A Deadly Shade Of Gold

A Deadly Shade Of Gold

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #5 A Deadly Shade Of Gold

John D. MacDonald

One

A SMEAR of fresh blood has a metallic smell. It smells like freshly sheared copper. It is a clean and impersonal smell, quite astonishing the first time you smell it. It changes quickly, to a fetid, fudgier smell, as the cells die and thicken.

When it is the blood of a stranger, there is an atavistic withdrawal, a toughening of response, a wary reluctance for any involvement. When it is your own, you want to know how bad it is. You turn into a big inward ear, listening to yourself, waiting for faintness, wondering if this is going to be the time when the faintness comes and turns into a hollow roaring, and sucks you down. Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet.

When it is the blood of a friend…

When maybe he said, Please not yet… But it took him and he went on down…

It was a superb season for girls on the Lauderdale beaches. There are good years and bad years. This, we all agreed, was a vintage year. They were blooming on all sides, like a garden out of control. It was a special type this year, particularly willowy ones, with sun-streaky hair, soft little sunbrown noses, lazed eyes in the cool pastel shades of green and blue, cat yawny ones, affecting a boredom belied by glints of interest and amusement, smilers rather than gigglers, with a tendency to run in little flocks of three and four and five. They sparkled on our beaches this year like grunions, a lithe and wayward crop that in too sad and too short a time would be striving for Whiter Washes, ScuffPruf Floors and Throw-Away Nursing Bottles.

In a cool February wind, on a bright and cloudless afternoon, Meyer and I had something over a half dozen of them drowsing in pretty display, basted with sun oil, behind the protection of laced canvas on the sun deck atop my barge type houseboat, the Busted Flush, moored on a semipermanent basis at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale. Meyer and I were playing acey-deucy. He was enjoying it more than I was. He kept rolling doubles. He looks like the diorama of Early Man in the Museum of Natural History. He has almost as much pelt as an Adirondack black bear. But he can stroll grinning down a beach and acquire a tagalong flock of lovelies the way an ice cream cart ropes children. He calls them all Junior. It saves confusion. He is never never seen with one at a time. He lives alone aboard a squatty little cruiser and is, by trade, an Economist. He predicts trends. He acquired a little money the hard way, and he keeps moving it around from this to that, and it keeps growing nicely, and he does learned articles for incomprehensible journals.

At reasonable intervals one of the Juniors would clamber down the ladderway, go below and return with a pair of cans of cold beer from my stainless steel galley. I always buy the brands with the pull tabs. You stare at the tab, think deep thoughts about progress, advertising, modern living, cultural advances, and then turn the can upside down and open with an opener. It is a ceremonial kind of freedom.

Just as Meyer got all the way around, blocked me out, and began taking off with exquisite care, smirking away to himself, humming, rolling good numbers, I heard my phone ring. It surprised me. I thought I had the switch at the off position, the position where you can phone out, but anybody phoning you thinks it is ringing, but it isn’t. And that is another kind of freedom. Like throwing away mail without looking to see who it’s from, which is the ultimate test, of course. I have yet to meet a woman who has arrived at that stage. They always have to look.

Perhaps if Meyer hadn’t been making everything so disagreeable, I would have let it ring itself out. But I went on down to my lounge and answered it with one very cautious depersonalized grunt.

“McGee?” the voice said. “Hey McGee? Is this Travis McGee?”

I stuck a thumb in my cheek and said, “I’m lookin affa things while he’s away.”

The voice was vaguely familiar. “McGee, buddy, are you stoned?”

Then I knew the voice. From way back. Sam Taggart.

“Where the hell are you,” I said, “and how soon can you get here?”

The voice faded and came back. “…too far to show up in the next nine minutes. Wait’ll I see what it says on the front of this phone book. Waycross, Georgia. Look, I’ve been driving straight on through, and I’m dead on my feet. And I started thinking suppose he isn’t there, then what the hell do you do?”

“So I’m here. So hole up and get some sleep before you kill somebody.”

“Trav, I got to have some help.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Listen. Seriously. You still… operating like you used to?”

“Only when I need the money. Right now I’m taking a nice long piece of my retirement, Sam. Hurry on down. The little broads are beautiful this year.”

“There’s a lot of money in this.”

“It will be a lot more pleasant to say no to you in person. And by the way Sam?”

“Yes?”

“Is there anybody in particular you would like me to get in touch with? Just to say you’re on your way?”

It was a loaded question, about as subtle as being cracked across the mouth with a dead mackerel. I expected a long pause and got one.

“Don’t make those real funny jokes,” he said in a huskier voice.

“What if maybe it isn’t a joke, Sam?”

“It has to be. If she had a gun, she should kill me. You know that. She knows that. I know that. For God’s sake, you know no woman, especially a woman like Nora, can take that from anybody. I dealt myself out, forever. Look, I know what I lost there, Trav. Besides, a gal like that wouldn’t still be around. Not after three years. Don’t make jokes, boy.”

“She’s still around. Sam, did you ever give her a chance to forgive you?”

“She never would. Believe me, she never would.”

“Are you sewed up with somebody else?”

“Don’t be a damn fool.”

“Why not, Sam?”

“That’s another funny joke too.”

“She’s not sewed up. At least she wasn’t two weeks ago. Why shouldn’t her reasons be the same as yours?”

“Cut it out. I can’t think. I’m dead on my feet.”

“You don’t have to think. All you have to do is feel, Sam. She’ll want to see you.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I was the shoulder she cried on, you silly bastard!”

“God, how I want to see her!”

“Sam, it will tear her up too much if you walk in cold. Let me get her set for it. Okay?”

“Do you really know what the hell you’re doing, McGee?”

“Sam, sweetie, I’ve been trying to locate you for three years.”

He was silent again, and then I heard him sigh. “I got to sack out. Listen. I’ll be there tomorrow late. What’s tomorrow? Friday. What I’ll do, I’ll find a room someplace…”

“Come right to the boat.”

“No. That won’t be so smart, for reasons I’ll tell you when I see you. And I’ve got to talk to you before I do anything about seeing Nora. What you better do, Trav, tell her I’m coming in Saturday. Don’t ask questions now. Just set it up that way. I… I’ve got to have some help. Do it my way Trav. I’ll phone you after I locate a place.”

After I hung up, I looked up the number of Nora Gardino’s shop. Some girl with a Gabor accent answered, and turned me over to Miss Gardino.

“The McGee!” she said with irony and pleasure. “Let me guess. Something in a size eight or ten, lacy, expensive and, of course, gift wrapped.”

“Nope. This time I want the boss lady. Gift wrapped. Instead of package delivery I’ll pick it up in person. About seven? Gin, steak, wine, dancing and provocative conversation.”

“Oh God, I promised my accountant I would…”

“Low lights.”

“But this stuff is way past due now and I really…”

“Close harmony.”

“Seven o’clock then. But why? I’m pleased and so on, but why?”

“Because a McGee never never gives up.”

“Wow, you’re after me every minute, huh? Tireless McGee. Once a year, with bewildering frequency, turning a poor girl’s head, never giving her a chance to catch her breath. But make it seven-thirty. Okay?”

I went back topside and lost my game, and the next, and the next, while the Juniors cheered their Leader on. I lost $14.40. I paid off. The air was colder, and the heat was going out of the slanting sunlight. The Juniors were getting restive.

“Here,” I said to Meyer. “Put it in something with a future. Jump the culture trend. Electric hairbrushes.”

Meyer smiled and surveyed his flock. “With your money McGee, I’d rather be trivial. What I’ll do, I’ll send Junior off, when the time is ripe, to invest it all in bean sprouts, water chestnuts, almonds, candied ginger and wonton, and we’ll choke it all down aboard this fifty-four feet of decadent luxury afloat, and play your fool records and all tell lies.”

“Got a date.”

“Mmmm,” he said. He counted them. “Darlings, I see you are seven. Those of you who can be trusted to go round up one amiable young man each, respectful, attentive, light-hearted young men, raise your right hand. Three of you? Ah, four. Splendid. All of you take your little roses and slippers and beach bags and buzz off now, and get dressed, warmly and informally, and gather up your young men and we shall all meet at Bill’s Tahiti at seven promptly.”

They trooped off my boat, making their little bird noises together, smiling back at us, waving.

Meyer leaned on the sun deck rail and said fondly, “Darlings all.”

“That’s a pretty sloppy formation. Shouldn’t you have them marching by now?”

“They are products of an increasingly regimented culture, my boy. Group activities give them a sense of security, of purpose, of adjustment. I am their vacation substitute for a playground director. Left to their own devices on vacation, they would become restless, quarrelsome, bitter, aimless. They would have a dreadful time. Now when they return to one of those dreary states which begin with a vowel, they will treasure the memory of being kept busy every minute. The western world, my dear McGee, is being turned into one vast cruise ship, and there is a shortage of cruise directors.” He turned and gave me a somber hairy look. “After that phone call, you played even worse, if that is possible.”

“An old friend.”

“With a problem, of course. McGee, that expression is rapidly becoming obsolete too. In our brave new world there will be nothing but new friends. Brand new ones every day, impossible to tell apart, all wearing the same adjusted smile, the same miracle fabric, the same perfect deodorant. And they will all say exactly the same things. It will take all the stress out of interpersonal relations. From what I have been able to observe of late, I suspect that all the females could be called Carol and all the males could be called Mark.”

He lumbered down my ladderway, refused an ultimate brew, and went trudging off toward his ugly little cruiser tied up to a neighboring dock. On its transom, in elaborate gold, was the name The John Maynard Keynes.

At the appropriate time I drove over to the mainland, across the 17th Street Causeway, and from there north to the back street where Nora Gardino lives in what was once a gardener’s cottage for a large estate. Only that small corner of the grounds is unchanged, framed on two sides by the original wall, with the fierce ornamental iron spikes on top of it, screened on the other two sides by tropical growth, rich, thick and fragrant. As I drove in, tires crunching the brown pebbles, I wondered if, back in a world no longer comprehensible to us, my vehicle had ever called at the main house, now long gone, replaced by a garden apartment project.

I drive a Rolls, vintage 1936, one of the big ones. Some previous owner apparently crushed the rear end, and, seeking utility, turned her into a pickup truck. Another painted her that horrid blue that matches the hair of a grade school teacher I once had, and I have named her, with an attack of the quaints, after that teacher. Miss Agnes. She is ponderously slow to get up to cruising speed, but once she has attained it, she can float along all day long in the medium eighties in a rather ghastly silence-a faint whisper of wind, a slight rumble of rubber. Miss Agnes was born into a depression, and suffered therefrom.

My lights made highlights on Nora’s little black Sunbeam parked deep in the curve of driveway. I went up onto the shallow porch, and a girl answered the door. She was big and slender. She had a broad face, hair the color of wood ashes. She wore a pale grey corduroy jump suit, with a big red heart embroidered where a heart should be. I did not catch her name exactly, not with that Gaborish accent, but it sounded like Shaja Dobrak. She invited me in, after I had identified myself, and said that Nora would soon be ready. In her grey-blue eyes, above her polite and social smile, were little glints of appraisal and speculation. Two Siamese cats, yawning on a decorator couch, gave me much the same look, though slightly cross-eyed.

The decor had been changed since that last time I was at the cottage. Now it was gold and grey, with accents of white and pale blue, a small, charming, intimate room. She made me a drink and brought it to me, and sat with her own in a chair facing me, long legs tucked under her, and told me she had worked far Nora seven months, and had been living at the cottage for four months. She was a grown-up, composed, watchful and gracious, and extraordinarily attractive in her own distinctive way.

In a little while Nora came hurrying out, and I got up for the quick small old-friends hug, the kiss on the cheek. She is a lean, dark, vital woman, with vivid dark eyes, too much nose, not enough forehead. Her voice is almost, but not quite, baritone. Her figure is superb and her legs are extraordinary. In spite of the strength of her features, her rather brusk and impersonal mannerisms, she is an intensely provocative woman, full of the challenging promise of great feminine warmth.

She was in a deep shade of wool, not exactly a wine shade, perhaps a cream sherry shade, a fur wrap, her blue-black hair glossy, her heels tall, purse in hand, mouth shaped red, her eyes sparkling with holiday. Her face looked thinner than I remembered, her cheeks more hollowed.

We said goodnight to the smiling Shaja, and as we went out Nora said, “I haven’t had a date in so long, I feel practically girlish.”

