The big man handed me my wallet. I looked through it. I had all the money still. All the cards. It had everything that belonged in it. I was surprised.
“Say something, pally,” the big one said. “Something that would make us get fond of you.”
“Give me back my gun.”
He leaned forward a little and thought. I could see him thinking. It hurt his corns. “Oh, you want your gun, pally?” He looked sideways at the one with the gray mustache. “He wants his gun,” he told him. He looked at me again. “And what would you want your gun for, pally?”
“I want to shoot an Indian.”
“Oh, you want to shoot an Indian, pally.”
“Yeah—just one Indian, pop.”
He looked at the one with the mustache again. “This guy is very tough,” he told him. “He wants to shoot an Indian.”
“Listen, Hemingway, don’t repeat everything I say,” I said.
“I think the guy is nuts,” the big one said. “He just called me Hemingway. Do you think he is nuts?”
The one with the mustache bit a cigar and said nothing. The tall beautiful man at the window turned slowly and said softly: “I think possibly he is a little unbalanced.”
“I can’t think of any reason why he should call me Hemingway,” the big one said. “My name ain’t Hemingway.”
The older man said: “I didn’t see a gun.”
They looked at Amthor. Amthor said: “It’s inside. I have it. I’ll give it to you, Mr. Blane.”
The big man leaned down from his hips and bent his knees a little and breathed in my face. “What for did you call me Hemingway, pally?”
“There are ladies present.”
He straightened up again. “You see.” He looked at the one with the mustache. The one with the mustache nodded and then turned and walked away, across the room. The sliding door opened. He went in and Amthor followed him.
There was silence. The dark woman looked down at the top of her desk and frowned. The big man looked at my right eyebrow and slowly shook his head from side to side, wonderingly.
The door opened again and the man with the mustache came back. He picked a hat up from somewhere and handed it to me. He took my gun out of his pocket and handed it to me. I knew by the weight it was empty. I tucked it under my arm and stood up.
The big man said: “Let’s go, pally. Away from here. I think maybe a little air will help you to get straightened out.”
“Okey, Hemingway.”
“He’s doing that again,” the big man said sadly. “Calling me Hemingway on account of there are ladies present. Would you think that would be some kind of dirty crack in his book?”
The man with the mustache said, “Hurry up.”
The big man took me by the arm and we went over to the little elevator. It came up. We got into it.
TWENTY-FOUR
At the bottom of the shaft we got out and walked along the narrow hallway and out of the black door. It was crisp clear air outside, high enough to be above the drift of foggy spray from the ocean. I breathed deeply.
The big man still had hold of my arm. There was a car standing there, a plain dark sedan, with private plates.
The big man opened the front door and complained: “It ain’t really up to your class, pally. But a little air will set you up fine. Would that be all right with you? We wouldn’t want to do anything that you wouldn’t like us to do, pally.”
“Where’s the Indian?”
He shook his head a little and pushed me into the car. I got into the right side of the front seat. “Oh, yeah, the Indian,” he said. “You got to shoot him with a bow and arrow. That’s the law. We got him in the back of the car.”
I looked in the back of the car. It was empty.
“Hell, he ain’t there,” the big one said. “Somebody must of glommed him off. You can’t leave nothing in a unlocked car any more.”
“Hurry up,” the man with the mustache said, and got into the back seat. Hemingway went around and pushed his hard stomach behind the wheel. He started the car. We turned and drifted off down the driveway lined with wild geraniums. A cold wind lifted off the sea. The stars were too far off. They said nothing.
We reached the bottom of the drive and turned out onto the concrete mountain road and drifted without haste along that.
“How come you don’t have a car with you, pally?”
“Amthor sent for me.”
“Why would that be, pally?”
“It must have been he wanted to see me.”
“This guy is good,” Hemingway said. “He figures things out.” He spit out of the side of the car and made a turn nicely and let the car ride its motor down the hill. “He says you called him up on the phone and tried to put the bite on him. So he figures he better have a look-see what kind of guy he is doing business with—if he is doing business. So he sends his own car.”
“On account of he knows he is going to call some cops he knows and I won’t need mine to get home with,” I said. “Okey, Hemingway.”
“Yeah, that again. Okey. Well he has a dictaphone under his table and his secretary takes it all down and when we come she reads it back to Mr. Blane here.”
I turned and looked at Mr. Blane. He was smoking a cigar, peacefully, as though he had his slippers on. He didn’t look at me.
“Like hell she did,” I said. “More likely a stock bunch of notes they had all fixed up for a case like that.”
“Maybe you would like to tell us why you wanted to see this guy,” Hemingway suggested politely.
“You mean while I still have part of my face?”
“Aw, we ain’t those kind of boys at all,” he said, with a large gesture.
“You know Amthor pretty well, don’t you, Hemingway?”
“Mr. Blane kind of knows him. Me, I just do what the orders is.”
“Who the hell is Mr. Blane?”
“That’s the gentleman in the back seat.”
“And besides being in the back seat who the hell is he?”
“Why, Jesus, everybody knows Mr. Blane.”
“All right,” I said, suddenly feeling very weary.
