“I didn’t do that,” says Eddie grimly. “I’ve got a rough idea what did, though.” Late yesterday afternoon. The night was coming on, and he couldn’t face what was coming to him for sponsoring Eddie, for giving them all away. Late yesterday after—that meant he hadn’t left that warning at the dressing-room or left that death sentence on the bed. He’d been dead himself by then—not white, not black, just yellow.
Eddie waits until Judy’s in her shower, then he phones the morgue. “About Johnny Staats. He worked for me until yesterday, so if nobody’s claimed the body send it to a funeral parlor at my exp “
“Somebody’s already claimed the remains, Mr. Bloch. First thing this morning. Just waited until the examiner had established suicide beyond a doubt. Some colored organization, old friends of his it seems “
Judy comes in and remarks: “You look all green in the face.”
Eddie thinks: “I wouldn’t care if he was my worst enemy, I can’t let that happen to him! What horrors are going to take place tonight somewhere under the moon?” He wouldn’t even put cannibalism beyond them. The phone’s right at his fingertips, and yet he can’t denounce them to the police without involving himself, admitting that he was there, took part at least once. Once that comes out, bang! goes his reputation. He’ll never be able to live it down—especially now that he’s played the Voodoo chant and identified himself with it in the minds of the public.
So instead, alone in the room again, he calls the best-known private agency in New Orleans. “I want a bodyguard. Just for tonight. Have him meet me at closing-time at the Bataclan. Armed, of course.”
It’s Sunday and the banks are closed, but his credit’s good anywhere. He raises a G in cash. He arranges with a reliable crematorium for a body to be taken charge of late tonight or early in the morning. He’ll notify them just where to call for it. Yes, of course! He’ll produce the proper authorization from the police. Poor Johnny Staats couldn’t get away from them in life, but he’s going to get away from them in death, all right. That’s the least anyone could do for him.
Graham slaps a sawbuck cover on that night, more to give the waiters room to move around in than anything else, and still the place is choked to the roof. This Voodoo number is a natural, a wow.
But Eddie’s back is ready to cave in, while he stands there jogging with his stick. It’s all he can do to hold himself straight.
When the racket and the shuffling are over for the night, the private dick is there waiting for him. “Lee is the name.”
“Okay, Lee, come with me.” They go outside and get in Eddie’s Bugatti. They whizz down to the Vieux, scrounge to a stop in the middle of Congo Square, which will still be Congo Square when its official name of Beauregard is forgotten. “This way,” says Eddie, and his bodyguard squirms through the alley after him. “*Lo, suga’ pie,” says the elbow-pusher, and for once, to her own surprise as much as anyone else’s, gets a tumble. “‘Lo, Eglantine,” Eddie’s bodyguard remarks in passing, “so you moved?”
They stop in front of the house on the other side of the tunnel. “Now here’s what,” says Eddie. “We’re going to be stopped halfway up these stairs in here by a big ourangoutang. Your job is to clean him, tap him if you want, I don’t care. I’m going into a room up there, you’re going to wait for me at the door. You’re here to see that I get out of that room again. We may have to carry the body of a friend of mine down to the street between us. I don’t know. It depends on whether it’s in the house or not. Grot it?”
“Got it.”
“Light up. Keep your torch trained over my shoulder.”
A big, lowering figure looms over them, blocking the narrow stairs, ape-like arms and legs spread-eagled in a gesture of malignant embrace, receding skull, teeth showing, flashing steel in hand. Lee jams Eddie roughly to one side and shoves up past him. “Drop that, boy!” Lee says with slurring indifference, but then he doesn’t wait to see if the order’s carried out or not. After all, a weapon was raised to two white men. He fires three times, from two feet away atid considerably below the obstacle, hits where he aimed to. The bullets shatter both knee-caps and the elbow-joint of the arm holding the knife. “Be a cripple for life now,” he remarks with quiet satisfaction. “I’ll put him out of his pain.” So he crashes the butt of his gun down on the skull of the writhing colossus, in a long arc like the overhand pitch of a baseball. The noise of the shots goes booming up the narrow stairwell to the roof, to mushroom out there in a vast rolling echo. “Come on, hurry up,” says Eddie, “before they have a chance to do away with “
He lopes on up past the prostrate form, Lee at his heels. “Stand here. Better reload while you’re waiting. If I call your name, for Pete’s sake don’t count ten before you come in to me!”