“Good: My car or yours?”

“Trav, you should remember that I would never slight Miss Agnes that way. She’d sit here and sulk.” After I closed her in and got in beside her she said, “I hate to be a bore, but I left a letter on my desk that has to go out tonight. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.” As I turned out of the drive I said, “I thought you were a loner.”

“Oh, Shaja? She is a jewel. I’m in the process of setting the shop up so that she can buy in, a little at a time. She’s the only one I’ve ever found I can really depend on. Or live with. She has a very precise sense of privacy, of fairness, of sharing. And… she reacts to things the way I do. We’re men’s women, both of us. No sorority overtones. No girlish giggles and confidences. And we’re both tidy as cats. No hair in the sink, no crud on the dishes. So it works. She’s married to a man years older than she is. She gets two letters a year from him. He’s in a Hungarian prison. Four years to go, I think, and then the problem of trying to get him out of the country somehow, and get him over here, but she has a wonderful confidence that it is all going to work out. She is absolutely marvelous in the shop. If a woman is torn between something terribly expensive, and something quite suitable, Shaja has a little trick of raising one eyebrow a fraction of an inch and changing the shape of her mouth, and sighing in an absolutely inaudible way. We’re doing just fine, and how are you doing, Trav, darling?”

“Medium well.”

“You were away for quite a long time, weren’t you? I tried to get to you for some little things that came up. I thought they’d amuse you.”

“I’ve been back since Christmas. Emotionally convalescent, sort of. Ragged edges.”

“Something rough?”

“I came out of it with a little money, and absolutely nothing else, except a case of the flying twitches.”

“What in the world is that?”

“When you try to drop off to sleep and all of a sudden you leap like a gaffed fish and start shaking. So you have a drink and try again. But now I’m having play time. Months of it, Nora.”

“Until the money gets low?”

“Is this going to work into the lecture about ambition, security, reliability, the obligation to use all the talents God gives you and so on?”

“No, darling. Not tonight. Not ever again. You are incorrigible.”

I parked in the vast emptiness in front of her shop. She is in a superior shopping center, multilevel, with walks, planting areas, piped music, a sprinkling of nationally known retail names. The two feminine dummies in the shallow window were silhouetted against her night lights. In a slant of gold script on the display window was written Gardino.

I went with her while she unlocked the door, and stood inside the door while she went back to her office in the rear to get the letter. In the still air was the scent of perfumes and fabric. Out of some mild ironic impulse I reached into the shallow window and patted the hard plastic curve of the sterile rump of the nearest dummy, covered by $89 worth of cotton. I thought of what Meyer had said, and I murmured, “I dub thee Carol.”

She came swiftly and soundlessly back across the thick carpeting, the paleness of the letter in her hand and said, “I hate to be so stupid.”

“What’s the most expensive thing in stock?”

“What? We can get almost anything very quickly for special customers.”

“I mean right here, right now.”

“Why, dear?”

“Aimless curiosity Nora.”

“We have some absolutely lovely suits at nine hundred dollars.”

“Would a woman buy one of those to please a man?”

She patted my arm. “Don’t be an ass, Travis. A woman buys a nine-hundred-dollar suit to prove to the world at large that she has a man willing to buy her a nine-hundred-dollar suit. It gives her a sense of emotional accomplishment. Come along. You’re a drink ahead of me.”

As she checked the lock on the door behind us, I said, “How about the Mile O’Beach?”

“Hmmm. Not the Bahama Room?”

“Later, if we feel like it. But food and drink in the Captain’s Room.”

“Fine!”

It was a conversational place, a small dark lounge far from the commercial merriment, all black woods, dark leather, flattering lighting. We took armchairs at the countersunk bar, and I told Charles to bring us menus in about forty minutes, and told him what sort of table we would like. We talked very busily and merrily, right through the drinks and right into dinner, and then the conversation began to sag because there wasn’t anything left to talk about except the way things once were. It brought on constraint.

I do not know if she ever actually realized, while things were going on, how it all was with me. Sam and Nora were so inevitably, totally, gloweringly right for each other, that the reflected aura deluded Nicki and me into thinking we had something just as special. A habitual foursome can work that kind of uneasy magic sometimes. When Sam Taggart and Nora broke up in that dreadful and violent and self-destructive way, Nicki and I tried to keep going. But there wasn’t enough left. Too much of what we thought we were to each other depended on that group aura, the fun, the good talk, the trusting closeness.

I waited until she had finished dinner and had argued herself into the infrequent debauch of Irish coffee.

Not knowing any good way to do it, I waited until one line of talk had died into a not entirely comfortable silence, and then I said, “Sam is on his way back here. He wants to see you.”

Her eyes went wide and deep lines appeared between her dark brows. She put her hand to her throat. “Sam?” she whispered. “He wants…” The color drained out of her face abruptly. She wrenched her chair sideways and bent forward to put her head between her knees. Charles came rushing over. I told him what I needed. He returned with it in about twelve seconds. I knelt beside her chair and held the smelling salts to her nostrils. Charles hovered. In a few moments she sat up, her color still ghastly.

She tried to smile and said, “Walk me, Trav. Get me out of here. Please.”

Two

WE WALKED on the dark grounds of the big hotel, among the walks and landscaping. In exposed places the wind was biting.

“Feel better?”

“Terribly maidenly, wasn’t it? What did they used to call it? The vapors.”

“I didn’t do it very well. I sort of slugged you with it.”

“How did he sound?”

“Exhausted. He’d been driving a long way.”

“From where?”

“He didn’t say.”

“How did he sound… about me?”

“As if he’s convinced you can never forgive him.”

“Oh God! The fool! The damned fool! All this waste… ” She turned and faced me in the night. “Why should he think I couldn’t ever understand? After all, a man like that is always terrified of… any total commitment. It was cruel and brutal, the way he did it, but I could have…”

She whirled away and made a forlorn sound, staggered to a slender punk tree, caught it with her left hand, bent forward from the waist and began to vomit. I went to her, put my right hand on her waist to hold her braced and steadied, her hip pulled against the side of my thigh, my left hand clasping her left shoulder. As her slim body leapt and spasmed with the retching, as she made little intermittent demands that I leave her alone, I was remembering just how brutal it was, so all involved with that dreary old business of killing the thing you love the best. Because you are afraid of love, I guess.

Sam was a random guy, a big restless, reckless lantern-jawed ex-marine, a brawler, a wencher, a two-fisted drinker. He loved the sea and knew it well. He crewed on some deep-water racers. He worked in boat yards. He went into hock for a charter boat, did all right, then had a run of bad luck and lost it. He worked on other charter fishermen, and did some commercial fishing. A boat bum. An ocean bum. For a time he captained a big Wheeler for an adoring widow. He was a type you find around every resort port. Unfocused. A random, rambling man. After you knew him a long time, if he trusted you, you would find out that there was another man underneath, and a lot of the surface was a part he played. He was sensitive, perceptive. He had a liberal arts degree from one of the fine small colleges. He had a lot of ability and no motivation.

Then he met Nora Gardino, and she was that marvelous catalyst that brought all the energy of Sam Taggart into focus, into some sense of purpose. Nora gave him meaning. And it took a lot of woman to do that. She was more than most, by far.

At that time I picked up with Nicki and the four of us ran in a small friendly pack. Nicki and I got in on the planning phase. Her shop was doing well. Sam scouted a good piece of waterfront land. He wanted to start a marina from scratch, and he had sound ideas about it, and good local contacts. Once he got it started, they would be married. She would continue with the shop until too pregnant, and then she would sell out and put the money into the marina project. They designed the big airy apartment they would live in, right on the marina property.

Maybe he felt the walls were closing in. Maybe he felt unworthy of all the total trust and loyalty she was so obviously giving him. Maybe he was afraid that, in spite of all his confidence, he would fail her in some way. By then he was earning pretty good money in a boat yard, and saving every dime of it. She had a dull little girl working for her at the time, plump and pretty with an empty face. Her name was Sandra. Maybe, subconsciously, he wanted it to happen just the way it happened. Maybe, after he got drunk, it was just accidental. But it was cruel, and it was brutal, to have Nora, after a day and a night of searching for him, find him at last, see his blurred self-destructive grin as he stared at her from the tangled bed, with all the naked fattiness of Sandra snoring placidly beside him.

She turned on her heel quickly, closed the door with barely a sound, and went away from there, her heart breaking anew with every step she took.

By the next day he was packed and gone. I helped her try to find him. She put a thousand dollars into agency fees without their finding any trace of him.

After a while you give up. Or maybe you never give up.

Nora straightened up at last, weak and dizzy and held the slim tree with both hands and stood with her forehead resting against the soft silvery bark.

“I must be a very attractive date,” she said in a half whisper.

“It’s been three years.”

“Not knowing if he was sick or dead or in trouble.” She shivered visibly.

I patted her shoulder. “Come on. Go freshen up and we’ll get away from here.”

“When will he be here?”

“Saturday”

“What time?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will he… come to the shop?”

“Or phone you. I don’t know.”

“Does he know you’ve told me about him?”

“Yes.”

“He hasn’t found anybody else?”

“Neither of you have. For the same reason.”

“I’m glad to have some warning, Trav. But I will be a complete wreck by Saturday.”

I waited in the lobby for her. When she was ready I drove to Bahia Mar. We could talk aboard the Busted Flush. Obviously she wanted to talk.

I turned the heat up. I made her a tall mild drink. She took her shoes off and sat on the far curve of my yellow couch in the lounge, her legs tucked up, her color better, her frown thoughtful.

“Damn it all, Trav, I just don’t know how to handle it. Rush into his arms? I want to. But does he want me to? Or does he want to be punished? She was a dreadful little bit of nothing, you know. God, how I remember that whining little explanation.” She imitated Sandra’s immature little voice. “ ‘Miss Gardino, we just had a coupla drinks and you know, one thing led to another. Geez, I don’t know where he went. I ast him and he pushed me away so hard I fell down. He just went.’ ”

“I don’t know how he wants you to act.”

“Boy, it was a real belt to the pride. My pride hurt so badly, I didn’t really know he was gone until he’d been gone a month. The wedding was a month away. We were practically living together. That was no secret. And it was such a wonderful magic, Trav. Every time was a promise of forever. Wasn’t I enough for him? That’s what made it such a terrible slap in the face.”

“He was drinking.”

“What started the drinking?”

“Fright, maybe.”

“Of what?”

“A real live complete entire woman can be a scary thing.”

“Did I come on too strong or something?”

“You have to be what you are, Nora. The complete package.”

“Now I’m twenty-nine. Three lousy stinking wasted years. What did he say? Tell me some of his words.”

“Quote God how I want to see her unquote.”

She jumped up and went back and forth with panther stride. “What the hell did he think I was? A white plaster saint? A vision of perfection? Did he think I was so weak I couldn’t handle a little ugliness? So okay! We’d have had a terrible couple of months. We’d have torn each other to ribbons. And I would have told him that if he ever did that to me again, I’d cut his heart out. But he didn’t give me a chance! He didn’t give us a chance. He ran, damn him!”

“After he gave himself the excuse to run, Nora.”

She sat down abruptly and stared at me for a long time. “Sure,” she said. “You can understand that better than I can, because you are one of those too, aren’t you? One of those long distance runners. You wade around the edge, boy. But you never jump in. You go out on the end of the high board and bounce pretty and puff your chest, but you never take that big dive.”

“That’s reasonably accurate.”

Her face twisted. “I’m sorry Trav. I haven’t got the right.”

“Or maybe all the information. But no harm done.”

She hit her knee with her fist. “I don’t know how to handle it, meeting him.”

“Don’t plan anything. Play it by ear, Nora. Don’t try to force any kind of reaction. It’s the only thing you can do.”

“I guess,” she said. She gave me a shamefaced look. “This is idiotic, but I’m absolutely ravenous.”

“Nora, honey, you know exactly where everything is, including the drawer where you’ll find an apron.”

“Eggs? Bacon? Toast?”

“All there. All for you. I’ll settle for one cold Tuborg. Bottom shelf. No glass, thanks.”

She brought me the beer. I heard the bacon sizzling out there. I looked over at the slim and lovely lines of her Italian shoes, one standing, one toppled. I wondered where Nicki was, and if she was making it the way she deserved. I heard Nora Gardino humming to herself. I sipped the cold beer. I turned on the FM and spun the tuner dial and found a Bach thing, a fugue, one of those that sounds as if the needle keeps getting stuck.

