Seven Lies South

17

It seemed to Beecher that Lynch had willed himself to die; with Laura gone he had given up the struggle to live. His expression was fixed and sad. And his body was like clay. The spark had gone from it.

Beecher moistened his lips.

“She had to clear out,” Lynch said faintly. “Only chance. Can’t hold it against her.”

“How do you feel?”

Surprisingly, Lynch managed a smile. “Gone for a Burtons, that sort of thing.”

“Then try hard to understand me,” Beecher said. “If we get out of this, Ilse and I will be in trouble. There’s nothing to prove we weren’t involved in Don Willie’s plans. Do you see that?”

Lynch nodded weakly. “No good saying you had a gun against your head, unless you can prove it.”

“And it’s only Ilse’s word that she wasn’t involved,” Beecher said. “I’m going to write a statement explaining how we got into it. Will you sign it?”

Lynch’s eyelids fluttered. He moved his head slowly from side to side. “Wish you hadn’t asked that. I can’t do it, you know.”

“Why not?”

“She’s still got a chance. Laura. She took all your money, I may as well tell you.” He sighed. “Save you hunting about for it.”

“And you still won’t help us?”

Lynch looked at him anxiously. “I can’t, old man. I can’t peach on her.”

“Judas Priest!” Beecher almost burst out laughing; there was no humor in the impulse, it was simply a giddy and nervous reaction to the insane irrelevance of Lynch’s pose. “One doesn’t peach, does one?” he said slowly. “Terribly bad form, and all that.”

“Can’t blame you for being sarcastic. But there it is.”

“Now listen to me,” Beecher said, and his voice was so rough and cold that Ilse looked at him with a quick frown. “You’re dying, get that into your head,” he said, as Lynch’s eyes blinked anxiously. “We’ve done our best for you. After you lied to get me into this, after you tried to roast me like an order of fish and chips. But you’re dying, anyway. And you’re dying like you lived. You can talk about form and playing the game until your breath rattles, and it won’t change a damn thing. You’re going out like a scared phony. You spent a lifetime lying about your background to hide the fact that you’re a cheap fraud. And that’s how you’re dying, Lynch, everything stripped away but the lies and the fears.”

Ilse put a hand on his arm. “Please don’t, Mike. It doesn’t matter that much.”

Lynch drew a slow, cautious breath, and his eyes fixed themselves on Beecher’s with a pathetic intensity. “Very hard to go out like that, I can promise you,” he said faintly. “Listen. Laura’s a peculiar girl. She’s a liar. Not only when it’s necessary. It’s some need.” He drew another tentative breath, like a man tapping the last few shillings from his bank account. “Remember, eh? She’d go to tea with friends, lie about it. Say she’d been shopping. Go shopping, tell me something else. No sense to it. But she knew the truth, I didn’t. Gave her an advantage. Couldn’t really help it. The landrover is—” Lynch’s voice failed, and Beecher leaned forward and gripped his shoulder.

“The landrover? What about it?”

“It’s a half mile from here. Due south. The axle isn’t broken. Feed line’s clogged. Case in point, eh? Laura insisted we lie about it. Gave her advantage.” A spasm of pain twisted his ruined face. “Peculiar girl, eh? But I can’t peach on her. Sign statements. Wish you hadn’t asked.”

Lynch closed his eyes. The breath that stirred his body was feeble and tentative; it seemed to have only a tenuous connection with the long, slack body. Ilse looked steadily at Beecher.

“There’s nothing to do,” he said.

A few seconds later Lynch’s hand moved and touched Beecher’s arm. He opened his eyes with an obvious effort, like a man fighting his way up from drugged sleep. A faint sad smile touched the corners of his mouth. “Shouldn’t have cheated you out of that match,” he whispered. “No need to. Could have won, anyway.” But it wasn’t a statement, it was a question; and his eyes begged Beecher for reassurance.

Out of a weary compassion, Beecher nodded and said: “Sure you could. You were playing fine.”

Ten minutes later Lynch died.

