Candy Smell

He had to stoop to come through the wall.

I saw his boots first, from where I lay with my cheek in the tar. They were big black boots, wet to the ankle, and they came down onto the darkroom floor with a heavy, deliberate scuff. Then a pair of long legs in dark trousers. Then the hem of a coat that fell almost to the floor, black wool, shiny with damp, stirring about his shins. I turned my head a quarter inch to see up. Someone was unfolding himself out of the secret passage like a heron out of a reed bed: tall, and then taller, and then so tall that the top of his hat brushed the plaster of the ceiling.

The brim was pulled low. In the red light I couldn't see his face. I could see a chin, blue with stubble, and a mouth that curled up at one corner. And I saw his right hand.

It was gloved. The glove was a thin black leather one, fitted close. Its fingers hung loosely at his side, all five of them, neatly curved. Four were limber. The little finger was not. It stood a shade too straight, a shade too still, with the stiff sad elegance of a thing that has been put there.

It isn't his, I thought.

I smelled it again. Over the tar and the vinegar and the sweat of my own fear, thick, sour, cloying, the stale reek of candy gone bad in a pocket. It came off his coat in waves. It was the smell of the stairwell. It was the smell of the man who had put his hand over my mouth.

"Mr. Voss," said Lyle Cobb.

…

He had a pleasant voice.

That was the worst of it. It was a plain tenor, a little nasal, with a soft slow Ohio drawl, and it carried the trailing amusement of a man who has just walked into a party where everyone is pretending not to be drunk. He took off his hat. Underneath, his head was long and narrow and bald as an egg, and his eyes were set so close together that they seemed to touch.

"Mr. Ashby sent me," he said, "to see if you planned to take everything yourself."

Voss, who had been wiping the black from his face with the sleeve of his coat, went still.

"I wasn't aware," he said, "that Mr. Ashby sent."

"Well. He does worry."

"Gordon is in a hotel, with a lawyer and a bottle, weeping into his pillow. He has not sent anyone anywhere in twenty years." The words came out slow and cold. "He's too scared to come himself, so he sends a dog."

"Woof," said Cobb mildly.

He turned his head. He found me where I lay among the glass, and for a moment I saw his eyes, small, damp, delighted, flat as buttons, and I understood that I was the thing in the room that interested him most.

"Well, now," he said. "We meet again."

"I don't know you."

"No, no. Not yet." He crouched. He came down on his heels with a creak of leather, close enough that the candy smell washed over me and made my stomach turn, and he rested his gloved hand on his knee. The false finger pointed at me. "But I know you. Oh, I know you very well, little lady. Harder to kill somebody who's already died once, isn't it?"

My blood stopped.

"Shut your mouth," said Voss.

…

I had never heard him use that tone.

It was not the voice that had said you may stand now. It was not the cold amused one, or the hungry one. It was a hoarse flat dreadful whisper, raw to the root, like a blade dragged over stone, and it had in it something that I'd never thought to hear from him. It was fear.

"Why?" said Cobb. He didn't rise. He only cocked his head at the other man, like a bird. "She knows, Mr. Voss. Look at her. She knows it as well as you do. It's the worst-kept secret in the county." He smiled at me. "You'd be amazed what you can learn at a funeral. People get to talking."

"Lyle."

"What are you afraid of, Mr. Voss?" His voice dropped to a confiding murmur. "That they'll find out? That she'll go home and tell her little friends what the rule is? That someone will put it in the paper?" The small eyes slid up. "Or is it something else? That they'll learn you're not the last one either?"

Silence.

I do not know what he meant. I did not know then and I have thought about it for many years. But I saw what it did. It went through Voss like a wire. He had been standing quite still with the black tar drying on his collar, and now he took one step, and the camera on his chest swung. His big pale hand came up.

There was a noise from the street.

…

It came like the end of the world.

A colossal shattering crash, from far away and then not far, from the other side of the shop, from the alley, as of a truck driven through a wall. The whole building shook. Glass rained from the front window. I heard shouting, men's voices, a dozen of them, and boots, and the bark of a dog, and a great ringing clang of steel on steel, and over it all a voice I knew, bull-throated, roaring, hoarse with fury.

"POLICE! CLEVELAND POLICE! RELEASE THE HOSTAGE!"

Dunleavy.

I nearly sobbed.

"Well," said Cobb. "That's torn it."

He straightened, in one smooth unfolding motion, and out of the pocket of the long coat he pulled something cylindrical. A tube. A canister. He weighed it in his palm for an instant, with a look of faint regret, and pulled the pin with his teeth.

"I do hate to rush a party," said Lyle Cobb, "but I think it's time we all went home."

He tossed it at the door.

…

The smoke was white.

It was different from the van's. That had been a rolling cloud, thick and sweet. This was a blast. It struck the floor with a hiss like a snake, and the room vanished. It simply ceased. The red lantern turned to a smear. The trays and the bench and the dripping tubs became pale ghosts, then nothing, and every breath I took burned. I flung my sleeve over my mouth. I rolled on my belly. In the roaring gray I heard coughing, a man's, a woman's, a scuffle, a thud. I heard my mother's voice cry out, once, and be stifled. I heard Voss say something short and savage.

Get down, I thought. Low. It sinks.

I crawled.

I do not know how I knew where to go. I think it was the smell. The air from the passage was cold and clean and smelled of earth, and the smoke, which wanted to rise, was drawn by it, so that along the floor, in a thin foot-high channel, there ran a trickle of breathable air. I put my face in it. I dragged myself on my elbows across the wet boards, over the broken glass, with my cracked rib shrieking, toward the slit in the wall.

I wriggled through.

…

The room behind the wall was no bigger than a closet.