Here, behind the thick opaque lounge curtains was that rare and special privacy obtainable in the middle of deserts and the middle of big marinas. Around me were the other craft, water slapping the hulls, gurgling around the pilings, little pressures of tide and wind creaking the lines.

She came out of the galley and said, “Why did he call you?”

“To find out it you were still around,” I lied. “To find out if there were any chances left. To find out if it was too late to come home.”

“It isn’t too late. Believe me, it isn’t too late.”

Three

SOUTH OF Lauderdale on U.S. 1 there are junk strips dating back to the desperate trashiness of the thirties. They are, as a governor of the state of Florida once said at a press conference, a sore eye.

Sam Taggart was in one of six cabins out behind a dispirited gas station that sold some kind of offbrand called Haste. The cabins were originally styled to look like little teeny tiny Mount Vernons. There was a field full of dead automobiles behind the cabins, a defunct Midgie-Golf on the left, a vegetable stand on the right. Sam was in number three, and I got there at four on Friday afternoon, twenty minutes after he phoned. The car beside the cabin was maroon and rust, a seven or eight year old Merc with bald tires.

A bed creaked as Sam got off it and came to the door. He let me in and hit me solidly in the chest and said, “You’re an uglier man than I remembered.”

“I compensate with boyish charm, Taggart.” We shook hands. He motioned to the only chair in the room and sat on the bed. I had never seen him so dark. He was the deep stained bronze of a Seminole. His hand was hard and leathery. He wore faded khaki pants and a white T shirt with a ripped shoulder seam. He looked leaned down, all bones and wire. He had a crescent scar on his chin that hadn’t been there before. He was missing some important teeth on the upper right. His black hair was cropped close to his skull.

“You know what I was remembering while I was waiting, McGee? That crazy time down at Marathon, and those big twins, Johnny Dow’s nieces from Michigan. And we got in that game of trading punches, just for kicks. And every time, both those big old gals would scream. Finally I dropped you, and you stayed down so long I began to get nervous. Then you got up, a little bit at a time. I swear to God, it took you five whole minutes to get all the way up on your feet and you stood there swaying and gave me a great big bloody grin and said, ‘My turn, Sam.’ That’s what I was remembering. God, what idiots. How are things, Trav?”

“You mean with Nora?”

“Okay. With Nora. How did she take it?”

“First she got faint and then she threw up, and then she decided she loves you and wants you back.”

“Boy I come back like a hero, don’t I? I come back in great shape.”

“But you came back.”

“She’s a sucker for punishment, eh?”

“Why did you do her that way Sam?”

He braced his arms on his knees and stared at the floor. “I don’t know. I just don’t know, Trav. I swear.” He looked up at me. “How has she been? How does she look? How’s she been making out?”

“She looks a little thinner in the face. And she’s a little bit quieter than she used to be. She’s made a good thing of the shop. It’s in a new place now. More expensive stuff. She’s still got the best legs in town.”

“Coming back is doing her no favor.”

“Leave that up to her, Sam. Unless you plan to do it the same way all over again.”

“No. Believe me. Never. Trav, have there been any guys?.

“When you two get back together, you can decide whether you want to trade reminiscences.”

“You know, I wondered about you and her. I wondered a lot.”

“Forget it. It was a mild idea at one time, but it didn’t work out. Where have you been all this time, Sam?”

“Most of the time in a little Mexican town below Guaymas. Puerto Altamura. Fishing village. I became a residente. Helped a guy build up a sports fishing layout, catering to a rich trade.”

“You don’t look so rich.”

“I left real quick Trav. Jesus, you’ve never seen fishing like we had there. Any day, you quit because your wrist is so sprained you can’t hold a rod.”

“How nice for you, Sam.”

He peered at me. “Sure. Sure, you son of a bitch. When you don’t think much of yourself, you can’t think much of anything else.”

“You said you’re in trouble.”

“You’re still doing the same kind of hustling, McGee?”

“I am still the last resort, Sam, for victims of perfectly legal theft, or theft so clever the law can’t do a thing. Try everything else and then come to me. If I can get it back, I keep half. Half is a lot better than nothing at all. But I am temporarily retired. Sorry.”

“I’ve done some thinking since I talked to you. When I decided to come and see you, was I thinking about getting help, or an excuse to see Nora? I don’t know. Everybody kids themselves. How can you tell. I knew I’d find out she’s married, two kids by now. I could see the guy, even. One of those development guys, very flashy, speeches to the service clubs, low golf handicap, flies his own plane. A nice guy with thirty forty sports jackets.”

“She’s twenty-nine. She’s not married. She should be.”

“To me? To me, Trav? Take a good look.”

His eyes moved away. He made a knotted fist and stared at it.

I said, “Maybe you’ve gotten all the rest of it out of your system now. Maybe you’re ready.”

He sighed. “I could be. God knows I could be. I did some thinking. If there’s a chance of her. If there’s a good chance, then the thing that seemed so important to get your help on… maybe it isn’t all that important. Oh boy, they gave it to me good, friend. The stuff was mine, and they took it. You see, without Nora, it was a lot more important to get it back, or get half of it back, half to you. If you could do anything about it. Maybe not, even if you wanted to. This is not minor league.”

“I don’t have very much idea of what you’re talking about.”

“I suppose it’s pride,” Sam Taggart said. “Getting pushed around like a stupid kid. But it is better, I guess, to just get out of it with what I have.” He stood up. “Stay right there. I want to show you something.” He went out to the rusty car with the California plates. In a few moments he came back in. He sat on the bed and untied coarse twine, unrolled a piece of soiled chamois, reached and handed me a squat little figurine about five and a half inches tall. The weight of it was so unexpected I nearly dropped it.

It was a crude little figure, dumpy, a male representation like a child would make out of clay. It was startlingly, emphatically male. It was of solid metal, dull yellow and orange, blackness caught into the creases of it, shinier where it had been handled.

“Gold?” I asked.

“Solid. Not very pure. But that doesn’t make the value of it. It’s Pre-Columbian. I don’t know whether this one is Aztec. It could be. It’s worth a hell of a lot more than the gold, but nobody can say exactly what it is worth. It’s worth what you can get a museum or a collector to pay for it. I imagine this one was some kind of a potency symbol. I had twenty-eight of them, some bigger, some smaller. Not all the same source or same period. Two were East Indian from way way back. Three were, I think, Inca. When they took the others, they missed this one because that night by luck or coincidence, this one wasn’t with the others.”

“They were yours?” I couldn’t read his eyes.

“Let’s just say there was nobody else they could have belonged to, the way things had worked out. Somebody might develop an argument on that, but when I had them, they were mine. A rough, a very rough estimate of the value of the whole collection would be three to four hundred thousand. Take the gold alone, it was two thousand, two hundred and forty-one point six ounces, discount that for impurities, it’s still a nice bundle.” He slowly rewrapped the figurine, knotted the twine. “Finding the right buyer for the whole works would be touchy”

“A question of legal ownership?”

“Who owns things like these anyway?”

“I’m not looking for a project, Sam.”

“So you keep saying. And this one is too rough for one man. Some people have been hurt on this thing already. I thought it all over and I decided, what the hell.” He bounced the wrapped lump of gold on the palm of his tough hand. “It scalds them they missed this one, not so much from the value of it, but because I could use it as a lever and give them a lot of agitation. If I wanted to give up any chance at any of it, and give this little fellow up too, I could raise political hell with them. So, earlier today, I made the decision to pull out with what I could salvage. I used most of the pennies I had left to stop along the road and make a couple of phone calls. They’d like to have this little fellow, and close the books. So I said fifteen, and they said ten, and it looks as if it will be twelve thousand five. They’re sending a guy to close.” He grinned widely enough to expose all the gap where the teeth were gone. “At least I come back with a trousseau. Twelve-five plus Nora is better than three hundred without her. Lesson number one.”

“It takes you a while. But you learn.”

“Can I tap you for some walk-around money?”

I looked into my wallet. “Forty do it?”

“Forty is fine, Trav. Just fine.”

“When are you going to see Nora?”

He looked uneasy. “After I get this thing closed out. God, I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know how to act toward her. I ought to drop onto my knees and smack my head on the floor. Tomorrow is the day. Three years of thinking about her, and remembering every little thing about her, and tomorrow is the day. I’ve got stage fright, Trav. How should I set it up?”

“What you do, you hire fifty female trumpet players and dress them in white robes and then you-”

“Right. It’s my problem. Trav, how’s Nicki?”

“I wouldn’t know. She isn’t around any more.”

“Oh.”

“When she left, we shook hands. What she really wanted was a barbecue pit in the back yard, tricycles in the car port, guest towels, daddy home from the office at five-fifteen. She tried to be somebody else, but she couldn’t make it. She lusted to join the PTA.”

He gave me a strange look. “So do I.”

“You’ll make it, Taggart.”

“We’ll have you to dinner every once in a while.”

“I’ll use your guest towels.”

“We’ll feed the kids first.”

So I left him there and went on back to the boat, depressed in a vague way. The plumbing facilities aboard the Busted Flush are extraordinary. I heard that the Palm Beach type who originally built her obeyed every whim of his Brazilian mistress. The water tanks are huge. You could almost set up a bridge game in the shower stall. One could plausibly bathe a sizeable horse in the stainless steel tub. Every possible area of the walls of the bath is mirrored.

When I had saved myself from extinction in that marathon poker game by making a four heart flush stand up, the houseboat chap showed an expensive tendency to see every hand I had from then on. After I had all his ready cash and his houseboat, as his friends gently and firmly led him away from the game, he was trying forlornly to swing a loan on the Brazilian. With cash and houseboat gone, it would seem that his title to that particular asset was clouded.

I could guess that she had been a very clean girl. Other than that, she was either a very large girl or a very gregarious one.

I thundered hot water into the big tub, setting up McGee’s Handy Home Treatment for Melancholy. A deep hot bath, and a strong cold drink, and a book on the tub rack. Who needs the Megrims? Surely not McGee, not that big brown loose-jointed, wirehaired beach rambler, that lazy fish-catching, girlwatching, grey-eyed iconoclastic hustler. Stay happy, McGee, while you use up the stockpiled cash. Borrow a Junior from Meyer for the sake of coziness. Or get dressed and go over to the next dock, over to the big Wheeler where the Alabama Tiger maintains his permanent floating house party and join the festive pack. Do anything, but stop remembering the way Sam Taggart looks with all the wandering burned out of him. Stop remembering the sly shy way Nicki would walk toward you, across a room. Stop remembering the way Lois died. Get in there and have fun, fella. While there’s fun to have. While there’s some left. Before they deal you out.

Four

THE INSISTENT bong of the bell awakened me. I stared at the clock dial. Quarter after midnight. I hadn’t gone out at all. I had read my book, gotten slightly tight, broiled myself a small steak, and baked myself a large potato, watched the late news and weather and gone to bed.

I put a robe on and went out through the lounge and put the afterdeck lights on. I looked out and saw Nora Gardino rehooking my gangplank chain. She came aboard and swept by me and into the lounge and turned on me, one fist on her hip, her eyes narrow. “Where is he?”

I yawned and rubbed my eyes. “For God’s sake!”

“You know Beanie, over at the Mart.”

“Yes, I know Beanie.”

“She called me, over an hour ago. Maybe an hour and a half. She said she saw Sam about eight o’clock over at the Howard Johnson’s. She was sure it was him.”

“Can I fix you a drink, Nora?”

“Don’t change the subject. Where is he? You said he wouldn’t get here until tomorrow.”

“So I lied.”

“Why? Why?”

“Settle down, honey. He had a little matter to take care of first.”

“I called you and called you, and then I decided you’d turned the phone off again, so I came on over. I want to see him, Travis.”

“He wants to see you. Tomorrow.”

She shook her head. “No. Now. Where is he?” She stood there staring at me, tapping her foot. She wore flannel slacks, a yellow turtleneck sweater, a pale leather hip-length coat over the sweater, swinging open. She looked fervently, hotly, indignantly alive.

“Let him set it up his own way, Nora.”

“I am not going to wait through this night, believe me. It’s ridiculous. The time to have it out is right now. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Travis!”

I yawned again. “Okay, okay, honey. Let me get dressed. I’ll take you there.”

