Seven Lies South

21

The skipper of the Rosaleen was a small and volatile Spaniard, with thick, oily black hair, and the face of an anxious priest. He paced the cabin of the ship, his rope-soled slippers twisting dryly on the glossy floor boards, and looked at Beecher and Ilse with an expression blended of compassion and irritation and pity. “I explained to him that this would be a difficult matter,” he said, shaking his head impatiently. His name was Diego Najera, he had told them, and he had been working with the Irishman for three years. He obviously admired him, but held a qualified opinion of his judgment. “This is not the time to be taking so much as one package of contraband cigarettes into open water,” Diego said. “Things are very tense. I explained this to him, and do you know what he told me?” Diego raised his hands and let them fall limply. “He says he trusts me. That is all. He trusts me. So what can I do?”

“I’m sorry,” Beecher said. “I didn’t think of the spot I’d be putting you in.”

“It is all right. We will try our best.” Diego took a jacket from a chair at the chart table and hung it around his thin shoulders like a cape. “We will leave in fifteen minutes.”

“There’s one thing,” Beecher said. He opened Ilse’s suitcase and removed Pusey’s wallet. It was a flat leather case cut to the size of an American passport, with compartments for travellers checks, and boat and plane tickets. Pusey’s paper assets and credentials were tidy and cautious: a cabin-class ticket on the Constitution; four hundred and twenty dollars in American Express travellers checks; a clean stiff passport with a snapshot of Pusey staring out in advance suspicion at any official who might ask to see it; and a deck of credit cards wrapped up in celluloid jackets. He was a member of Rotary and Kiwanis and the Lions. Beecher smiled at a card with a gold star stamped on it; Pusey was an honorary sheriff, Cook County. He explained to Diego how he happened to have the wallet, and asked him if he could arrange to have it sent over to the Bland Line offices.

“Yes, I will do that,” Diego said. “But may I ask why? After what you’ve told me, it doesn’t seem very logical. Why not pitch it overboard?”

“Maybe a good turn will save his soul,” Beecher said. “Who knows?”

Diego sighed. “You have lived with Spaniards too long. Give me the wallet. I will return it...”

Beecher and Ilse sat together on one of the two bunks. She picked up his hand and rubbed it lightly with her fingertips. “I’m not frightened anymore,” she said. “I’ll never be frightened again.”

“You flew out of your cage, didn’t you?”

“It was so easy to do,” she said. “I wanted to be free for you. Nothing else was important.” She seemed very simple and earnest then, holding his hand tightly and smiling into his eyes. “It was like coming to life.”

Beecher brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. It was true, she wasn’t afraid anymore. She had chosen life over death. In the cab coming to the Rosaleen, she had acted as if they were children playing hide-and-seek in the shadows of a friendly garden. They had found Pinky at the Velasquez, and although he was expecting them, he had seemed to Beecher a slender support for their safety. Pinky was about sixteen, a smiling, dreaming youngster in a red fez and flowing blue jellabah. His eyes were bulging and glassy from an after-luncheon pipe of hashish, and he had found his way from the lobby to the street by trailing a finger tentatively along walls, and over the backs of furniture. They had driven to the dock in the cab which had taken them away from Pusey, and in a few minutes were pulling up beside the Rosaleen. She was a tidy thirty-footer, with the burgee of the Tangier yacht club at her bow, and the colors of France streaming from a stem shaft. The bright work was immaculate, mahogany and brass gleaming in the late sunlight. In addition to red and green running lights on her port and starboard sides, a large searchlight was mounted behind the yacht-club pennant. The afternoon winds were cool, and whitecaps danced across the blue water. Two British destroyers stood at anchor, outlined against the bulk of Gibraltar, as still and significant as bird dogs at point.

Pinky, in spite of his dreaming smiles and glassy eyes, had known his business; he told Beecher he would keep the cab engaged until after the Rosaleen was at sea. With that assurance he had driven off, his red fez disappearing from view as the first lurch of the cab sent him rolling over on his side.

Beecher looked around the cabin. There was a neat galley forward, and lockers were built against all open bulkheads. The chart table, with its overhanging lamp, was recessed into an area at the head of the other bunk.

Ilse said: “Why don’t you lie down and rest? I slept most of the day.”

“I’m not tired.”

“I wish you were,” she said smiling. “I would like to put covers over you and bring you coffee. Then, while you slept, I would sit and watch you.”

“I’d probably snore and spoil everything,” he said.

“No, not you,” she said quickly. She was very serious. “Never. I know.”