There’s a scurrying back and forth and an excited but subdued jabbering going on on the other side of the door. Eddie swings it wide and crashes it closed behind him, leaving Lee on the outside. They all stand rooted to the spot when they see him. The papaloi is there and about six others, not so many as on the night of Eddie’s initiation. Probably the rest are waiting outside the city somewhere, in some secret spot, wherever the actual burial, or burning, or—feasting—is to take place.
Papa Benjamin has no juju mask on this time, no animal pelt. There are no gourds in the room, no drum, no transfixed figures ranged against the wall. They were about to move on elsewhere, he just got here in time. Maybe they were waiting for the dark of the moon. The ordinary kitchen chair on which the papaloi was to be carried on their shoulders stands prepared, padded with rags. A row of baskets covered with sacking is ranged in a row along the back wall.
“Where is the body of John Staats?” raps out Eddie. “You claimed it, took it away from the morgue this morning.” His eyes are on those baskets, on the bleared razor he catches sight of lying on the floor near them.
“Better far,” cackles the old man, “that you had followed him. The mark of doom is on yo’ even now ” A growl goes up all around.
“Lee,” grates Eddie, “in here!” Lee stands next to him, gun in hand. “Cover me while I take a look around.”
“All of you over in that corner there,” growls Lee, and kicks viciously at one who is too slow in moving. They huddle there, cower there, glaring, spitting like a band of apes. Eddie makes straight for those baskets, whips the covering off the first one. Charcoal. The next. Coffee-beans. The next. Rice. And so on.
Just small baskets that negro women balance on their heads to sell at the market-place. He looks at Papa Benjamin, takes out the wad of money he’s brought with him. “Where’ve you got him? Where’s he buried? Take us there, show us where it is.”
Not a sound, just burning, shriveling hate in waves that you can almost feel. He looks at that razor-blade lying there, bleared, not bloody, just matted, dulled, with shreds and threads of something clinging to it. Kicks it away with his foot. “Not here, I guess,” he mutters to Lee and moves toward the door. “What do we do now, boss?” his henchman wants to know. “Get the hell out of here, I guess, where we can breathe some air,” Eddie says, and moves on out to the stairs.
Lee is the sort of man who will get what he can out of any situation, no matter what it is. Before he follows Eddie out, he goes over to one of the baskets, stuffs an orange in each coat-pocket, and then prods and pries among them to select a particularly nice one for eating on the spot. There’s a thud and the orange goes rolling across the floor like a volleyball. “Mr. Bloch!” he shouts hoarsely. “I’ve found—him!” And he looks pretty sick.
A deep breath goes up from the comer where the negroes are. Eddie just stands and stares, and leans back weakly for a minute against the door-post. From out the layers of oranges in the basket, the five fingers of a hand thrust upward, a hand that ends abruptly, cleanly at the wrist.
“His signet,” says Eddie weakly, “there on the little finger—I know it.”
“Say the word! Should I shoot?” Lee wants to know.
Eddie shak
es his head. “They didn’t—he committed suicide. Let’s do what—we have to—and get out of here!”
Lee turns over one basket after the other. The stuff in them spills and sifts and rolls out upon the floor. But in each there’s something else. Bloodless, pallid as fish-flesh. That reizor, those shreds clinging to it, Eddie knows now what it was used for. They take one basket, they line it with a verminous blanket from the bed. Then with their bare hands they fill it with what they have found, and close the ends of the blanket over the top of it, and carry it between them out of the room and down the pitch-black stairs, Lee going down backwards with his gun in one hand to cover them from the rear. Lee’s swearing like a fiend. Eddie’s trying not to think what the purpose, the destination of all those baskets was. The watchdog is still out on the stairs, with a concussion.