“Just tell me where.”

I was tempted, but then I thought that Sam Taggart would be sore as hell if I let her go to that fusty little cabin without warning, bust in on him in the midst of that kind of squalor without warning. The best way I could retrieve it would be to have her wait out in the car and go get him and warn him and send him on out to her. As a matter of fact, as a penalty against myself, or a gesture of friendship, I could turn over the Busted Flush for the reunion, and stay in his little Mount Vernon.

I dressed quickly, woke myself up by honking into double handfuls of cold water, locked up, went out with her and woke up Miss Agnes. Nora sat very perky and alert beside me.

“What was it he had to take care of?”

“I’ll let him tell you that.”

“When did he arrive?”

“This afternoon, late.”

“How does he look?”

“Fine. Just fine. He’s in great shape.”

I drove over to Route 1 and turned left. She was as rigid as a toy with the spring wound too tightly. When I glanced at her, she gave me a big nervous white-toothed grin in the reflection of the passing street lights. The gas station was dark. I parked on the asphalt beside the pumps and got out.

“In one of those crummy little cabins?”

“He isn’t broke.”

“I don’t care if he’s broke. I’ll come with you.”

“Nora, damn it, you stay right here. I’ll send him out. Okay?”

“All right, Trav,” she said meekly.

I walked around to the back. Cupid McGee. His car was beside his cabin. There was a pickup truck parked beside the end cabin on the left. The others looked empty. I rapped on his door. Night traffic growled by on Route 1.

“Sam?” I called. I rapped again. “Hey Sam!”

I tried the latch. The door swung open. I smelled musty linoleum, ancient plumbing. And a sharp metallic smell, like freshly sheared copper. I fumbled my hand along the inside wall beside the door.

The switch turned an unshaded light on. The light bulb lay against the floor, on the maple base of a table lamp, the shade a few feet away. The eye records. The eye takes vivid, unforgettable pictures. Sam Taggart was on his side, eyes half open in the grey-bronze of the emptied face, one chopped hand outflung, all of him shrunken and dwindled by the bulk loss of the lake of blood in which he lay. A flap of his face lay open, exposing pink teeth, and I thought, idiotically, the missing teeth are on the other side.

They’re sending a guy to close the account.

I heard the brisk steps approaching across cinders, and it took me too long to realize who was coming. “Sam?” she called in a voice like springtime. “Darling?”

I turned too late and tried to stop her. My arms were wooden, and she tore loose and took a step in and stared at what they’d left her of him. There are bodies you can run to. But not one like that. She made a strange little wheezing sound. She could have stood there forever. Lot’s wife.

I had enough sense to find the switch and drop him into a merciful blackness. I took her and turned her slowly and brought her out. She was like a board.

In the darkness, with faint lights of traffic touching her face, she said in a perfectly conversational tone, “Oh, no. I can’t permit that. I can’t stand that. He was coming back to me. I can’t have anything like that. I can’t endure that. There’s only so much, you know. They can’t ask more than that, can they?”

And suddenly she began to hurl herself about, random thrusts and flappings like a person in vast convulsions. Maybe she was trying to tear herself free of her soul. She made a tiny continuous whining sound, and she was astonishingly strong. I wrested her toward brighter light and her eyes were mad, and there was blood in the corner of her mouth. She clawed at me. I caught her by the nape of the neck, got my thumb under the angle of her jaw, pressed hard against the carotid artery. She made a few aimless struggling motions and then sagged. I caught her around the waist and walked her to the car, holding most of her weight. I bundled her in on the driver’s side, got in and shoved her over, and drove out of there.

By the time I walked her into her cottage, she was crying with such a despairing, hollow, terrible intensity that each sob threatened to drive her to her knees. Shaja wore a slate blue robe, her ashy hair tousled, her broad face marked with concern.

“I took her to Sam,” I said. “When we got there he was dead. Somebody killed him. With a knife.” She said an awed something in a foreign tongue. She put her arms around the grief-wracked figure of the smaller woman.

“Do what you can,” I said. “Sleeping pills, if you’ve got any.”

“We haff,” she said.

“I’ve got to use the phone.”

She led Nora back to the bedrooms. I sat on a grey and gold couch and phoned the county sheriff’s department. A man has been murdered at the X-Cell Cottages, in number three, half a mile below the city line on the left. My name is McGee. I found the body a few minutes ago. I’m going back there right now.“

I hung up in the middle of his first question. I went back to Nora’s bedroom. Shaja was supporting Nora, an arm around her shoulders, holding a glass of water to her lips. A coughing sob exploded a spray of water.

“I’ll be back later,” I said. She gave me a grave nod.

When I parked at the gas station, a department sedan was already in front of the cottage. The cottage lights were on. Two deputies were standing outside the open door. A middle-aged one and a young one.

“Hold it right there!” one of them said.

I stopped and said, “I phoned it in. My name is McGee.”

“Okay. Don’t touch anything. We got to wait for the C. I. people,” the middle-aged one said. “My name is Hawks. This here is Deputy DeWall.” He coughed and spat. “Friend of yours in there?”

“Yes.”

“When’d you find him?”

“A little after quarter of one. A few minutes after.” Cops do not have to be particularly acute. The average citizen has very few encounters with the law during his lifetime. Consequently he reacts in one of the standard ways of the average citizen, too earnest, too jocular, too talkative. When someone does not react in one of those standard ways, there are only two choices, either he has been in the business himself, or he has had too many past contacts with the law. I could sense that they were beginning to be a little bit too curious about me. So I fixed it…

“God, this is a terrible thing,” I said. “I suppose you fellows see a lot of this kind of thing, but I don’t think I could ever get used to it. Jesus, as long as I live I’ll never forget seeing Sam there on the floor like that with the light shining on his face. I can’t really believe it.”

Hawks yawned. “Somebody chopped him pretty good, Mr. McGee. The registration on the steering post says Samuel Taggart.”

“That’s right. Sam Taggart. He used to live here. He went away three years ago, just got back today.”

The doctor arrived next. He stared in at the body, rocked from heel to toe, hummed a little tune and relit the stub of his cigar. Next came another patrol vehicle followed by a lab truck and by a Volkswagen with two reporters in it. A young square-shouldered, balding man in khaki pants, in a plaid wool shirt, and a baggy tweed jacket seemed to be in charge.

Hawks and DeWall muttered to him as he stared in at the body. They motioned toward me. Everything was casual. No fuss, no strain. When a man with a hundred dollar car gets killed in a four dollar cabin, the pros are not going to get particularly agitated. The official pictures were taken. A reporter took a few shots. They weren’t anything he could get into the paper. Tweed Jacket waved the doctor in. The ambulance arrived, and the two attendants stood their woven metal basket against the outside wall of the cabin and stood smoking, chatting, waiting for the doctor to finish his preliminary examination.

The doctor came out, spoke briefly to Tweed Jacket and drove away. The ambulance boys went in and wrapped Sam, after Tweed Jacket checked his pockets, put him in the basket, strapped him in and toted him out and drove away with him-no siren, no red lights. Tweed Jacket waved the lab crew into the cabin and I heard him tell them to check the car out too.

He came wandering over to me, the two reporters drifting along in his wake. He turned to them and said patiently, “Now I’ll tell you if there’s anything worth your knowing. You just go set and be comfortable, if you can spare the time.”

He put his hand out and said, “Mr. McGee, I’m Ken Branks. We appreciate it when people report an ugly thing like this rather than letting it set for somebody else to find, like when they come in the morning to tidy up. You come on over to the car where we can talk comfortable.”

We got into the front seat of his car. He uncased a little tape recorder and hooked the mike onto the dash and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. “Hope you don’t mind this. I’ve got a terrible memory.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Now tell me your full name and address.”

“Travis D. McGee, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, aboard the Busted Flush.”

“Own it or run it?”

“I own it.”

“Now you tell me in your own words how you come to find this body.”

“Sam Taggart used to live here. He went away three years ago. He got back today and called me up this afternoon, aboard the boat. I came right over and we talked for about an hour, about old friends and so on. I loaned him forty dollars. He said he was back to stay. I went on back to the boat. I spent the evening alone. I had my phone turned off. I went to bed and went to sleep. At quarter after twelve a woman came to the boat, a friend of mine. She used to know Sam. She said a mutual friend had phoned her and told her Sam was back in town. She thought I might know where he was. She thought it would be a good idea if we both paid him a visit. I got dressed and drove her over here. She left her car back at Bahia Mar. His car was here. I knocked and there wasn’t any answer. I tried the door and it opened. I found the light switch. She came to the door and looked in at him too, and she went all to pieces. She used to be pretty fond of him. I took her back to her place, phoned in from there, and then came right back here. There’s somebody to take care of her at her place. When I got back here, the two deputies were already here. So I waited around.”

“Who is this woman?”

“She’s a local businesswoman. It wouldn’t help her any if it was in the newspapers that she was with me when I found the body.”

“I can understand that, Mr. McGee. Who is she?”

“Nora Gardino. She has a shop at Citrus Gate Plaza.”

“I know the place. Expensive. She knew this type fella?”

“I guess he didn’t have much luck during the three years he was away.”

“Where did he work and where did he live when he lived here?”

I remembered some of the places he had worked, and a couple of the addresses.

“Would the law around here have any kind of file on him?”

“It wouldn’t be anything serious. Brawling, maybe.”

“Who phoned Nora Gardino about seeing this man in town?”

“A girl called Beanie who works in the Mart, across from Pier 66. I don’t know her last name.”

“Do you know where she saw Taggart?”

“In that Howard Johnson’s opposite the Causeway, about eight o’clock.”

“Anybody with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long did you know Taggart before he moved away?”

“About two years.”

“How did you meet him?”

“Through friends. A mutual interest in boats and the water and fishing.”

“Where has he been living?”

“In California. And he spent some time in Mexico.”

“And he came back broke?”

“He borrowed forty dollars from me.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I get into little ventures every now and then. Investments. Land deals. That kind of thing.”

“It was sort of a gag, going to call on Taggart so late?”

“I guess you could call it that. She wanted to see him again, I guess.”

“You didn’t see anybody driving away from here or walking away from here when you drove up?”

“No.”

“Was he the kind of fella goes into a bar and gets in trouble?”

“Sometimes.”

“I’ll have to check this out with Mrs. Gardino.”

“Miss. She might be pretty dopey by now. Sleeping pills. It was a terrible shock for her to see anything tike that.”

“A knife is messy. There’s no big rush about talking to her. How about Taggart’s folks?”

“I wouldn’t know. I think he has some cousins somewhere.”

A man appeared at the window on Branks’s side. Branks turned the tape machine off.

“All clear, Ken. We got more prints than anybody needs, most of them smudged.”

“How about that end cabin?”

“A farmer from South Carolina and a half wit kid. They didn’t see anything or hear anything. No other cabins occupied.”

“How about the owner?”

“He should be here any minute. He lives way the hell and gone out.”

“Runs the gas station?”

“Yes.”

“Check him on anybody coming to see Taggart. How about Taggart’s gear?”

“I’d give you about twenty-eight cents for everything he owns, Ken.”

“Have Sandy tag it and take it in and store it, and arrange to have that heap driven in to the pound.”

The man went away. Ken Branks stretched and yawned. “He had a little over twenty left out of the forty, Mr. McGee. These things have a pattern. The way I see it, Taggart went out to do some cruising on your money. So he hit a few bars, and got somebody agitated, and that somebody followed him on back here and went in after him with a knife. In the dark, probably. Taggart did pretty good. The place is pretty well busted up. From the wounds, the guy was hacking at him, and got him a dozen times on the hands and face and arms before he finally got him one in the throat. So somebody left here bandaged up and spattered all to hell with blood. It won’t be hard, I don’t think. Leg work. Hitting all the likely saloons and finding where the trouble was, and who was in it. We’ll pretty Taggart up for a picture we can use to show around here and there. Don’t expect to see your name in the paper. Or Miss Gardino’s. It won’t get big coverage. The season is on, you know. Can’t upset the sun-loving merrymakers.” We got out of the car.

He shook his head and said, “Some poor son of a bitch is out there tonight burying his clothes, throwing the knife off a bridge, trying to scrub the blood off his car seat, and it won’t do him a damn bit of good. By God, nobody can get away with making a pass at his girl. She can drive up to Raiford once a month and pay him a nice visit. You can take off, Mr. McGee. If I remember something I should ask you, I’ll be in touch.”