In this mood she reminded Beecher of a child drawing a picture; frowning and intent upon each stroke of the pencil, but seldom bothering to look at the object it was drawing. Children didn’t copy reality; they simply drew the picture that was already in their minds. This was what Ilse was doing, he knew; she wasn’t seeing him, she was seeing an image born of her hopes and dreams.

Diego returned in ten minutes wearing a blue blazer and a black wool muffler about his throat. He had brought a sack of sandwiches with him. “If we are lucky,” he said, “we will have something to eat about seven o’clock. There’s coffee in the galley.” Then he went above and they heard him shouting commands. The lines were cast off and the Rosaleen came to life, rocking eagerly with the twist of the currents. Within her slim hull the engines sounded like a strong heartbeat, and when the twin screws cut smoothly into the water, her bow soared with their power, thrusting for the open sea.

At seven o’clock Beecher took coffee and sandwiches up to Diego. The wind whipped his hair into his eyes, and raised a miniature storm in the mug of coffee. To his left the clean corrugations of the Spanish mountains stood sharply against the fading tones of the evening. The Rosaleen was running into a gathering darkness streaked with rays of orange and purple sunlight; the spray rising from the bow caught the brilliant colors and gleamed like strings of fantastically dyed crystal beads.

Beecher climbed down beside Diego. In the lee of the cowling it was warm and quiet.

“We have had luck,” Diego said. “There is Estepona off our port. Marbella, Fuengirola, then Mirimar, and you are home. Where shall I put you off?”

“There’s a pier at the Reina del Mar,” Beecher said.

“I know,” Diego said, frowning.

The Reina del Mar was the only chic and expensive restaurant in the fishing village of Mirimar. It had been designed as a beach club for the foreign colony, with a swimming pool and orchestra, flood-lit gardens and a dock for skin-diving and surf-boarding boats.

“How about it?” Beecher asked him.

Diego nodded and sipped his coffee. “We can try. It’s busy in the daytime, but it will be dark when we arrive. If I put you off at a beach you will get wet wading in, and I will risk tearing up my hull on the rocks. Getting repairs would be awkward.”

Ilse came on deck a few moments later, her dark streaming hair like a pennant in the wind. Beecher climbed out from the wheel pit and put an arm around her shoulders. “You’ll blow overboard,” he said, shouting into her ear.

“No, it’s wonderful!” She smiled up at him, the spray sparkling like happy tears on her eyelashes. “How soon are we there?”

“A few hours yet.”

The village of Estepona was falling behind them; it looked like a fire flickering along the coastline now, its lights glimmering faintly through the fogs rolling down the purple mountains. The fishing boats were standing in a long line on the horizon, each one marked by a single glowing torchlight which was there to draw the fish up to the looping nets strung between the boats. The fishermen would be out in the wet bitter winds all night long, and tourists standing on the terraces of their villas would admire the formation of pretty lights spaced like sentinels across the dark sea. And some of the tourists would envy the fishermen, Beecher thought, because they had jobs which wrung boredom and dissatisfaction from their bodies, and left them spent and drained, and blessedly grateful for food and drink and soft warm women. Beecher had envied them once, too, he remembered; he had watched them coming up from the beach in the cool morning light, with pesetas from the night’s catch in their pocket and he had wished that he were as tired as they were, and as involved as they were in the fundamental business of living.

He would see them later in Manolo’s little bar after a good catch, stunned by heaping platters of rice and fish, flushed by unlabeled bottles of strong red wine, their faces slack and smiling, dumbly grateful for warmth, and full bellies, and the big mouthful of smoke to be sucked down after another pull at the wine bottle. Beecher had never seen men enjoy tobacco so fervently, and sometimes that had made his own cigarettes seem flat and rank and tasteless.

He smiled. This was the sort of thing that had been wrong with him, he knew. Fretting over trifles, worrying about distant goals, dissatisfied with what he had done with his life, and believing stubbornly and egotistically that he had a right to happiness. He remembered his old reactions to life as if they were the symptoms of a draining and boring illness from which he had mercifully recovered; the inert self-pity, the premonitions of failure, the conviction that his efforts and ambitions were being frustrated by whimsical influences beyond his control or understanding — these were the tiresome crutches he wouldn’t need any more. Beecher smiled again as Ilse’s hair blew against his face. There was so damned much nonsense in the world about goals. Maybe this was the trouble with the idle, dissatisfied tourists, and so many of his friends in America. They weren’t ready to accept the imperfect present. They seemed to feel that happiness must be bought and paid for now, but delivered in the future; in the happy realm of pension plans and growth stocks, in the next step up the ladder, with college insurance and programs for their youngsters, and the tidy lot in Florida or California or Spain for themselves — this was so much nicer than the present that they traded now for then like children giving up an afternoon TV show for a movie at night.