At first light Beecher set out to find the landrover; and it was as Lynch had said, a half-mile south of them, parked behind a sloping ridge of black shale and half buried under sand swept against it during the storm. He blew out the gas lines, cleaned the pump and carburetor, and got the motor running. Except for external fire damage, the truck was in good condition. There was a radio and compass on the dashboard, and in the back were Lynch and Laura’s luggage, coils of rope and chains, and sleeping bags and entrenching tools. In a stout aluminum locker he found a supply of tinned foods and biscuits, and several bottles of gin and whisky.

Beecher felt sick and weak with relief; his hands were trembling as he put the truck in gear and started back to the tiny pond.

Ilse was waiting for him in the mouth of the clearing. She had found her purse, empty of both dollars and pesetas. It was deep in the trees that circled the pond; it had obviously been thrown there.

“Never mind,” Beecher said. “We’re all right. We’ve got some food.” There was no anger left in him. Laura must have emptied the purse when Ilse had left the pond to meet the Arab riders. Now Lynch was dead, and Laura was gone. But she had been afraid when she left, Beecher knew; that fact was enough to make any anger superfluous.

They rested beside the pond and ate sandwiches of tinned meat and crackers. The sun was already hot, and the shade in the trees, and the faint stir of wind over the water was very pleasant. Beecher noticed how slowly and deliberately Ilse moved; in spite of the food she had nibbled, she seemed very weak. She had piled her hair in a knot on top of her head, and her face was pale and expressionless as a wax mask.

“We’ve got a good chance to get to Goulamine,” he said. “Then the fun starts.”

“What fun?”

“I mean trouble.” Beecher took out his wallet and counted his money. Six hundred and fifty pesetas, a bit more than ten dollars.

“What does the money matter for?” Ilse asked him. “In Goulamine, if we get there, we can go to the police.”

“It’s a little late for going to the police. Or a little early, maybe.” Beecher twisted around to face her. “Look. I took a job with Don Willie. That’s a known fact. I had a row with a Frenchman who ended up murdered on my doorstep. Another known fact. I flew the plane down here.” Beecher sighed wearily. “You were Don Willie’s — well, whatever you were isn’t important. But your relationship is a known fact. You knew what he was planning, but didn’t go to the police. How do you imagine our stories will sound? We’ll look like a pair of liars trying to pin the blame on dead men. Candles are burning now for those murdered pilots. Their wives have put on black for life. Somebody’s going to pay for it. Can you think of better prospects than you and me?”

“Why are we going to Goulamine then? Why not stay here and die?”

She was serious, he saw, and for some reason this angered him; he decided that it was the idea of waiting for death like uncaring lumps of flesh which revolted him. He realized with surprise how much he wanted to live; not in some rosy future, but here and now, in this stinking, unprofitable present, and he was prepared to fight minute by minute just for the privilege of drawing another breath.

“We’re going to Goulamine,” he said sharply. “And then up through Morocco to Spain. At any rate, we’ll try like hell. If we get caught on the way we’re through. We wouldn’t see a lawyer for weeks. And by then the truth would be so smothered under rumors and guesses that you couldn’t hack your way through to it with an axe.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “But what is the good of going to Spain?”

“Don Julio, the constable of Mirimar, is a friend of mine. He won’t call us liars until he can prove it.”

“But he knows I lied to him once. He will assume I am lying again.”

“Don Julio assumes damned little. Also, he’s about the only person I can think of who’s got enough humor to take our stories seriously. If we get to Mirimar, we’ve got a chance.”

“What must I do?”

“Make yourself as presentable as possible. We can’t avoid being seen. But we can’t afford to be stared at.”

“She left a suitcase of things.”

“Use them then.” Beecher stood and helped her to her feet. “And hurry.”

Beecher checked the gas and oil and refilled two of the jerry cans with fresh water. Then he stripped and scrubbed himself in the pond, and shaved with Lynch’s razor. He found clean slacks and shirts in Lynch’s bag. The khaki shirt was a full size too large for him, but he left the collar open and turned the cuffs back under the sleeves of his linen jacket.