As I drove away, my neck and shoulders felt stiff with tension. I was under no illusions about Mr. Branks. I remembered how he had maneuvered me into the light to give me a thorough inspection. And I pretended not to see the flashlight beam as somebody had checked my car over while he was talking to me.

Branks would check me out with care and precision, and Nora too, and when his estimate of the situation did not pay off, he would go over us again.

A single lamp was lighted in Nora’s living room. I saw Shaja, still in her blue robe, get up from the chair and come to unlock the door. I followed her into the living room. “How is she doing?”

“She fell to sleep, not so long ago.” I noticed that she had brushed her hair, put on her makeup. “Such a wicked think,” she said. “My hoosband, yes. One could expect, from a prison sickness. Some kind. Her Sam, no. Please to sit. You drink somesink, maybe?”

“If you’ve got a beer.”

“Amstel? From Curacao?”

“Fine.”

She went to the kitchen and brought back one for each of us, in very tall tapered glasses, on a small pewter tray.

“About him returning, she was so excite. So ‘appy. It breaks my heart in two.”

“Shaja? Is that the way you say it?”

“For friends, just Shaj. It comes from a girl in an old story in my land. For children. A princess turnink to ice slowly.”

“Shaj, I had to tell the police she went there with me.”

“Of course!”

“The way I told it, I made Sam a lot less important to her. I’ll tell you exactly what I told them, and you remember it and tell her as soon as she wakes up. A man named Branks will come to see her. She should tell him exactly the same thing. It shouldn’t be hard, because most of it is the truth.”

She agreed. I repeated what I had said to Branks. She gave little nods of understanding.

When I had finished she frowned and said, “Excuse. But what is wrong to tellink this man she was in love with her Sam, all the three years he was gone? Is no crime.”

“There is a reason for it. You see, there is something else too.”

I saw a little flicker of comprehension in her eyes, product of a mind nicely geared to intrigue. “Somesink she does not know yet?”

“That’s right.”

“But you will tell her?”

“When she feels better.”

She was thoughtful for long moments. She looked over at me. “You do not see her often, but you are a good friend, no?”

“I hope so.”

“I am her friend too. She is good to me for a long time now. I can do all the work of the shop, completely. Those girls obey. What you will tell her, maybe it takes her mind from the work. But you should know, it will be no harm to anything.”

“You’re a nice person, Shaj.”

She smiled, perhaps blushed slightly. “Thank you.”

I leaned back into heavier shadow and sipped the beer. The light came down over her shoulder, backlighting the odd pale hair, shining on the curve of her broad cheek. This one had the same thing Nora had, such a total awareness of herself as a woman, such a directed pride in being a desirable woman, that every small fastidiousness was almost ritualistic, from stone clean scalp to glossy pedicure, all so scented and cared for that, as is the case with the more celebrated beauties, the grooming itself forms a small barrier against boldness, against unwelcome intrusion.

Around us was the night silence ticking toward three in the morning. In a nearby bed slept the drugged woman, unaware for a little time of the depth of her wound. In that silence, which seemed more difficult to break with every passing moment, I felt the slow increments of awareness. That sort of awareness is an atavistic thing, a man-woman thing on a wordless level, and when it occurs in just that way, you know that she, in the cat-foot depths of the female heart, is just as aware of it as you are.

She lifted the glass to her lips, and I saw the silken strength of the pale throat work as she swallowed.

“What made the princess turn to ice?” My voice sounded too loud.

She stared across at me. At last she said, “Breakink a sacred vow.”

“Was she forgiven?”

“Not at all. Her heart turns to ice. Her tears turns to ice. And where she is, on a high mountain, it then begins to snow, and forever, even in summertimes, the mountain there is white.”

“It seems like a sad name to give a little girl.”

“It is not my name.”

“No?”

“My name is Janna.”

“Where did you get Shaja then?”

“My hoosband call me that as a love name, because to him, in the beginning, I was of ice. But then not.”

“Why do you call yourself that now?”

She came to her feet with a slow lithe grace. “Perhaps for rememberink at all times such a sacred vow. A vow to a man who throws at tanks little bottles of fire. Perhaps you should go and sleep a little, and come back here at almost nine when I must leave, because if she is not awaken then, she can sleep more and you can be here to tell her all those thinks, no?”

I agreed. No princess could have dismissed a peasant with a more gracious hauteur. She walked me to the door, turning on the hallway light.

“What was his work, Janna?”

“Please. You must not say that name for me. Not ever.”

“What did he do for a living, Shaja?”

She shrugged. “A teacher of history. A man not quite as tall as me. A mild man, getting bald on his head in the middle. Just one year married. It was necessary, what he did. But then all of the world turned its back on our land. As you know. That is the shame of the world. Not his shame. Not mine. I came out because I was no use there. Not to help him there.” She put her hand out. “Goodnight,” she said. “Thank you.”

It was the abrupt continental handshake, accompanied by a small bow, an immediate release of the clasp. As I walked to my car I looked back and saw her still standing there in the open door silhouetted against the hallway lights, hips canted in the way a model stands. We both knew of the hidden smoldering awareness. But there would be no breakink of vows, not with that one. It made her that much more valuable. Dobrak, the history teacher, bald on his head in the middle, mild slayer of tanks, had his hand on her loyal heart at all times. And she would wait out her years for him, unused and prideful.

As I drove back to Bahia Mar I wanted to hold fast to all the small speculations about her, the forlorn erotic fancies, because I knew that as she slipped out of my mind, Sam Taggart would take her place.

And he did, before I was home. I found a slot and then I shoved my hands into my pockets and walked across to the public beach. I walked slowly where the outgoing tide had left the sand damp and hard. The sea and the night sky can make death a small thing. Waves can wash away the most stubborn stains, and the stars do not care one way or the other.

It was a cheap and dirty little death, a dingy way to die. When dawn came, there would be a hundred thousand more souls alive in the world than on the previous day, three quarters of a million more every week. This is the virus theory of mankind. The pretentious virus, never knowing that it is a disease.

Imagine the great ship from a far galaxy which inspects a thousand green planets and then comes to ours and, from on high, looks down at all the scabs, the buzzings, the electronic jabberings, the poisoned air and water, the fetid night glow. A little cave-dwelling virus mutated, slew the things which balanced the ecology, and turned the fair planet sick. An overnight disease, racing and explosive compared with geological time. I think they would be concerned. They would be glad to have caught it in time. By the time of their next inspection, a hundred thousand years hence, this scabrous growth might have infected this whole region of an unimportant galaxy. They would push the button. Too bad. This happens every once in a while. Make a note to re-seed it the next time around, after it has cooled down.

Lofty McGee, shoulders hunched against the cold of the small hours, trying to diminish the impact of the death of a friend.

But Sam was still there, in a ghastly dying sprawl on the floor of my mind. He wasn’t going to make the PTA. They had closed his account. I squatted on my heels and picked up a handful of the damp sand and clenched it until my shoulder muscles creaked and my wrist ached like an infected tooth.

This time they had taken one of mine. One of the displaced ones. A fellow refugee from a plastic structured culture, uninsured, unadjusted, unconvinced.

So I had to have a little word or two with the account closers.

That was what I had been trying not to admit to myself.

It wasn’t dramatics. It wasn’t a juvenile taste for vengeance. It was just a cold, searching, speculative curiosity.

What makes you people think it’s that easy? That was the question I wanted to ask them. I would ask the question even though I already had the answer. It isn’t.

Five

AT FIFTEEN-MINUTE intervals I went into the bedroom to look at Nora Gardino. In the darkened room, she was a curled girl-shape under a fuzzy green blanket, a black tousle of hair, a single closed eye, a very deep slow soft sound of breathing.

At ten-thirty I heard a sound in there. I went in. She stood by the dressing table, belting a navy blue robe. I startled her. She stared at me, shaped my name with silent lips, then came on the run for holding and hugging, shuddering and snorting against me, her breath sour.

“It was a dirty dream,” she whispered, and made a gagging sound. “Just a dirty wretched dream.”

I stroked her back and said, “He never came back. That’s all.”

She pushed herself away. “You think you can make it that easy?”

“Not really”

“Don’t try then,” she said, and ran into the bath room and slammed the door. I went back to the kitchen and poured myself some more coffee. I went back to the magazine article I was reading. A southern pusgut who fancied himself a liberal was patting the coons on their burry heads by asking them to live up to the responsibilities of conditional oquality, the implication being that his white brethren were so doing. I would have liked to have sent that jolly racist crawling across bad terrain with a couple of skilled Negro infantrymen giving him covering fire. I decided that I wouldn’t want to marry his daughter, and threw the magazine aside just as Nora came into the kitchen, taking small steps. I got the orange juice from the refrigerator and handed it to her.

She sat at the table and took several small sips and said, “I’m pretty flippy today Trav. Don’t listen too hard to anything I say.”

“Shaj took off at quarter to nine. She said the shop is under control.”

“Bless her. And you too, my friend.”

She had not put on makeup. Her face had a new dry papery texture, as though it would crackle to the touch.

I told her about Branks. I gave her the same detailed report I’d given Shaj.

“Can you handle it?” I asked.

“I guess so. You mean, on the level that he was nothing more than a friend who’d been away. Yes. I can manage. But why?”

“Maybe I don’t want him to know that we have a very intense personal interest in finding out who…”

“Who killed him. Don’t hunt for easier words. Use the brutal ones. Let them sting. Why shouldn’t he know we have that personal interest, Trav?”

“Because we don’t want him interfering with any looking we may want to do. If it is personal. If it is intense, we want a part of it, don’t we?”

She put the empty juice glass down.

“Do you know something about it?”

“I think so.”

“Did you tell that man?”

“No.

I cannot describe the look on her face then, a hunting look, a merciless look, a look of dreadful anticipation. It reminded me that the worst thing the Indians could do to their enemy prisoners was turn them over to the women. “I want to keep it very very personal,” she whispered.

“Then don’t give Branks the slightest clue. He’s a sharp man.”

“If I thought there was no point to it, if it was just some murderous animal trying to rob cabins…”

“More than that.”

She locked icy fingers on my wrist. “Then what? The thing he had to take care of. What?”

“Later, Nora. It will keep.”

I saw her accept that promise. I had polarized her, with one of the most ancient and ugly emotions. It was irresponsible of me, perhaps. I plead a shining motive. Without direction she had nothing but pain, loss, grief. I gave her a bullet to bite on while they amputated her heart. It is a temporizing world, fading into uncertain shades of grey, so full of complexities all worth and value are questioned, hag-ridden by the apologistics of Freud, festering with so many billions of us that every dab of excellence has to be spread so thin it becomes a faint coat of grease, indistinguishable from the Eva-Last plastics. In this toboggan ride into total, perfectly adjusted mediocrity, the great conundrum is what is worth living for and what is worth dying for. I choose not to live for the insurance program, for creative selling, for suburban adjustments, for the little warm cage of kiddy-kisses, serial television, silky wife-nights, zoning squabbles.

But what is the alternative? I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology, health food, flag waving, bible thumping, Zen, nudism, nihilism-all of these are grotesque simplifications which small dreary people adopt in the hope of thereby finding The Answer, because the very concept that maybe there is no answer, never has been, never will be, terrifies them.

All that remains for the McGee is an ironic Knighthood, a spavined steed, second class armor, a dubious lance, a bent broadsword, and the chance, now and again, to lift into a galumphing charge against capital E Evil, his brave battle oaths marred by an occasional hysterical giggle. He has to carry a very long banner because on it has been embroidered, by maidens galore, The Only Thing in the World Worth a Damn is the Strange, Touching, Pathetic, Awesome Nobility of the Individual Human Spirit. The end of the banner trails on the ground way the hell behind his horse, and people keep stepping on it.

So in polarinzing the lady, I had at least given hera simplification she could live with and, if the need should arise, die for. But when I looked into the depths of her dark eyes, there was something there which made me wish I hadn’t pushed that particular button. I had created something which perhaps I could not control.

Branks phoned at eleven-fifteen and came by at quarter to twelve.

She had dressed by then. Her heart said black, but she dressed in pink, a pleated skirt, an angora sweater, a mouth red for polite smiling.