What they had forgot, perhaps, was that survival itself was a goal. To be alive, in whatever circumstances, was an exciting and respectable accomplishment. Now, he thought, it was good to be standing close to a girl, with the strong wind blowing in his face. It didn’t have to be perfect. There was no reason to mess it up by wondering if what he felt for Ilse was pity or compassion, or a kind of guilty responsibility because he had been the first man to take her to bed. In a sense, it was to hell with the perfect future, and hurrah for the miserable present. If your cigarette didn’t taste as good as the fisherman’s, then throw it away and try a cigar.

Diego called to them and pointed off to port. A liner had come up on the horizon, advancing like a city of light through the darkness. It passed a few hundred yards from them and they could see the squares of cabin lights circling her hull, and the silhouettes of the slanted smokestacks. Its horn sounded like an animal baying into the wind and, incredibly, they heard the faint and distant sound of music coming over the water.

Ilse moved closer into his arms. “Isn’t it marvelous? Can you imagine being on a big ship like that, and dancing in a big gay ballroom?”

She might be the Constitution, Beecher thought. Pusey’s ship. Somewhere deep inside that great blaze of lights would be a little cabin with the bed covers turned down and fresh towels hanging in the bathroom. Ready and waiting for Mr. Pusey of Blue Island, Illinois.

“Let’s go below and get a bite to eat,” Beecher said.

“Let’s go below and get warm,” Ilse said.

They drank coffee and ate sandwiches. Beecher stretched out and smoked a cigarette while Ilse tidied up the galley. He wasn’t tired at all; that was his last thought until he felt Ilse shaking his shoulder. “Diego has called us,” she said.

Beecher sat up quickly. “How long have I been sleeping?”

“Almost two hours. Like a tired little boy. He wants us to go upstairs.”

Diego had swung in close to the shore line, Beecher saw, as he stepped from the companionway onto the deck. The Rosaleen was skimming like a dart over heavy breakers, swinging in toward the lights of Mirimar.

Diego called to him. “We will say good-by now,” he said. “There won’t be time at the pier. Good luck, my friend.”

“Thank you.” Beecher shook Diego’s hand. “When I can, I’ll come to Tangier and buy you a drink. Several drinks.”

“It’s nothing. Take care now.”

Directly ahead the blue lights on the pier of the Reina del Mar were glowing softly in the darkness. Diego throttled down his engines and with the loss of thrust the Rosaleen began to dance and buck like an unschooled colt sensing freedom in the feel of slackened reins.

“Be ready now,” Diego said.

The pier was dark and deserted, but above them they saw the dazzling lights of the beach club, and heard the sound of band music drifting toward the water. Diego docked the Rosaleen with gentle precision, and Beecher stood up and jumped onto the pier. He caught Ilse about the waist and swung her over the side. Diego waved to them, his teeth flashing brilliantly, and then the Rosaleen curved smoothly away from the dock, its slender bow cresting the waves for home...

Beecher took Ilse’s hand and started down the long dark pier to the shore. The clubhouse of the Reina del Mar sprawled gracefully along rising ground a hundred yards above the beach. Light from open terraces flowed over the calm green surface of the swimming pool, and glittered on the graveled pathways which twisted through fragrant groupings of oleander and geranium. The band was playing loudly, but occasionally bursts of laughter and conversation came shooting through the music.

Beecher followed a shadowed pathway through the gardens. There would be cabs at the front of the club, he knew, but he also realized that almost any cab driver from Mirimar would recognize him on sight. And everyone in town would know that he was on the run, wanted for murder. They were in Spain at last, their feet crunching on the graveled walks, but they still weren’t safe; until he had given himself freely into Don Julio’s custody, he couldn’t risk meeting anyone who knew him, and knew the trouble he was in...

Beecher tightened his grip on Ilse’s hand and led her into a curving path which skirted the clubhouse and stopped at a dead-end in the rear of the parking lot. There, in the shadows of a line of cars, he could see the entrance to the clubhouse, and a knot of drivers clustered at the head of the taxi rank. The doors of the club opened and a group of women and men stepped into the bright glow of the porch lights. They stood talking while a club attendant went off to get their car. One of the men laughed clearly and happily, and a woman said, “Can you imagine? It was green, positively green,” and everyone in the group laughed at this. When the car arrived, they climbed in noisily and swept off toward Mirimar.

“What are we to do?” Ilse asked him.

“It’s three miles to my villa. I’d rather not walk.”

“Are you going there?”