I couldn't see it. I felt it. My hand hit stone, my knee hit a step, and I scrabbled up, and found myself in a narrow cell with the smoke at my back and a faint gray glimmer from somewhere above. The walls were rough. The ceiling was low. And all along them, ranged in the dark, were shapes: tall, flat, boxlike, in rows.

Cabinets.

My fingers found a handle. It was iron, cold, gritty with rust. I felt a drawer front, a label holder, a long thin plate. The glimmer strengthened. A pale slice of light came from a ventilation grate high on the wall, perhaps a streetlamp's, perhaps a star, and it fell across the middle of the room, across a squat black thing on a cabinet-top, and a small oval of paper propped against it.

I looked at the black thing first.

It was a box. It was an iron one, about the size of a bread bin, and it was brand-new. The paint was clean. The hinges shone. It had been set down in the exact center of the cabinet, as in a shop window, and it had the same flat official look as the others, the box in the bank vault, the box on the bridge. I didn't touch it. Decoy, I thought.

A fourth box. How many does she have?

I looked at the paper.

It was a photograph. An old one, creased, soft with handling, in an oval frame of tarnished brass: a young woman with dark hair pulled back, in a high-collared dress, staring directly at the camera with great calm gray eyes. She had a straight nose and a mouth held very firm. She might have been twenty-five. I knew her at once.

Grandma.

I picked it up. I turned it over.

On the back, in a small, firm, slanting pen, in a hand I'd have known at the bottom of a well, were four words.

Don't go down there.

…

Behind me, in the smoke, something heavy went by: a stumbling tread, a dragging weight, the scuff of a woman's shoes on stone, and a man's low breath. It passed through the slit and down into the dark below, so close that the wind of it stirred my hair, and I did not dare make a sound.

I stood quite still.

I don't know what I'd expected. A letter, maybe. A key. A word of love. Instead I had four words in my own grandmother's hand, and they were a warning, and they were meant for me, and a girl of thirteen, with a broken rib and a split hand and a mother who had just been dragged past her in the dark, had to decide whether to be afraid of them.

Down where? I thought.

The tunnel. The word came whole. The air-raid tunnels, under the whole east side. That's where it goes.

And she's telling me, don't.

Which means that's where it is.

There was a wooden slat on the floor. It was part of a broken crate, a yard long, gray with age. I snatched it up and drove one end into the gap of the nearest cabinet, a tall steel door with a hasp rusted solid, and leaned. The metal shrieked. It bent. It cracked, with a sound like a rifle, and the door swung out on its hinge.

Inside there was a shelf. On the shelf, in neat rows, stood a line of clear plastic envelopes the size of a paperback book.

Each held a strip of film.

Negatives. Black and silver, in long curling ribbons, laid out in sleeves with a tag on each. I snatched at the nearest. The tag was typed. Lot 13. #1. I took the next. #2. The next. I ran my finger along them, down the row, faster, faster, with the breath tearing in my chest. Four. Seven. Nine. Names. Surnames. A strange short string of numbers. I did not read them.

Thirteen, I thought. Where's the thirteenth?

It was at the end.

It lay by itself in the corner of the shelf, a little apart. The sleeve was dusty. The tag was blurred. But the pen had been good, and the black ink stood out like iron, and the name was printed in capitals.

MERRITT, ANSEL.

I turned it over. And there, at the edge of the plastic, so faint that I almost missed it, ran a row of tiny scratches. Three short. One long.

A pointer.

They're pointers, I thought. Every one of them. These aren't the originals.

They're copies. Or labels. Or...

"Wrong thing, kid," said a voice.

…

He filled the doorway.

He had followed me through the smoke, bent double, and stood in the slit with his hat in one hand and the other, the gloved one, stretched toward me. His long face was gray and wet. His eyes were streaming from the smoke. But he smiled, and I saw that he had a gold tooth.

"That's not what we came for," said Lyle Cobb. "That's the junk. That's the pretty."

I backed against the cabinet. My heel hit something. A cable, a thick old one, sheathed in cloth, running across the floor like a root. I felt it under my sole. I felt it give, as a rope gives, and I knew, quick as a thought, what to do.

I stepped back over it.

He stepped forward.

His boot caught the cable. He had been looking at the envelope in my hand, at the bright ghost of film, and he did not look down. His long body pitched. He flung out an arm, caught at the air, and in the same instant I seized an iron film hanger from the shelf, a rusted clip, long and sharp as a letter-opener, and brought it down on his wrist as hard as I could.

He screamed.

It was a high thin wail, like a hurt dog's, and he went over the edge of the top stair, where the room opened onto a flight of steps I had not even seen, and I heard him go, head over heels, down and down, thudding on stone.

I did not wait.

I snatched the sleeve with Ansel's name and thrust it down the front of my coat. I leaped the cable. I flew down the steps after him, over him, past his writhing legs, past his curses, one hand on the wall, the other still clutching the iron clip. It was not that I didn't trust the police. It was only that Voss still had my mother, and the smoke was in the next room, and somewhere in the dark ahead of me a pair of feet were dragging.

…

The stairs ended in water.

I came down the last step into it, ankle deep, black, bitterly cold, and stopped. The air was wet. It smelled of rust and old stone and a century of rain. I stood in a tunnel, a great long arch of dripping concrete that vanished in both directions into the dark, with a spine of rusted pipe along the ceiling and a trickle of water running in the middle of the floor. A faded stencil on the wall said SHELTER — 40 PERSONS.

It was silent.

Then, very far away, down the left-hand arm of the tunnel, I heard it. A scrape. A splash. The slow wet drag of a shoe-heel through water. And a man's voice, low and furious, saying something I couldn't hear.

Someone was pulling another person along the floor.