Back through the lane they struggle, and finally put their burden down in the before-dawn stillness of Congo Square. Eddie goes up against a wall and is heartily sick. Then he comes back again and says: “The head—did you notice—?”
“No, we didn’t,” Lee answers. “Stay here, I’ll go back for it. I’m armed. I could stand an)rthing now, after what I just been through.”
Lee’s gone about five minutes. When he comes back, he’s in his shirt, coatless. His coat’s rolled up under one arm in a bulky bulge. He bends over the basket, lifts the blanket, replaces it again, and when he straightens up, the bulge in his folded coat is gone. Then he throws the coat away, kicks it away on the ground. “Hidden away in a cupboard,” he mutters. “Had to shoot one of’em through the palm of the hand before they’d come clean. What were they up to?”
“Practice cannibalism maybe, I don’t know. I’d rather not think.”
“I brought your money back. It didn’t seem to square you with them.”
Eddie shoves it back at him. “Pay for your suit and your time.”
“Aren’t you going to tip off the squareheads?”
“I told you he jumped in the lake. I have a copy of the examiner’s report in my pocket.”
“I know, but isn’t there some ordinance against dissecting a body without permission?”
“I can’t afford to get mixed up with them, Lee. It would kill my career. We’ve got what we went there for. Now just forget everything you saw.”
The hearse from the crematorium contacts them there in Congo Square. The covered basket’s taken on, and what’s left of Johnny Staats heads away for a better finish than was coming to him.
“G’night, boss,” says Lee. “Anytime you need any other little thing “
“No,” says Eddie. “I’m getting out of New Orleans.” His hand is like ice when they shake.
He does. He hands Graham back his contract, and a split week later he’s playing New York’s newest, in the frantic Fifties. With a white valet. The Chant, of course, is still featured. He has to; it’s his chief asset, his biggest draw. It introduces him and signs him off, and in between, Judy always dances it for a high-spot. But he can’t get rid of that backache that started the night he first played it. First he goes and tries having his back baked for a couple of hours a day under a violet-ray. No improvement.
Then he has himself examined by the biggest specialist in New York. “Nothing there,” says the big shot. “Absolutely nothing the matter with you: liver, kidneys, blood—everything perfect. It must be all in your own mind.”
“You’re losing weight, Eddie,” Judy says, “you look bad, darling.” His bathroom scales tell him the same thing. Down five pounds a week, sometimes seven, never up an ounce. More experts. X-rays this time, blood analysis, gland treatments, everything from soup to nuts.
Nothing doing. And the dull ache, the lassitude, spreads slowly, first to one arm, then to the other.
He takes specimens of everything he eats, not just one day, but every day for weeks, and has them chemically analyzed. Nothing. And he doesn’t have to be told that anjrway. He knows that even in New Orleans, way back in the beginning, nothing was ever put into his food. Judy ate from the same tray, drank from the same coffee-pot he did. Nightly she dances herself into a lather, and yet she’s the picture of health.
So that leaves nothing but his mind, just as they all say. “But I don’t believe it!” he tells himself. “I don’t believe that just sticking pins into a wax doll can hurt me—me or anyone!”
So it isn’t his mind at all, but some other mind back there in New Orleans, some other mind thinking, wishing, ordering him dead, night and day.
“But it can’t be done!” says Eddie. “There’s no such thing!”
And yet it’s being done; it’s happening right under his own eyes. Which leaves only one answer. If going three thousand miles away on dry land didn’t help, then going three thousand miles away across the ocean will do the trick. So London next, and the Kit-Kat Club. Down, down, down go the bathroom scales, a little bit each week. The pains spread downward into his thighs. His ribs start showing up here and there. He’s dying on his feet. He finds it more comfortable now to walk with a stick—not to be swanky, not to be English—to rest on as he goes along. His shoulders ache each night just from waving that lightweight baton at his crew. He has a music-stand built for himself to lean on, keeps it in front of him, body out of sight of the audience while he’s conducting, and droops over it. Sometimes he finishes up a number with his head lower than his shoulders, as though he had a rubber spine.