There were details to consider then: burying Lynch’s body, and whether to take along the crate of documents Don Willie had left behind him. Beecher decided against doing either of these things; Lynch would last as well in this bone-dry air as he would under a foot or so of sand, and the box of papers would be an awkward burden when they abandoned the landrover. Lynch and the documents were all right where they were; neither was going anywhere for a while.

Ilse came down the ladder of the plane in a pale blue dress with a white raincoat over her arm. She was scrubbed and clean, her cheeks pink from the cold water. The sunlight flashed on her brown legs as she picked her way to the landrover.

Beecher stopped beside the truck for a last look at the little clearing. The moment was significant. The strained and blackened ship belonged to the desert now; it was lifeless and purposeless as the bleached rocks and sterile sands. And some part of him belonged here, too, he knew. And it would remain with this desolate emptiness.

Beecher was surprised by a sense of almost buoyant confidence; he suddenly felt himself to be an enemy of all dead things.

The sun was well above the horizon now, and its heat was falling like the blows of a tyrant on the helpless earth.

Beecher swung himself up into the truck. It was eight-thirty when they rolled from the clearing and swung with the compass toward Goulamine.

The landrover had been rented from an agency in Casablanca, according to information on a brass plaque on the dashboard. There were addresses in French and Spanish, and below these a wriggle of Arabic symbols apparently repeating this message. But Beecher guessed that the truck would be recognized in Goulamine, that its comings and goings would be a matter of general gossip. When they reached the outpost late in the afternoon, he didn’t drive to the central plaza, but parked a half mile from it, in an empty lane running between rows of one-storied, sand-colored homes and shops. No one seemed to pay any attention to them, except an elderly Arab who was sitting cross-legged in front of a vegetable stall. He had glanced up at them briefly, eyes staring and milky from trachoma, and then had lowered his head to contemplate once again the flies buzzing about the bits of rotting fruit at his feet.

They walked quickly away from the truck, Beecher carrying their single suitcase, and Ilse picking her way carefully through the rivulets of filthy water draining into the street. After two turns, they were swept up in a human stream flowing toward the central plaza.

The trip had taken eleven hours, with almost a third of that time spent in the lee of a lava ridge to avoid the worst heat of the day. Now it was almost six o’clock at night, with cooling winds blowing, but they were still flushed and lightheaded from the hours in the sun.

During those hours the pulse of the motor had been more significant to them than the beat of their own hearts. Nothing had gone wrong; they had the compass to guide them, and the steady pound of the motor had ground down the miles separating them from Goulamine. But they had lived with a straining fear all that time; dreading a whine or sob from the engine, or the crack of an axle as they bounced into rocky depressions.

In the late afternoon sunlight the great central plaza was shining like a brass tray heaped with debris. Camels, burros, ancient cars and trucks, water vendors with great black goat skins sagging over their shoulders, veiled women in long white robes, children darting about like hungry birds — all this animal and vehicular energy crackled about the square like bolts of lightning. In the days of the great caravans, fire-eaters and jugglers, storytellers and acrobats would appear at dark, leaping brilliantly from the pages of the Arabian Nights. But this was all done for, Beecher knew; the riotous days of Goulamine had ended with the decline of the caravans.

Beecher changed his pesetas into Moroccan francs and bought tickets for Agadir, which was three hours from Goulamine. He and Ilse joined the line waiting for the bus. It was darker now, and the fires from cooking braziers leaped through the streams of people. The night seemed to welcome the bitter and grotesque; he saw men veiled to the eyes, tall and majestic in flowing blue robes, dwarfs and cripples, thieves with a hand or ear lopped off as punishment, and a naked beggar squatting with a double rupture, testicles resting on the ground like withered melons. The bus filled up rapidly. Everyone carried something in his arms: a child, chickens, baskets of fruit and vegetables, bolts of cloth, broken suitcases tied up with rope.

Beecher looked through a smeared window at the pulsing crowds in the square. He thought of Laura. The bus started up with a grind of gears, and Beecher sighed and settled back in his seat.