There was a little more silence, more curves, more winding ribbons of concrete, more darkness, and more pain.
The big man said: “Now that we are all between pals and no ladies present we really don’t give so much time to why you went back up there, but this Hemingway stuff is what really has me down.”
“A gag,” I said. “An old, old gag.”
“Who is this Hemingway person at all?”
“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”
“That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said. “For a private dick you certainly have a wandering kind of mind. Are you still wearing your own teeth?”
“Yeah, with a few plugs in them.”
“Well, you certainly have been lucky, pally.” The man in the back seat said: “This is all right. Turn right at the next.”
“Check.”
Hemingway swung the sedan into a narrow dirt road that edged along the flank of a mountain. We drove along that about a mile. The smell of the sage became overpowering.
“Here,” the man in the back seat said.
Hemingway stopped the car and set the brake. He leaned across me and opened the door.
“Well, it’s nice to have met you, pally. But don’t come back. Anyways not on business. Out.”
“I walk home from here?”
The man in the back seat said: “Hurry up.”
“Yeah, you walk home from here, pally. Will that be all right with you?”
“Sure, it will give me time to think a few things out. For instance you boys are not L.A. cops. But one of you is a cop, maybe both of you. I’d say you are Bay City cops. I’m wondering why you were out of your territory.”
“Ain’t that going to be kind of hard to prove, pally?”
“Good night, Hemingway.”
He didn’t answer. Neither of them spoke. I started to get out of the car and put my foot on the running board and leaned forward, still a little dizzy.
The man in the back seat made a sudden flashing movement that I sensed rather than saw. A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night.
I dived into it. It had no bottom.
TWENTY-FIVE
The room was full of smoke.
The smoke hung straight up in the air, in thin lines, straight up and down like a curtain of small clear beads. Two windows seemed to be open in an end wall, but the smoke didn’t move. I had never seen the room before. There were bars across the windows.
I was dull, without thought. I felt as if I had slept for a year. But the smoke bothered me. I lay on my back and thought about it. After a long time I took a deep breath that hurt my lungs.
I yelled: “Fire!”
That made me laugh. I didn’t know what was funny about it but I began to laugh. I lay there on the bed and laughed. I didn’t like the sound of the laugh. It was the laugh of a nut.
The one yell was enough. Steps thumped rapidly outside the room and a key was jammed into a lock and the door swung open. A man jumped in sideways and shut the door after him. His right hand reached toward his hip.
He was a short thick man in a white coat. His eyes had a queer look, black and flat. There were bulbs of gray skin at the outer corners of them.
I turned my head on the hard pillow and yawned.
“Don’t count that one, Jack. It slipped out,” I said.
He stood there scowling, his right hand hovering towards his right hip. Greenish malignant face and flat black eyes and gray white skin and nose that seemed just a shell.
“Maybe you want some more strait-jacket,” he sneered.
“I’m fine, Jack. Just fine. Had a long nap. Dreamed a little, I guess. Where am I?”
“Where you belong.”
“Seems like a nice place,” I said. “Nice people, nice atmosphere. I guess I’ll have me a short nap again.”
“Better be just that,” he snarled.
He went out. The door shut. The lock clicked. The steps growled into nothing.
He hadn’t done the smoke any good. It still hung there in the middle of the room, all across the room. Like a curtain. It didn’t dissolve, didn’t float off, didn’t move. There was air in the room, and I could feel it on my face. But the smoke couldn’t feel it. It was a gray web woven by a thousand spiders. I wondered how they had got them to work together.
Cotton flannel pajamas. The kind they have in the County Hospital. No front, not a stitch more than is essential. Coarse, rough material. The neck chafed my throat. My throat was still sore. I began to remember things. I reached up and felt the throat muscles. They were still sore. Just one Indian, pop. Okey, Hemingway. So you want to be a detective? Earn good money. Nine easy lessons. We provide badge. For fifty cents extra we send you a truss.
The throat felt sore but the fingers feeling it didn’t feel anything. They might just as well have been a bunch of bananas. I looked at them. They looked like fingers. No good. Mail order fingers. They must have come with the badge and the truss. And the diploma.
It was night. The world outside the windows was a black world. A glass porcelain bowl hung from the middle of the ceiling on three brass chains. There was light in it. It had little colored lumps around the edge, orange and blue alternately. I stared at them. I was tired of the smoke. As I stared they began to open up like little port-holes and heads popped out. Tiny beads, but alive, heads like the heads of small dolls, but alive. There was a man in a yachting cap with a Johnny Walker nose and a fluffy blonde in a picture hat and a thin man with a crooked bow tie. He looked like a waiter in a beachtown flytrap. He opened his lips and sneered: “Would you like your steak rare or medium, sir?”
I closed my eyes tight and winked them hard and when I opened them again it was just a sham porcelain bowl on three brass chains.
But the smoke still hung motionless in the moving air.
I took hold of the corner of a rough sheet and wiped the sweat off my face with the numb fingers the correspondence school had sent me after the nine easy lessons, one half in advance, Box Two Million Four Hundred and Sixty Eight Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty Four, Cedar City, Iowa. Nuts. Completely nuts.