Just a friend, she said. And it seemed like a kick to go visit him at such a crazy hour. But it was the sort of thing he would do. And Beanie had phoned her because she knew Nora used to run around with the guy sometimes. And McGee was an old friend too. It was just for kicks. Welcome home. You know. But, God, who ever thought we’d walk in on anything like that! Oh, yes, I went all to pieces completely. I never saw anything so horrible in my whole life, never. Maybe I should have stayed there, but I couldn’t, really.

Branks thanked her and thanked me again. He said that Beanie had said Taggart was alone when she had seen him, eating at the counter. The owner of the cabins, who ran the gas station also, had seen Taggart drive out about seven and when he had closed at nine, Taggart had not returned.

“We’ll find him,” Branks said with absolute confidence. “You’ll see it in the paper one of these days.” As he drove out, Nora’s casual smile crumpled. She clung to me, asking if she had done all right. She got a case of hiccups. I patted her and said she had done fine. Just fine, honey. Slowly, with a labored effort, she pulled herself together, a nerve at a time. It was a valiant thing to watch.

“F-Find out about services for him, Trav. All that.”

“Courtesy of the county.”

“No!”

“Honey, just what difference does it make to Sam now?”

She lit a cigarette, her hand shaking. “I’ve been tucking money away, for the time when he’d come back. He came back. What do I do with the money? It doesn’t mean anything.”

“What do you want to do? Buy a plot? And bronze handles. Hire a hall? For two mourners?”

“I just… want it to be nice.”

“All right. We’ll do what we can, in a quiet way, Iike a hundred dollar way. On top of the county procedure, so that if Branks should ever wonder or ask, we took up a collection. Flowers, and a lengthy reading at the graveside, and a small marker.”

I stalled her on the other until after the small ceremony. Six of us there, under the beards of Spanish moss blowing wildly in a crisp wind on a day of cloudless blue. Shaj, Nora and me, a pastor and two shovelers. The wind tore the old words out of his mouth and flung them away, inaudible.

The single floral offering bothered me, a huge spray of white roses, virginal, as a huge bride might carry. Death is the huge bride, and the night of honeyinoon is eternity. The stone would be placed later, one just big enough for his name, date of birth, date of death.

We took her home, bleached with grief, moving like an arthritic. She was pounds lighter than on the night we had gone to see him. Shaj hastened back to the shop. I set out a gigantic slug of brandy for Nora Gardino. Then I told her everything I knew.

Her numbness turned slowly to anger. “That is all you know? What does that mean? What can we do about that, for God’s sake?”

“He wanted me to help him, and then because of you he changed his mind and decided to make a deal with them.”

“But you’ve let me think it was… somebody we could find right here, right now!”

“There’s something to go on.”

“But how far?”

“I don’t know how far. I don’t know until I try. If you don’t like it, give up right now, Nora. I’ve gotten into things with less leverage than I have on this one.”

“I’ll never give up!”

“Do you want it all handed to you, wrapped and tied and labeled?”

“I didn’t say that. You made me believe…”

“That it would be easy? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“But… ”

“Nora, do you want to play or don’t you? It can be long and expensive, and it can all come to nothing, or it could get somebody killed. I have a hunch two will work out better than one on this thing, less conspicuous. I’ll pick up my end of the tab. But one thing clear, right now. You take orders. And if we make a recovery, of what Sam said was his, if we are convinced by then that it was his, then we split it down the middle.”

“That’s what you’re in this for?”

“Certainly. That’s why I said no thanks, when Sam invited me in.”

“I’m sorry, Trav.”

“I can tell you one thing. From what we know right now, if we handle ourselves well, if you follow orders, we can get close.”

Her right hand turned into a claw. “I would like that.”

“Close is all I can promise. Remember this, Nora. Sam was tough and quick and smart. You saw what he got out of it.”

“Don’t. But… where is the starting point?”

“Finding out just what it was that he thought was his. That’s my job. While I’m doing that, you get Shaj set up so she can run the store on her own.”

Professor Warner B. Gifford was a fat, sloppy, untidy young man. He was not the tenant the architects had in mind when they had designed that particular building for Florida Southwestern. The building, I guess, was for dynamic scholastic living, for Communications courses, whatever they are, for machines to grade multiple choice questions, for that curious union of Madison Avenue, the N.A.M., foundation monies and the education of the preadjusted young which successfully emasculates all the factors thereof. It was a building to house the men who could turn out fabulous technicians with that contempt for every other field of human knowledge which only the truly ignorant can achieve. It was a place to train ants to invent insecticides.

But Warner B. Gifford was unaware of that. They had given him a weatherproof cube to work in, and he had managed to make it look and smell like the back room of a London hock shop. He goggled vacantly through thick lenses in frames mended with Band-Aids. He committed all the small offenses he had no best friends to tell him about. He worked at a rickety little table amid piles of paper and unidentifiable junk, rank, scurfy, soiled and absolutely unconcerned with everything in the world except the expertise of taking one tiny fragment of the remote past and fitting it into another little fragment, and thereby filling that tiny gap in the continuity of the history of the human animal. If, in his total career, he could infect two or three other individuals with that same compulsion, I had the feeling he would be worth a round dozen of the tailored golfers who gave brilliant lectures which could have been printed intact in the Reader’s Digest, and probably were.

It had taken two hours to thread my way through the labyrinth of exotic specialties and find my way to him.

“A what?” he said. “A what?”

I found myself raising my voice, enunciating clearly, as though he were deaf. I described the little golden figurine with greatest care, and he looked pained at my layman’s language. He grunted up off his straight chair and went over to a corner full of books and got down on all fours, giving the impression of a large sad dog digging a hole. He brought a big book back, sat down, riffled the pages, turned it to face me and laid a dirty finger against a photographic plate. “Like this, possibly?”

“Very much like that, Professor.”

He went into a discourse, pitched in a penetrating monotone, and it took me a long awed time to realize that he was still speaking English.

I stopped him and said, “I don’t understand any of that.”

He looked pained and decided he had to speak to me in Pidgin English. We both needed a course in Communications. With each other.

“Eight hundred years old. Um? Fired clay. National Museum in Mexico City. Gold is rare. Um? Spaniards cleaned it out, melted it into ingots, shipped it to Spain. Indian cultures moving, changing. Some used gold. Ceremonial. Open veins in mountains. Um? Low melting point. Easily worked. No damn good for tools. Pretty color. Masks, et cetera. Then conflict of cultures. Changed the meaning of gold. Cleaned them out, hunted it down. Torture, et cetera. Gold and silver. Um?”

“Then there isn’t much left?”

“Museums. Late finds. Overlooked. Uh… less archeological significance than one would think. Have the forms in clay, carvings, bone, et cetera. Duplication. Um?”

“But a museum would be interested in the thing I described?”

“Of course. Highly. Not scholarship. Museum traffic. Publicity.”

“What about a collection of twenty-eight little stattuettes like that, some bigger and some smaller, all goId, and from different places? Aztec, Inca, some East Indian.”

He shrugged. “Ancient man made little ceremonial figures. Handy materials. Ivory, bone, wood, stone, clay, gold, silver, iron, lead. Gods, spirits, demons, fetishes, from very crude to very elegant. Merely being of gold, it would not be a museum collection. A museum could assemble perhaps such a showing from other specific collections. Egypt. China. Not very professional.”

“Then such a collection would be a private collection?”

“Possibly. Pack rats. Something shiny. No scholarship. Um? Acquisition. Most unprofessional. Hampers the work of professionals. Probably very valuable items all over the world, locked away. Valuable keys. Connectives. Take Egypt. Thieves looted tombs, sold to tourists. Same in Mexico. All changed now. But damage done. They should will collections to museums. Let the professionals sort them out.”

“But such a collection would be valuable?”

“In money? Um? Oh yes.”

“Who would know if such a collection exists, Professor?”

Again he went searching among the chaotic debris. He dug into a low cupboard. He took out correspondence files, put them back. Finally he extracted a letter from a folder, tore the letterhead from it and put it back. He brought me the letterhead. Borlika Galleries, 511 Madison Avenue, New York.

“They might know,” he said. “Supply collectors. Hunt for things on assignment. Special items. Jades, African sculpture, ancient weapons, bronze artifacts, all periods, all cultures. Purveyors to pack rats. Sometimes they deal with museums, but not when they can get more elsewhere. Buy collections, break them up, sell items to the rich. Hunt all over the world. They might know. Business on an international scale.”

He was bent to his lonely work again before I had reached the door of his office. My car was a quarter mile away, parked at the Administration Building. It was dusk on the big busy sprawl of campus. By now all the young heroes would be showering, savagely hungry, after all the intricate business of learning how best to drop an inflated ball through a hoop and net. The class day was over, and all the jolly business of the evening charged the air with expectancy. Gaggles of soft young girls hurried by making little cawing sounds at each other.

I marveled at the strange and tenuous link between them and Professor Warner B. Gifford. We are doing something wrong. We haven’t found out what it is yet. But somehow we have turned all these big glossy universities into places which the thinking young ones, the mavericks, the ones we need the most, cannot endure. So all the campuses are in the hands of the unaware, the incurably, unconsciously second class kids with second class minds and that ineffably second class goal of reasonable competence, reasonable security, reasonable happiness.

Perhaps this is the proper end product to people a second class world. All mavericks ever do, anyway, is make the sane, normal, industrious people feel uncomfortable. They ask the wrong questions. Such as-What is the meaning of all this. So weed them out. They are cultural mistakes. Leave the world to the heroes and the semi-heroes, and their rumpy little soft-eyed girls, racing like lemmings toward the warm sea of the Totally Adjusted Community.

Miss Agnes seemed glad to take me away from there. We made our stately way through snitty little clots of sports cars and Detroit imitations thereof, and were soon whispering toward home, through a hundred miles of cold February night.

Six

GRIEF IS a strange tempest. Nora Gardino, her strong and handsome face becoming mask-like, bobbed about in her own storm tides, supporting herself with whatever came to hand. But she found that her sense of purpose provided the most useful buoyancy. And as I was the instrument through which she expected to achieve a bloody vengeance, she came running to me whenever she felt as if she were drowning. She thought my methods far too indirect. She wanted immediate confrontations. She had no patience with research. She wanted us to go at once to Puerto Altamura and start slamming around. She threatened to go by herself. I explained to her that it worked on television dramas and in muscular movies, but in the far drearier vistas of life itself, a man could pry nothing open unless he had a pry bar. And knowledge is that pry bar. Strangers do not suddenly open up because you confuse them. Confusion leads to a cautious silence. Strangers talk when they know that you have facts. They talk when it is in their interest to try to convince you your facts are wrong.

Shaja and I were partners in the cooperative venture of keeping her calm. She seemed like a pleasant child subject to temper tantrums, a child who might, unguarded, break every dish in the cupboard. There was a self-destructive aspect to Nora’s urgencies. Soothed, she would pull herself together and give a plausible imitation of the way she had been before Sam had returned.

On the morning I was to fly up to New York, she drove me down to Miami International in her little black Sunbeam. We had time to spare, so we went to the restaurant atop the Airport Hotel and had coffee at a window table amid all those shades of blue, overlooked paved areas where the little yellow service vehicles sped back and forth in their ant-hill routines.

“I shouldn’t be so impatient,” she said. “But it just…”

“Look at it this way. You go charging at something, and nothing happens. Then you have to back off and try the vague chances, the off-beat things. By charging you may mess something up, and spoil all your chances. So armor yourself first. Later you may find out that the preparation wasn’t necessary. But there’s no harm done. This will keep, Nora. It’s a case of whether you want an emotional release, or whether you really want to accomplish something.”

“I want to…”

“Okay. We do this my way. I had to learn the hard way. I had to learn patience and care.”

They announced my flight. She went down with me. At the gate she gave me a sister’s kiss, her dark eyes huge in her narrow face, eroded by loss. “As long as you’re not just kidding me along, as long a we really will do something, okay then, Trav. We’ll do it your way.”

New York, on the first day of March, was afflicted by a condition a girl I once knew called Smodge. This is a combination of rain, snow, soot, dirt, and wind. The black sky squatted low over afternoon Manhattan, and all the store lights were on, traffic braying, the sidewalk folk leaning sullenly into the weight of wind. There is a tax loophole in recent years which makes it possible for men to acquire tax-free fortunes by putting up the cheapest possible office buildings.