“Yes.” Beecher wanted to wash the grime from his hands and face and put on clean clothes before giving himself over to Don Julio. Don Julio wouldn’t be at his office now; he would be at home, and Beecher didn’t intend to present himself there looking like a skid-row derelict. “You won’t need to come with me,” he said to Ilse. “You know where the road goes up to my villa? Beyond the railroad track?”

She nodded and smiled slowly at him, and Beecher realized that she would probably behave in exactly the same fashion if he had told her to go to hell or jump in the lake. She was smiling at the image she had drawn of him, the shining picture in her mind; and her smile was like that of someone lost in a dream.

“Now listen,” he said, and rubbed her cheek gently with the back of his fist. “There’s a tiny bar called the Quita Pena; it’s right on the road beside the railroad track. It’s a fishermen’s hangout, very dark and very quiet. No one from Mirimar goes there. I’ll leave you on the terrace. It’s not lighted. No one can see you. Drink a glass of wine and wait for me.”

“Yes, Mike,” she said, still smiling at him. “But you must tell me what to think about while you are gone. And when to smile or frown, and when to sip my drink. I will be like a child without you.”

“Well, just enjoy the glass of wine and the fishermen’s singing,” Beecher said. “And look at the moon.”

“No, I will wait until you come back before I enjoy anything,” Ilse said.

Beecher sighed faintly. She couldn’t accept the present as a goal; it had to be the perfect future, with everything neatly and blissfully laid on in some rosy never-never land. He turned as a shrill and familiar laugh sounded from the opening doors of the clubhouse. Old Polly Soames, whom he had known and liked all the time he had been in Spain, was making her exit; she descended the flatstone steps with an air of precarious dignity, placing each plump foot out and down with tentative confidence, and gripping the iron railing tightly with one gloved hand. She wore a red and gold dress, which fluttered preposterously about her short, heavy body, and her wispy red hair flickered like a fading, uncertain torch in the moonlight. She was chuckling and chattering to herself as she started for her car, her voice sounding like that of a confused but belligerent crow. Something had gone wrong at her villa, it was evident from her muttered diatribe against maids, agents, gardeners, and plumbers. “Take my money and break things instead of fixing them. Put them all in the cesspool, serve the lot right,” she cried cheerfully, as she found the door handle of her car.

Beecher took Ilse’s arm. “Come on,” he said, and led her through the shadows toward Polly’s car. Polly would take them into Mirimar. She enjoyed helping people. But most importantly, she wouldn’t remember doing it. And it was a solid bet that she wouldn’t know anything of Beecher’s trouble, not even if she had heard the inevitable gossip a dozen times a day. Polly Soames was a grand and generous old rake, but after four marriages, a dozen children, and thousands of fiestas, affairs, and intrigues, she had given up trying to keep anything straight in her head; all the fine wires up there had melted together in the heat of her enthusiastic passions, so that now her thoughts raced wildly and cheerfully from past to present to future, with old husbands and new gigolos, remembered hang-overs and anticipated ones, all blurring together in scenes of spastic and brilliant irrelevance.

Beecher called to her while she tugged at the handle of her car. “Goddamn Stutz, no good at all,” she was muttering as she tried to pry open the door of her Mercedes. She turned and stared at him, her eyes flashing weakly in her deliciously ravaged face. “Goddamn, Mike Beecher!” she said. “I thought you’d gone. Off to Palm Beach. Somebody said Palm Beach. Ridiculous place. Full of Italian golfers.”

Beecher asked her if she would drive them into town, and Polly said, “Sure, sure, hop in. Goddamn.” She cocked her head to one side like an inquisitive bird, and a frown of painful intensity clouded her forehead. “It wasn’t Palm Beach. It was something quite delightful. It cheered me up, I remember.” Suddenly she poked a finger against his chest. “You stole an airplane, that’s what you did.” She put her head back and laughed shrilly. “Delightful! Bored waiting for it to take off, I imagine.”

“Polly, you know how these rumors get around.”

“No, it wasn’t you.” She shook her head crossly. “It was Massimo. My first husband. In Italy. Took a plane and ran into a sweet little church in Sicily. Left me the most marvelous collection of books. All decorated in gold. Very religious. Eve with a gold fig leaf. Sold ’em all to the Vatican. Who’s that with you?”

“You remember Ilse, Polly.”

“Of course. Cannes. Before the war.” She laughed heartily and slapped Beecher on the back. “Gold fig leaves, my boy, you don’t know the half of it. Come! Crisis at the villa. All the drains stopped up, all maids pregnant. Hah! They’re stopped up too. Get in...”

