Brother,” I said the second time I squeezed in next to him on the bench, “pardon me for butting in, but why do it? You must be a glutton for punishment.”
His wife had gone on the rest of the way up without waiting for him. He just wheezed for a long time, then finally he got around to answering me. “Brother,” he said with an unhappy air, “she can think up more things for me to do like this. You know the old saying, nobody loves a—”
I couldn’t help liking him right off. “Buck up. Slim,” I said, “they’re all the same. Mine thinks I’m a lowbrow and sends me out looking at statues so I’ll learn something.”
“And have you?” he wanted to know.
“Yep, I’ve learned there’s no place like home,” I told him. “Well, keep your chins up,” I said, and with that I left him and went on up.
At the very top you had to push through a little turnstile, and then you were finally up in the head of the statue. The crown or tiara she wears, with those big spikes sticking out, has windows running from side to side in a half-circle. I picked the nearest one and stuck my head out. You could see for miles. The boats in the harbor were the size of match-boxes. Down below on the lawn the cannonballs looked like raisins in a pudding. Well, I stood there like that until I figured I’d gotten my thirty-five cents’ worth. The rest were starting to drift down again, so I turned to go too.
At the window next to me I noticed the fat man’s pretty little wife standing there alone. He evidently hadn’t been able to make the grade yet and get up there with her. She was amusing herself by scribbling her initials or something on the thick stone facing of the window, which was about a foot deep and wider at the outside than at the inside, the tiara being a semicircle. That was nothing. Most people do that whenever they visit any monument or point of interest. All five of the facings were chock-full of names, initials, dates, addresses, and so on, and as time and the weather slowly effaced the earlier ones there was always room for more. She was using an eyebrow pencil or something for hers though, instead of plain lead, I noticed.
By that time we were alone up there. The others were all clattering down the corrugated-iron staircase again, and the ferry was on its way back from the Battery to pick us up. Much as I would have enjoyed waiting to get an eyeful of the shape her stout spouse was going to be in when he got up there, I figured I’d had enough. I started down and left her there behind me, chin propped in her hands and staring dreamily out into space, like Juliet waiting at her balcony for a high-sign from Romeo.
You went down by a different staircase than you came up, I mean it was the same spiral but the outside track this time, and there was no partition between, just a handrail. There were lights strung all along the stairs at regular intervals, of course; otherwise the place would have been pitch-dark. Some were just house bulbs; others were small searchlights turned outward against the lining of the statue, which was painted silver. In other words, anyone that was going up while you were coming down had to pass you in full view, almost rub elbows with you. No one did. The whole boatload that had come out with me was down below by now.
When I got down even with the first resting-platform, with only a rail separating me from it, something caught the corner of my eye just as my head was due to go below the platform level. I climbed back up a step or two, dipped under the railing, and looked under the bench, where it lay. Then I saw what it was and reached in and pulled it out. It was just somebody’s brown felt hat, which had rolled under the bench.
I turned it upside down and looked in it. Knox—and P.G. were the initials. But more important, it hadn’t been left there yesterday or last week, but just now. The sweat on the headband hadn’t dried yet, and there was plenty of it—the leather strip was glistening with it. That was enough to tell me whose it was, the fat guy’s. He’d been sitting on this bench when I left him—dripping with exertion—and I remembered seeing this very lid in his hand, or one the same color and shape. He’d taken it off and sat holding it in his hand while he mopped his melting brow.
He hadn’t gone on up to where I’d left his wife, for he’d neither arrived while I was still up there nor had I passed him on the way down. It was a cinch he’d given it up as a bad job and gone on down from here, without tackling the last of the seventeen “stories” or twists. Still I couldn’t figure how he could come to forget his hat, leave it behind like this, fagged out or not. Then I thought, “Maybe the poor gink had a heart attack, dizzy spell or something and had to be carried down, that’s how it came to be overlooked.” So I took it with me and went on down to try and locate him and hand it back to him.
I rang when I got to where the elevators started from, and when the car had come up for me I asked the operator: “What happened to that fat guy, know the one I mean? Anything go wrong with him? I picked up his hat just now.”
“He hasn’t come down yet,” he told me. “I’d know him in a minute. He must be still up there.”
“He isn’t up above, I just came from there myself. And he’s the last guy in the world who’d walk down the six stories from here when there’s a car to take him. How do you figure it?”
“Tell you where he might be,” said the attendant. “Outside there on the parapet. They all go out there for a last look through the telescope before they get in the car.”
“Well, wait up here for a minute until I find out. If he shows up tell him I’ve got his hat.”
I went out and made a complete circuit of the place, then doubled back and did it in reverse. Not a soul on it. It was a sort of terrace that ran around the top of the base, protected by a waist-high stone ledge on all four sides. It was lower down than the head of Miss Liberty of course, but still plenty high.
I went back to the elevator operator. “Nothing doing. You sure you didn’t take him down in your car without noticing?”
“Listen,” he said. “When he got on the first time he almost flattened me against the door getting in. I woulda known it the second time. I ain’t seen him since.”
“Are there any lavatories or restrooms on the way up?”
“Naw,” he said, “nothing like that.”
“Then he musta walked down the rest of the way without waiting for you. Take me down to the bottom—”
“If he did, he’s the first one ever did that yet. That’s what the elevators are here for.” He threw the switch, “Say,” he said, and I saw his face light up as if he was almost hoping something would happen to break the monotony of his job, “maybe he—^you don’t suppose he—”
I knew what he was driving at. “You’re trying to tell me he took a jump for himself, aren’t you? G’wan, he couldn’t have even raised himself up over that stone ledge out there to do it! And if he had, there’d a been a crowd around him below. Everyone on the island woulda seen him land. I looked down just now. They’re all strolling around down there, addressing postcards, taking it easy waiting for the boat.”
His face dropped again. “They none of ‘em try that from here, they always pick bridges instead. Nothing ever happens here.”
“Cheer up. Suicide Johnny,” I told him, “your cage will probably fall down the shaft some day and kill everyone in it.”
When he let me out I made straight for the concession pavilion down near the pier, where most of the ten who had come out with m
e were hanging around buying postcards and ice-cream cones, waiting for the ferry to pull in. It wasn’t more than fifty yards away by this time, coasting in a big half-circle from the right to get into position, with its engine already cut off.
The fat man wasn’t in the refreshment house—one look inside from the doorway told me that. I asked one or two of the others if they’d seen him since they’d come out of the statue. Nobody had, although plenty had noticed him going in—especially on the way up—just as I had.
“He must be around some place,” one of them suggested indifferently. “Couldn’t very well get off the island until the ferry came back for him.”
“No kidding?” I remarked brittlely. “And here I am thinking he went up in a puff of smoke!”
I went around to the other side of the base, following a series of cement walks bordered with ornamental cannonballs. No rotund gentleman in sight. I inquired at the dispensary at the back of the island, and even at one or two of the brick cottages the caretakers lived in, thinking he might have stopped in there because of illness or out of curiosity. Nothing doing.
I completed my circuit of the terraced lawn that surrounds the statue and returned to the front of it again. It had dawned on me by now that I was going to a hell of a whole lot of trouble just to return a man’s hat to him, but his complete disappearance was an irritant that had me going in spite of myself. It was the size of the man that burned me more than anything. I wouldn’t have minded if it had been somebody less conspicuous, probably wouldn’t have noticed him in the first place, but to be as big as all that and then to evaporate completely—
Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Page 16