Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

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. Got 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 and 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 shakes 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 razor, 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 anything 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.