Beecher left Ilse on the terrace of the Quita Pena, at a table far from the faint beams of yellow light falling through the doorway from the bar. The fishermen were singing in the back room, their voices rising mournfully with the wind, and a burro passing on the highway clicked out a rhythmic accompaniment to their songs. When Beecher crossed the road he turned and waved to her. But he didn’t know whether she saw him, or whether or not she returned his wave; in the gloom of the terrace she had become a blurred and indistinct figure, her particular form and identity lost among the shadows.

Beecher climbed the winding dirt road that led to the villa. The moonlight was filtering through light gray fog, but he could see the massive bulk of the mountains against the sky, and slender trees twisting in the wind. He was very tired. His legs ached with each step, and he had to breathe deeply to get enough air into his lungs. But his body seemed separate from him, as if it were some large and clumsily wrapped package which he had been carrying an intolerable distance.

His villa loomed ahead of him, silent and completely dark; not a crack of light showed from any window or door. He stopped to get his breath. The wind across the garden was heavy and fragrant with the scent of flowers, and below him he heard the faint noise of traffic on the coastal road. Beecher felt abandoned and homeless; it had been foolish to expect that Adela and Encarna would be here to greet him, but that had been his hope nonetheless, that they would answer the door, and weep over him and rush about to make him a cup of tea.

But after this first, reflexive twist of disappointment, Beecher realized that he had learned his lesson well; he didn’t need these pretty vignettes of future pleasure any more. He preferred reality. Shrugging, he walked down the narrow pathway and tried the side door of the villa. It was locked. He went around to the terrace and glanced down into the garden. The pale, graveled walks, and the tiny pool were shining in the moonlight. Turning, he saw that one of the terrace doors was open, and this made him smile. He was back in Spain, all right. The landlord had undoubtedly padlocked every window, chained the garden furniture together, and then, smiling efficiently, had hurried off leaving the terrace doors wide open. Beecher walked into the living room and made an effort to adjust his eyes to the gloom. A lamp with a tall white shade stood beside the fireplace like some neat cylindrical ghost. Beecher was groping clumsily toward it when a switch clicked sharply; the overhead bulbs seemed to explode against his eyes, flooding the room with brilliant confusing light.

Don Julio Cansana, the police constable of Mirimar, stood in the terrace doorway, ominously correct and formal in his green twill uniform and shining black boots. The strong light gleamed on his silver-gray hair, and drew deep shadows beneath his cold blue eyes. When he smiled and inclined his head, the small twist of his lips did nothing to relieve his austerely formal manner.

“I apologize for the touch of theater,” Don Julio said. “But I was afraid the lights might scare you away.”

Beecher’s mouth was dry, and his heart was still pounding with shock. It took him several seconds to absorb the implications of Don Julio’s comment; then he shook his head quickly, like a fighter trying to throw off the effects of a brutal, unexpected blow. “You were waiting for me?” he said. “You knew I was coming here?”

“Yes,” Don Julio said. “The Rosaleen made excellent time, didn’t she?”

Beecher sat down slowly on the arm of a chair. He rubbed a shaking hand over his face and tried to adjust himself to what he knew was coming; waves of shock seemed to be streaking through his body, hammering and pounding at the shores of his reason and strength. But the most treacherous ones were still on the way, he knew.

“Who told you I was on the Rosaleen?” he said hopelessly.

“Your friend, the Irishman.” Don Julio strolled across the room, the heels of his boots sounding with measured clarity on the cold marble floor. “I persuaded him it was the wisest thing to do under the circumstances.”

Beecher smiled bitterly. “And the circumstances were what?”

“I suspected you were in Morocco. For several reasons. A report of a landrover abandoned in Goulamine. A curiously hesitant description from a policeman in Marrakech, and a belated but more convincing one from a hotel clerk in Casblanca. I was kept informed because the crimes had occurred here, you see.” Don Julio’s tone was mildly ironical. “The Frenchman was murdered twenty feet from where we are standing, and the missing aircraft was last heard from at our little airport. Naturally, I have an interest in these things.”

“Naturally.”

“At any rate, the descriptions fitted you, and it was evident you were traveling north. It wasn’t likely you would attempt to enter Spain legally, and this thought led me to the Irishman. He was reluctant and evasive until I made it clear I was in no mood for games.”

“Why didn’t you arrest me when I landed?”

“You had gone to such great lengths not to be arrested that I believed — or hoped at least — that you were coming here to tell your story to me. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Had I arrested you, no one would have believed this for a minute. So I decided to let you come and surrender yourself. Now this is official. You are under arrest.”

“Shall we put on Don Giovanni? And pour ourselves a sherry? While I tell you what happened?”

“No.” Don Julio’s eyes were suddenly grave. “I will take your statement in my office. We are involved with a death, a murder. And several other matters. Your guilt or innocence, perhaps your life. Vamos?”