Like some hovering undisciplined anus, this loophole has excreted its garish cubes all over the Upper East Side. These are the buildings where they purposely build a roar into the heating and air conditioning systems to compensate for the tissue thickness of the walls. There, in a sterile and incomparable fluorescent squalor, in stale air, under low ceilings, are devised the creative ideas to amuse, instruct, guide, and convince an entire nation. This time I was in no mood for the newer, or pseudo-Miami hotel architecture, and took a single at an eerie little ugly old hotel I had stayed at long ago, the Wharton, on West 49th, in the first block off Fifth. Red stone, oak lobby, high ceilings and Victorian plumbing.

At two forty-five I ducked out of the sleety wind into the narrow entrance to the Borlika Galleries.

The display window was a tasteful arrangement of small items of carved bone and ivory, some of it touchingly quaint. I hunted in my dust-bin mind for that word for that sort of work, and found it. Scrimshaw. Hobby of sailors on the old sailing ships.

I pushed the door open and went in, wondering if I was dressed for the impression I wanted to make. My suit and raincoat were too lightweight for New York in March. No hat. Seagoing tan. Shirt collar slightly frayed. Scuffed shoes, now slightly sodden.

A cluster of bells jangled as I pushed the door open. It was a long narrow place, meagerly lighted. It had the collection smell, leather and dust, sandalwood and age. In a long lighted display case was an ornate collection of cased duelling pistols. On a long table to my right was a collection of primitive wood carvings.

A young man came toward me up the aisle from the back, with bone-pale face and funereal suit. It was a hushed place and he spoke in a hushed voice.

“May I help you?” He had taken me in at a glance, and he spoke with precisely the intonation which fitted my appearance, a slight overtone of patronizing impatience.

“I don’t know. I guess you sell all kinds of old stuff.”

“We have many types of items, sir.” He said the sir as though it hurt his dear little mouth. “We specialize in items of anthropological and archeological significance.”

“How about old gold?”

He frowned. He was pained. “Do you refer to old coins, sir?”

“No. What I’m interested in is old statues made of gold. Real old. Like so high. You know. Old gods and devils and stuff like that.”

It stopped him for a long moment. Finally he gave a little shrug. It was a long slow afternoon. “This way, please.”

He had me wait at a display counter in the rear while he went back into the private rooms behind the store. It took him five minutes. I guessed he had to open a safe or have someone open it. He turned on a pair of bright little lamps, spread a piece of blue velvet, tenderly unwrapped an object and placed it on the blue velvet. It was a golden toad, a nasty looking thing the size of my fist. It had ruby eyes, a rhino horn on its head, and a body worked of overlapping scales like a fish.

“This is the only object we have on hand at the moment, sir. It is completely documented and authenticated. Javanese Empire, close to two thousand years old.”

It had a look of ancient, sardonic evil. Man dies and gold endures, and the reptiles will inherit the earth.

“What do you get for a thing like this?”

He put it back in its wrappings and as he began to fold the cloth around it, he said, “Nine thousand dollars, sir.”

“Did you hear me say I didn’t want it, Charlie?” He gave me a baleful glance, a murmured apology, and uncovered it again.

“Lovely craftsmanship,” he said. “Perfectly lovely.”

“How did you people get it?”

“I couldn’t really say, sir. We get things from a wide variety of sources. The eyes are rubies. Badly cut and quite flawed, of course.”

“What would you people pay for a frog like this?”

“That wouldn’t bear any relationship to its value, sir.”

“Well, put it this way Charlie. Supposed I walked in off the street with this frog. Would I be one of those sources you said you use?”

It put the right little flicker of interest and reappraisal in his indoor eyes. “I don’t quite understand, sir.”

“Try it this way, then. It’s gold. Right? Suppose somebody didn’t want to get involved in a lot of crap, Charlie. Like bills of sale and so on. If he wants to make a cash deal, the easiest thing is to melt old frog down.”

“Heavens!” he said, registering shock.

“But maybe that way he cheats himself a little.”

“A great deal! This is an historical object, sir. An art object!”

“But if the guy doesn’t want any fuss, Charlie?”

His eyes shifted uneasily. “I suppose that if… this is just hypothetical, you understand… if someone wished to quietly dispose of something on a cash basis… and it wasn’t a well-known piece… from a museum collection, for example, something might be worked out. But I…”

“But you just work here, Charlie. Right?”

He touched the toad. “Do you care to purchase this?”

“Not today”

“Would you wait here, please?”

He wrapped it up and took it away. I had a five minute wait. I wondered what they did for customers. A little old man came shuffling out. He had white hair, a nicotined mustache, a tough little face. I don’t think he weighed a hundred pounds. In a deep bass voice he said his name was Borlika.

He peered up at me, his head tilted to the side, and said, “We are not receivers of stolen goods, mister.”

“Unless you’re damn well sure they’ll never be traced, old man.”

“Get out!” he bellowed, pointing toward the front door. We both knew it was an act.

I put my hand on my heart. “Old man, I’m an art lover. It’ll hurt me here to melt all the beautiful old crap down.”

He motioned me closer, leaned on the counter and said, “All?”

“Twenty-eight pieces, old man.”

He leaned on the counter with both arms and kept his eyes closed for so long I began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. At last he looked at me and blinked as the gold toad would blink if it could and said, “My granddaughter is in Philadelphia today, doing an appraisal. In this area, you will talk to her. Can she see the pieces?”

“That can be arranged later. After we talk.”

“Can you describe one piece to me?”

I gave him a crude but accurate description of the sensual little man. His eyes glittered like the toad’s.

“Where can she find you this evening, mister?”

“I can phone her and arrange that.”

“You are a very careful man.”

“When I have something worth being careful about, old man.”

He wrote the phone number on a scrap of paper, told me her name was Mrs. Anton Borlika, and told me to phone after eight o’clock. When I got back to the hotel I checked the book. The listing was under her name, an address on East 68th which would place it close to Third Avenue.

With time to kill, I got a cab and kept it while I made a tour of inspection of the neighborhood. It was a poodle-walking area. At about five o’clock I found a suitable place about two blocks from her apartment. It was called Marino’s Charade. There was an alcove off the bar/lounge with a booth at the end, perfectly styled for maximum privacy. The night shift was on, and the boss waiter was happy to gobble up my ten dollar bill and promise that he would keep it empty from eight o’clock on.

Her voice on the phone, flat as only Boston can make it, had not prepared me for the woman. She was in her late twenties, black Irish, with blue eyes and milky skin, slightly overweight, dressed in a conservative suit, a big grey corduroy rain cape, droplets of the night moisture caught in her blueblack hair. As she walked along the alcove toward the booth I stood up and said, “Mrs. Borlika?”

“That’s right,” she said, slipping the cape off. I hung it up. “You made yourself easy to find, Mister…”

“Taggart. Sam Taggart.” I watched for reaction and saw none.

She smiled and smoothed her suit skirt with the backs of her hands and slid into the booth. “Betty Borlika,” she said. “Have you eaten? I had a nasty sandwich on the train.”

“Drink first?”

“Of course.” The waiter appeared, took our drink order and hastened away.

“How were things in Philadelphia?”

She made a face. “I had three days of it. Thank God somebody else was doing the paintings. There must have been five hundred of them. Fifty years of miscellaneous collecting. Barrels, actual barrels of ikons. Temple bells. Chinese ivory. You have no idea.”

“You know what all that stuff is worth?”

“Enough to give it an appraisal the tax people accept. I wouldn’t say I missed it by far.”

With all her friendly casualness, I knew I was getting a thorough inspection. I returned the favor. No rings on the ring finger. Plump hands. Nails bitten down. Plump little double chin. Small mouth, slightly petulant.

“You buy any of the stuff?”

“There are three lots we’ll bid on, when it goes to auction. You see, Sam, a man with no taste and a lot of money and a lot of time will acquire good things when he deals with good dealers.” It came out “acquah” and “dealahs.”

“I have a pretty good range,” she said. “I have a museum school degree and seven years of practical experience.” She sipped her drink, looking at me over the rim of the glass.

“Your husband do the same kind of work?”

“He used to. Before he died.”

“Recently?”

“Three years ago. His father and his uncle are active in the business. And his grandfather, of course. His father and his uncle are abroad at this time.”

“Or I’d be talking to them?”

“Probably.”

“I like it this way better.”

“You won’t get a better deal from me than you would from them.”

“If we deal.”

“Is there any question of that, Sam?”

“There’s a lot of questions, Betty. Right now there’s two real good gold markets. Argentina and India. And safer for me that way.”

“Safer than what?”

“Than making any kind of deal with something… not melted down.”

She scowled. “God, don’t even say that.”

“This stuff isn’t hot in the ordinary sense. But, there could be some questions. Not from the law. Do you understand?”

“Possibly.”

“Another drink?”

“Please.”

When the waiter was gone, she said, “Please believe me when I say we are used to negotiating on a very confidential basis. Sometimes, when it’s necessary, we can invent a more plausible basis of acquisition than… the way something came into our hands.” She smiled broadly, and it was a wicked and intimate smile. “After all, I’m not going to make you tell me where you got them, Sam.”

“Don’t expect to buy them cheap, Betty.”

“I would expect to pay a bonus over the actual gold value, of course. But you must consider this, too. We’re one of the few houses in a position to take the whole thing off your hands. It simplifies things for you.”

“The whole thing?”

“The… group of art objects. Did you say twenty-eight?”

“I said twenty-eight. Twenty-eight times the price of that frog would be…”

“Absurd.”

“Not when you sell them.”

“Only when you sell them to us, Sam.”

In spite of all the feminine flavor, this was a very shrewd cool broad.

“If I sell them to you.”

She laughed. “If we want to buy what you have, dear. After all, we can’t buy things unless we have some reasonable chance of selling them, can we?”

“These things look all right to me.”

“And you are an expert, of course.” She opened her big purse and took out a thick brown envelope. She held it in her lap where I could not see it. She frowned down as she sorted and adjusted whatever she took out of the envelope.

Finally she smiled across at me. “Now we will play a little game, Sam. We take a photograph for a record of everything of significant value which goes through our hands. These photographs are from our files. There are fifty-one of them. So that we will know what we are talking about, I want you to go through these and select any that are among the twenty-eight you have.”

“I haven’t looked at them too close, Betty.”

She handed the thick stack across to me. “Just do your best.” They were five by seven photographs in black and white and double weight paper, with a semi-gloss finish, splendidly sharp and clear, perfectly lighted. In each picture there was a ruler included to show scale, and, on the other side of the figurine, a little card which gave a complex series of code or stock or value numbers, or some combination thereof.

I made my face absolutely blank, knowing she was watching me, and went through them one at a time. I felt trapped. I needed some kind of opening. Somewhere in the middle I came across the same little man I had seen, squatting on his crude lumpy haunches, staring out of the blank eye holes. I did not hesitate at him. I began to pay less attention to the figures, and more to the little cards. I noticed then that, written in ink, on most of them, were tiny initials in the bottom right hand corner of the little code card. I leafed back to my little man and saw that the initials in the corner were CMC. I started through the stack again, looking for the same initials, and saw that they appeared on five of the photographs. The figurines were strange some beautiful, some twisted and evil, some crude and innocent, some earthily, shockingly explicit.

I looked at her and said, “I just don’t know. I just can’t be sure.”

“Try. Please.”

I went through the stack and began putting some of them on the table top, face down. You have to gamble. I put nine photographs face down. I laid the stack aside. I looked at the nine again, sighed and returned one of them to the stack.

I handed her the eight of them and said, “I’m pretty sure of some of these. And not so sure of others.”

I tried to read her face as she looked at them. The small mouth was curved in a small secretive smile. She had to show off. She handed me back three photographs. “These are the ones you’re not so sure of, Sam?”

I registered astonishment. “Yes! How could you know that?”

“Never mind,” she said, and slid all the photographs back into the envelope and returned it to her purse. “One more drink and let’s order, shall we?”

“Good idea.”

“Mr. Taggart, your credentials are in order. But I didn’t know he would have so many.”

“Who would have so many?”

“Oh, come now!” she said. “Couldn’t we stop playing games now? He bought from us. Of course, he would have other sources, in the position he was in.”

“Put it this way Betty. There was another party in the middle.”

“You aren’t acting as his agent, are you?”

“Why do you ask a thing like that?”

“I don’t think you are completely the rude type you pretend to be, Sam. I can understand how, in the present circumstances, he might want to sell out through a clever agent. If you could prove you’re his agent, we might see our way to being a little more liberal. After all, he was a good customer, long ago.”

