She turned and walked out. We drove back to Los Angeles in complete silence. Even when she let me out at the Alta Loma Hotel, even then we did not speak, but she smiled her thanks and I smiled my sympathy, and she drove away. Already it was dark, a smudge of the pink sunset fading in the west. I went down to my room, yawned, and threw myself on the bed. Lying there I suddenly remembered the clothes closet. I got up and opened the closet door. Everything seemed as it should, my suits hanging from hooks, my suitcases on the top shelf. But there was no light in the closet. I struck a match and looked down at the floor. In the corner was a burned matchstick and a score of grains of brown stuff, like coarsely ground coffee. I pressed my finger into the stuff and then tasted it on the end of my tongue. I knew what that was: it was marijuana. I was sure of it, because Benny Cohen had once showed me the stuff to warn me against it. So that was why she had been in here. You had to have an air-tight room to smoke marijuana. That explained why the two rugs had been moved: she had used them to cover the crack under the door.

Camilla was a hophead. I sniffed the closet air, put my nostrils against the garments hanging there. The smell was that of burned cornsilk. Camilla, the hophead.

It was none of my business, but she was Camilla; she had tricked me and scorned me, and she loved somebody else, but she was so beautiful and I needed her so, and I decided to make it my business. I was waiting in her car at eleven that night.

‘So you’re a hophead,’ I said.

‘Once in a while,’ she said. ‘When I’m tired.’

‘You cut it out,’ I said.

‘It’s not a habit,’ she said.

‘Cut it out anyway.’

She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’

‘Promise me you’ll quit.’

She made a cross over her heart. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ but she was talking to Arturo now, and not to Sammy. I knew she would not keep the promise. She started the car and drove down Broadway to Eighth, then south towards Central Avenue. ‘Where we going?’ I said.

‘Wait and see.’

We drove into the Los Angeles Black Belt, Central Avenue, night clubs, abandoned apartment houses, broken-down business houses, the forlorn street of poverty for the Negro and swank for the whites. We stopped under the marquee of a night spot called the Club Cuba. Camilla knew the doorman, a giant in a blue uniform with gold buttons. ‘Business,’ she said. He grinned, signalled someone to take his place, and jumped on the running board. It was done like a routine procedure, as though it had been done before.

She drove around the corner and continued for two streets, until we came to an alley. She turned down the alley, switched off the lights and steered carefully into pitch blackness. We came to some kind of opening and killed the engine. The big Negro jumped off the running board and snapped on a flashlight, motioning us to follow. ‘May I ask just what the hell this is all about?’ I said.