VIII
Pat Reddy and I went straight up the bush-hidden path to the yellow house’s front door, and rang the bell.
A big black man in a red fez, red silk jacket over red-striped silk shirt, red zouave pants and red slippers, opened the door. He filled the opening, framed in the black of the hall behind him.
“Is Mr. Maxwell home?” I asked.
The black man shook his head and said words in a language I don’t know.
“Mr. Elwood, then?”
Another shaking of the head. More strange language.
“Let’s see whoever is home then,” I insisted.
Out of the jumble of words that meant nothing to me, I picked three in garbled English, which I thought were “master,” “not,” and “home.”
The door began to close. I put a foot against it.
Pat flashed his buzzer.
Though the black man had poor English, he had knowledge of police badges.
One of his feet stamped on the floor behind him. A gong boomed deafeningly in the rear of the house.
The black man bent his weight to the door.
My weight on the foot that blocked the door, I leaned sidewise, swaying to the Negro.
Slamming from the hip, I put my fist in the middle of him.
Reddy hit the door and we went into the hall.
“ ’Fore God, Fat Shorty,” the black man gasped in good black Virginian, “you done hurt me!”
Reddy and I went by him, down the hall whose bounds were lost in darkness.
The bottom of a flight of steps stopped my feet.
A gun went off upstairs. It seemed to point at us. We didn’t get the bullets.
A babel of voices—women screaming, men shouting—came and went upstairs; came and went as if a door was being opened and shut.
“Up, my boy!” Reddy yelped in my ear.
We went up the stairs. We didn’t find the man who had shot at us.
At the head of the stairs, a door was locked. Reddy’s bulk forced it.
We came into a bluish light. A large room, all purple and gold. Confusion of overturned furniture and rumpled rugs. A gray slipper lay near a far door. A green silk gown was in the center of the floor. No person was there.
I raced Pat to the curtained door beyond the slipper. The door was not locked. Reddy yanked it wide.
A room with three girls and a man crouching in a corner, fear in their faces. Neither of them was Myra Banbrock, or Raymond Elwood, or anyone we knew.
Our glances went away from them after the first quick look.
The open door across the room grabbed our attention.
The door gave to a small room.
The room was chaos.
A small room, packed and tangled with bodies. Live bodies, seething, writhing. The room was a funnel into which men and women had been poured. They boiled noisily toward the one small window that was the funnel’s outlet. Men and women, youths and girls, screaming, struggling, squirming, fighting. Some had no clothes.
“We’ll get through and block the window!” Pat yelled in my ear.
“Like hell—” I began, but he was gone ahead into the confusion.
I went after him.
I didn’t mean to block the window. I meant to save Pat from his foolishness. No five men could have fought through that boiling turmoil of maniacs. No ten men could have turned them from the window.
Pat—big as he is—was down when I got to him. A half dressed girl—a child—was driving at his face with sharp high-heels. Hands, feet, were tearing him apart.
I cleared him with a play of gun-barrel on shins and wrists—dragged him back.
“Myra’s not there!” I yelled into his ear as I helped him up. “Elwood’s not there!”
I wasn’t sure, but I hadn’t seen them, and I doubted that they would be in this mess. These savages, boiling again to the window, with no attention for us, whoever they were, weren’t insiders. They were the mob, and the principals shouldn’t be among them.
“We’ll try the other rooms,” I yelled again. “We don’t want these.”
Pat rubbed the back of his hand across his torn face and laughed.
“It’s a cinch I don’t want ’em any more,” he said.
We went back to the head of the stairs the way we had come. We saw no one. The man and girls who had been in the next room were gone.
At the head of the stairs we paused. There was no noise behind us except the now fainter babel of the lunatics fighting for their exit.
A door shut sharply downstairs.
A body came out of nowhere, hit my back, flattened me to the landing.
The feel of silk was on my cheek. A brawny hand was fumbling at my throat.
I bent my wrist until my gun, upside down, lay against my cheek. Praying for my ear, I squeezed.
My cheek took fire. My head was a roaring thing, about to burst.
The silk slid away.
Pat hauled me upright.
We started down the stairs.
Swish!
A thing came past my face, stirring my bared hair.
A thousand pieces of glass, china, plaster, exploded upward at my feet.
I tilted head and gun together.
A Negro’s red-silk arms were still spread over the balustrade above.
I sent him two bullets. Pat sent him two.
The Negro teetered over the rail.
He came down on us, arms outflung—a dead man’s swan-dive.
We scurried down the stairs from under him.
He shook the house when he landed, but we weren’t watching him then.
The smooth sleek head of Raymond Elwood took our attention.
In the light from above, it showed for a furtive split-second around the newel-post at the foot of the stairs. Showed and vanished.
Pat Reddy, closer to the rail than I, went over it in a one-hand vault down into the blackness below.
I made the foot of the stairs in two jumps, jerked myself around with a hand on the newel, and plunged into the suddenly noisy dark of the hall.
A wall I couldn’t see hit me. Caroming off the opposite wall, I spun into a room whose curtained grayness was the light of day after the hall.