I sat up on the bed and after a while I could reach the floor with my feet. They were bare and they had pins and needles in them. Notions counter on the left, madam. Extra large safety pins on the right. The feet began to feel the floor. I stood up. Too far up. I crouched over, breathing hard and held the side of the bed and a voice that seemed to come from under the bed said over and over again: “You’ve got the dt’s . . . you’ve got the dt’s . . . you’ve got the dt’s.”
I started to walk, wobbling like a drunk. There was a bottle of whiskey on a small white enamel table between the two barred windows. It looked like a good shape. It looked about half full. I walked towards it. There are a lot of nice people in the world, in spite. You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians, but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same. Take the guy that left that half bottle of whiskey there. He had a heart as big as one of Mae West’s hips.
I reached it and put both my half-numb hands down on it and hauled it up to my mouth, sweating as if I was lifting one end of the Golden Gate Bridge.
I took a long untidy drink. I put the bottle down again, with infinite care. I tried to lick underneath my chin.
The whiskey had a funny taste. While I was realizing that it had a funny taste I saw a washbowl jammed into the corner of the wall. I made it. I just made it. I vomited. Dizzy Dean never threw anything harder.
Time passed—an agony of nausea and staggering and dazedness and clinging to the edge of the bowl and making animal sounds for help.
It passed. I staggered back to the bed and lay down on my back again and lay there panting, watching the smoke. The smoke wasn’t quite so clear. Not quite so real. Maybe it was just something back of my eyes. And then quite suddenly it wasn’t there at all and the light from the porcelain ceiling fixture etched the room sharply.
I sat up again. There was a heavy wooden chair against the wall near the door. There was another door besides the door the man in the white coat had come in at. A closet door, probably. It might even have my clothes in it. The floor was covered with green and gray linoleum in squares. The walls were painted white. A clean room. The bed on which I sat was a narrow iron hospital bed, lower than they usually are, and there were thick leather straps with buckles attached to the sides, about where a man’s wrists and ankles would be.
It was a swell room—to get out of.
I had feeling all over my body now, soreness in my head and throat and in my arm. I couldn’t remember about the arm. I rolled up the sleeve of the cotton pajama thing and looked at it fuzzily. It was covered with pin pricks on the skin all the way from the elbow to the shoulder. Around each was a small discolored patch, about the size of a quarter.
Dope. I had been shot full of dope to keep me quiet. Perhaps scopolamine too, to make me talk. Too much dope for the time. I was having the French fits coming out of it. Some do, some don’t. It all depends how you are put together. Dope.
That accounted for the smoke and the little heads around the edge of the ceiling light and the voices and the screwy thoughts and the straps and bars and the numb fingers and feet. The whiskey was probably part of somebody’s forty-eight-hour liquor cure. They had just left it around so that I wouldn’t miss anything.
I stood up and almost hit the opposite wall with my stomach. That made me lie down and breathe very gently for quite a long time. I was tingling all over now and sweating. I could feel little drops of sweat form on my forehead and then slide slowly and carefully down the side of my nose to the corner of my mouth. My tongue licked at them foolishly
.
I sat up once more and planted my feet on the floor and stood up. “Okey, Marlowe,” I said between my teeth. “You’re a tough guy. Six feet of iron man. One hundred and ninety pounds stripped and with your face washed. Hard muscles and no glass jaw. You can take it. You’ve been sapped down twice, had your throat choked and been beaten half silly on the jaw with a gun barrel. You’ve been shot full of hop and kept under it until you’re as crazy as two waltzing mice. And what does all that amount to? Routine. Now let’s see you do something really tough, like putting your pants on.”
I lay down on the bed again.
Time passed again. I don’t know how long. I had no watch. They don’t make that kind of time in watches anyway.
I sat up. This was getting to be stale. I stood up and started to walk. No fun walking. Makes your heart jump like a nervous cat. Better lie down and go back to sleep. Better take it easy for a while. You’re in bad shape, pally. Okey, Hemingway, I’m weak. I couldn’t knock over a flower vase. I couldn’t break a fingernail.
Nothing doing. I’m walking. I’m tough. I’m getting out of here.
I lay down on the bed again.
The fourth time was a little better. I got across the room and back twice. I went over to the washbowl and rinsed it out and leaned on it and drank water out of the palm of my hand. I kept it down. I waited a little and drank more. Much better.
I walked. I walked. I walked.
Half an hour of walking and my knees were shaking but my head was clear. I drank more water, a lot of water. I almost cried into the bowl while I was drinking it.
I walked back to the bed. It was a lovely bed. It was made of roseleaves. It was the most beautiful bed in the world. They had got it from Carole Lombard. It was too soft for her. It was worth the rest of my life to lie down in it for two minutes. Beautiful soft bed, beautiful sleep, beautiful eyes closing and lashes falling and the gentle sound of breathing and darkness and rest sunk in deep pillows. . . .
I walked.
They built the Pyramids and got tired of them and pulled them down and ground the stone up to make concrete for Boulder Dam and they built that and brought the water to the Sunny Southland and used it to have a flood with.