Finally he goes to Reynolds, famous the world over, the biggest alienist in England. “I want to know whether I’m sane or insane.” He’s under observation for weeks, months; they put him through every known test, and plenty of unknown ones, mental, physical, metabolic. They flash lights in front of his face and watch the pupils of his eyes; they contract to pinheads. They touch the back of his throat with sandpaper; he nearly chokes.
They strap him to a chair that goes around and around and does somersaults at so many revolutions per minute, then ask him to walk across the room; he staggers. Reynolds takes plenty of pounds, hands him a report thick as a telephone book, sums it up for him. “You are as normal, Mr. Bloch, as anyone I have ever handled. You’re so well-balanced you haven’t even got the extra little touch of imagination most actors and musicians have.” So it’s not his own mind, it’s coming from the outside, is it?
The whole thing from beginning to end has taken eighteen months. Trying to outdistance death, with death gaining on him slowly, but surely, all the time. He’s emaciated. There’s only one thing left to do now, while he’s still able to crawl aboard a ship—that’s to get back to where the whole thing started. New York, London, Paris haven’t been able to save him. His only salvation, now, lies in the hands of a decrepit colored man skulking in the Vieux Carre of New Orleans.
He drags himself there, to that same half-ruined house, without a bodyguard, not caring now whether they kill him or not, almost wishing they would and get it over with. But that would be too easy an out, it seems. The gorilla that Lee crippled that night shuffles out to him between two sticks, recognizes him, breathes undying hate into his face, but doesn’t lift a finger to harm him. The spirits are doing that job better than he could ever hope to. Their mark is on this man, woe betide anyone who comes between them and their hellish satisfaction. Eddie Bloch totters up the stairs unopposed, his back as safe from a knife as if he wore steel armor. Behind him the negro sprawls upon the stairs to lubricate his long-awaited hour of satisfaction with rum—and oblivion.
He finds the old man alone there in the room. The Stone Age and the 20th Century face each other, and the Stone Age has won out. “Take it off me,” says Eddie brokenly. “Give me my life back—I’ll do an5rthing, anything you say!”
“What has been done cannot be undone. Do you think the spirits of the earth and of the air, of fire and water, know the meaning of forgiveness?”
“Intercede for me then. You brought it about. Here’s money, I’ll give you twice as much, all I earn, all I ever hope to earn “
“You have d
esecrated the obiah. Death has been on you from that night. All over the world and in the air above the earth you have mocked the spirits with the chant that summons them. Nightly your wife dances it. The only reason she has not shared your doom is because she does not know the meaning of what she does. You do. You were here among us.”
Eddie goes down on his knees, scrapes along the floor after the old man, tries to tug at the garments he wears. “Kill me right now, then,
and be done with it. I can’t stand any more ” He bought the gun
only that day, was going to do it himself at first, but found he couldn’t. A minute ago he pleaded for his life, now he’s pleading for death. “It’s loaded, all you have to do is shoot. Look! I’ll close my eyes—I’ll write a note and sign it, that I did it myself “
He tries to thrust it into the witch-doctor’s hand, tries to close the bony, shriveled fingers around it, tries to point it at himself The old man throws it down, away from him. Cackles gleefully, “Death will come, but differently—slowly, oh, so slowly!” Eddie just lies there flat on his face, sobbing dryly. The old man spits, kicks at him weakly. He pulls himself up somehow, stumbles toward the door. He isn’t even strong enough to get it open at the first try. It’s that little thing that brings it on. Something touches his foot, he looks, stoops for the gun, turns. Thought is quick but the old man’s mind is even quicker. Almost before the thought is there, the old man knows what’s coming. In a flash, scuttling like a crab, he has shifted around to the other side of the bed, to put something between them. Instantly the situation’s reversed, the fear has left Eddie and is on the old man now. He’s lost the aggressive. For a minute only, but that minute is all Eddie needs. His mind beams out like a diamond, like a lighthouse through a fog. The gun roars, jolting his weakened body down to his shoes. The old man falls flat across the bed, his head too far over, dangling down over the side of it like an overripe pear. The bed-frame sways gently with his weight for a minute, and then it’s over …
Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Page 22