“If I knew his name, I’d try to convince you I was working for him.”

“Politics creates a lot of confusion, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t even know what you mean by that.”

“Then you are quite an innocent in this whole thing, and I shan’t try to confuse you, Sam. Let me just say that I am personally convinced that the twenty-eight items are legitimate, and we would like to purchase them.”

“For how much?”

“One hundred thousand dollars, Sam.”

“So I melt them, Betty. Maybe I can get that for the gold alone. Maybe more. I’m talking about a hundred and forty pounds of gold.”

“A lot of trouble, isn’t it, finding a safe place to melt them down, then smuggling the gold out, finding a buyer, trying to get your money without getting hit on the head?”

“I’ve had little problems like that before.”

“This would be cash, Sam. In small bills, if you’d like. No records of the transaction. We’ll cover it on our books with a fake transaction with a foreign dealer. It would just be a case of meeting on neutral ground to trade money for the Mente… the collection, with a chance for both parties to examine what they are getting.”

“What did you start to say?”

“Nothing of importance. You’re very quick, aren’t you?”

“Money quickens me, Betty.”

“I too have a certain fondness for it. That’s why I don’t part with it readily.”

“You won’t have to part with a single dime of that hundred thousand.”

“What would I have to part with?”

“Let’s say twice that.”

“Oh, my God! You are dreaming.”

“So are you, lady.”

“I’ll tell you what. If the other pieces are as good as the five we know, I will go up to one twenty-five, absolute tops.”

“The other pieces are better, and one seventy-five is absolute bottom. Take it or leave it.”

We ordered. We haggled all the way through the late dinner. She was good at the game. Over plain coffee for me, coffee and a gooey dessert for Betty Borlika, we worked our way down to a five thousand dollar difference, and then split that down the middle, for an agreed price of a hundred and thirty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars. We shook hands.

“Even if you were his agent, I couldn’t give you a penny more.”

“You’ll get a quarter of a million when you sell them.”

“We might. Over a period of years. There isn’t an active market in this sort of thing, Sam. You saw the jeweled toad. We’ve had that for over four months. We have considerable overhead you know. Rent, salaries, money tied up in inventory.”

“You’ll have me crying any moment.”

“Don’t cry. You drove a very good bargain. How would you like the money?”

“Used money. Fifties and smaller.”

“It will take several days to accumulate it, Sam.”

“I haven’t exactly got the little golden people stashed in a coin locker.”

“Of course not. From my estimate of you, they are probably in a very safe place. How long will it take you to bring them here?”

“You just get the cash and hang onto it and I’ll phone you when I get back to town. How will we make the transfer?”

“Do you trust me, Sam?” I could not get used to being called that. I kept seeing those pink teeth.

I returned her smile. “I don’t trust anybody. It’s sort of a religion.”

“We’re members of the same sect, dear. And that gives us a problem, doesn’t it? Any suggestions?”

“A very public place. How about a bank? Borrow a private room. They have them. Then nobody can get rough or tricky.”

“You are a very clever man, Mr. Taggart. Now we can forget it all until I hear from you again. And could you order us a brandy? The deal is made. From now on it’s social.”

“Social,” I agreed. Her eyes were softer, and her smile a little wider.

“You are a very competent ruffian, Sam. You give me problems. Did you know that?”

For the first time I could see that the drinks were working on her. “Not intentionally.”

She frowned judiciously. “You know, I deal all the time with shifty shifty people. How many ways can a person be shifty? Not so many ways, Sam. It’s like dancing. Ballroom dancing. It takes a few bars of music to get in step, and then you can follow every lead. But I stumble a little with you. You have contradictions, Sam. You look a little bit rough and sort of mild and sleepy and, excuse me, not too terribly sharp. I think I have you cased and then something else shows, and you go out of focus. Something quick and bitter and secretly laughing. Then I feel trivial and transparent. But I’m not!” She glowered at me. “Damn it, I’m not!”

“I know you’re not, Betty.”

I had seen the same thing happen with businessmen. The deal in process would sustain them, keep them alert and organized and watchful, and when it was settled, they would turn into softer more vulnerable mechanisms. The Betty Borlika of appraisals and bids, of dickering and expertise, had faded away. This was the woman of the bitten nails and the small petulant mouth, and blue Irish eyes slightly mazed, the young Irish widow, with a hidden uncertainty about the value of her goals and her attainments, driving loneliness underground with the pressures of her work.

I paid the check and helped her into her cape. The place was nearly empty. On the way out we stopped at the bar, at her suggestion, for another brandy.

“I came down here and got a small job,” she said. “Betty O’Donnell, curator of practically nothing. Scut work at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. I lived in the Village and dressed the part. Hairy stockings and ballet slippers. And I answered the Borlika ad. I worked there almost a year and then married Tony.” She turned and stared up at me. “You see, my best professional asset is a hell of a fantastic memory Sam. I can read an illustrated catalogue of a sale, and if five years later I come across something that appeared in that catalogue, I can recognize it, identify it, classify it, and remember what it brought at auction.” She shook her head as though puzzled. “And I don’t even have to work.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe you read about it. It was such a weird accident it was in papers all over the country. High up on one of those crappy buildings they were building, a slab of some kind of imitation stone gunk came out of a sling and fell and hit a cornice and ricocheted across Park Avenue and smashed Tony dead. It was a nice day. He’d decided to walk. A lot of money came out of that, Sam. An awful lot. But I should work at what I’m good at, shouldn’t I?”

“Of course.”

She put her empty glass down. “It’s such a family thing, you know. I’m a Borlika. I’m caught in it. Probably forever. At least it isn’t, for God’s sake, a chain of laundries. Beautiful things, Sam. Beautiful lovely things to buy and sell.”

We went out. It was well below freezing, and the sky had cleared, the high stars weak against the city glow. The sidewalks were dry. We walked to her place, her tall heels tocking, her arm hooked firmly around mine.

“You don’t say anything about yourself Sam.”

“Nothing much to say. I keep moving. I hustle a little of this and a little of that. I avoid agitation.”

“When this is over, what will you do?”

“Bahamas, maybe. Lease a little ketch, ram around, fish, play with the play people. Drink black Haitian rum. Snorkel around the coral heads and watch the pretty fish.”

“God! Can I sign on?”

“As cabin boy? Sure.”

We arrived at her place. Three stone steps up to the street door. “Nightcap time?” she said as she got her key out.

“If it doesn’t have to be brandy”

“Right. The hell with brandy.”

The elevator was a little larger than a phone booth. It creaked and juggled and shimmied upward, taking a long time to reach the fourth floor. She had become very animated and chatty, posing her face this way and that as though I held a camera aimed at her, talking as though we were recording it all. Women act that way on television commercials.

Her apartment was big. She bustled about, turning on strategic lighting, tossing her cape aside. Modern paintings, lighted by spots, made big bright explosions on the walls. A complex wire sculpture on a low pedestal was lighted in such a way it threw a huge mysterious shadow form on a far wall.

“In spite of all the Borlikas,” she said, “my personal tastes are contemporary. I happen to feel that…” The phone started ringing. She excused herself, started toward it, then went into the bedroom and closed the door. The phone stopped. She came back out a few moments later, brisk and chatty.

She opened a small lacquered bar and scurried off to the kitchen to get cubes. I made us two tall highballs. She took me on a circular tour of inspection of the paintings and sculpture, lecturing like a museum guide.

Then she said, “I do have one little collection of eighteenth century art. Come along.” With a brassy and forlorn confidence she marched me into her bedroom. It was more persuasively feminine than I would have guessed, canopied bed, pastel ruffles and furry rugs. She turned on a display light which illuminated a dark blue panel in the bedroom wall. In random arrangement against the panel were a dozen or so delicate little paintings, most of them round, a few of them oval, all framed in narrow gold, all a little smaller than saucers.

“French,” she said. “Metallic paints on tortoise shell. It was a precious little fad for a time. They are quite rare and valuable.”

“Very nice,” I said.

“Look at them closely, dear,” she said, with a mocking smile.

I did so, and suddenly realized that they were not what they appeared to be, not innocent little scenes of life in the king’s court. They were not pornographic. They were merely exquisitely, decadently sensual.

“I’ll be damned!” I said, and she gave a husky laugh of delight.

She moved closer and pointed to one. “This is my favorite. Will you just look at the fatuous expression on that sly devil’s face.”

“And she looks so completely innocent.”

“Of course,” she said. Her smile faded as she looked at me. She turned and with exaggerated care placed her empty glass on a small ornate table with a white marble top. It made a small audible click as she set it down. She turned back with her eyes almost closed and groped her way into my arms, whispering, in a private argument with herself, “I’m not like this. I’m really not like this.”

The physical act, when undertaken for any motive other than love and need, is a fragmenting experience. The spirit wanders. There is a mild feeling of distaste for one’s self. She was certainly sufficiently attractive, mature, totally eager, but we were still strangers. She wanted to use me as a weapon against her own lonely demons. I wanted information from her. We were more adversaries than lovers. The comments of old Samuel Johnson about the pursuit of women kept drifting into my mind. The expense is damnable, the position ridiculous, the pleasure fleeting.

But it went very well for her there in the faint night light under the yellow ruffles of the canopy, very well on a physical basis, which is, perhaps, the least important part, sufficiently well to induce her, in the post-tempest euphoria, to give myriad little kitteny affections, a purring gratitude.

“This is the last thing I expected to happen,” she said, with a luxurious stretching. “You’re very sweet.”

“Sure.”

She took my wrist, guided my cigarette to her lips. When she exhaled she said, “Did you expect it to happen?”

“Let’s put it this way. I hoped it would. Life is full of coincidences, Betty. Some of them are nasty. Some of them are fine. I guess they’re supposed to balance out sometime. I suppose, in a sense, that guy brought us together.”

“Who, darling?”

“The guy who collected the little gold people.”

“Oh,” she said in a sleepy voice. “Carlos Menterez y Cruzada.”

“Who’s he?”

I made it a bored question, as indifferent as her response had been.

“Sort of a bastard, dear. A Cuban bastard. Very close to Batista. A collector. Those five you picked out, he bought them from us.” She yawned, snuggled more comfortably against me and gave a little snorting sound of derision and said, “He collected me, too. In a sort of offhand way. I guess women were a lot more abundant than gold for Senor Menterez. I hated him a while. I don’t any more.”

“How did it happen?”

“Because I was a stupid young girl and he was a very knowing man. It was when I was working at the place, before I married Tony. We had two items he was interested in. I was on salary and two percent commission. He said he couldn’t make up his mind. He had a suite at the Waldorf. He called up just before we closed and asked me to bring the photographs over. Drinks and dinner in the suite, of course. He was very charming, very amusing. He didn’t make the mistake of begging or insisting or arguing. He just seemed to assume that I was going to go to bed with him, and that I wouldn’t have come to the suite if I wasn’t willing, and it all seemed to be so settled in advance, I just didn’t know how to handle it. I couldn’t seem to find the right moment to set my heels and pretty soon, there I was in bed, scared, confused and apologetic. A knowing man can manage it that way with a green girl.”

“How old was he then?”

“Mmm. Eight years ago. Early forties. Twenty years older than I was.”

“Nice-looking man?”

“No. Not very tall. Sort of portly, even. Thin little mustache and going bald. Very nice yes. Long lashes. Beautiful suits and shirts, and beautiful grooming. Manicures and facials and cologne and massages. A car and driver picked me up after work the next day too. He was in New York on business with several other Cuban businessmen, but he had the suite to himself. He bought me an absolutely beautiful gown. He wanted me to go back to Havana with him. He said he could set me up with a little shop of my own there. He had me in such a confused daze, I almost made that much of a fool of myself. I didn’t even really like him. I couldn’t understand why I kept doing exactly as he asked me to do. He didn’t seem… very intense about me. Just sort of jocular and fond, like people are toward dogs.”

“Was he married?”

“Yes. After he left it took me about two weeks to come out of the fog. You know, I had always wondered how reasonably attractive girls ever got themselves into entanglements like that with older married men. I just had a kind of anxious, earnest desire to please him. I didn’t want him to be disappointed in me in any way. A vassal state. Then I woke up and knew it had been a very dirty business.”

“What kind of business was he in in Cuba?”

She yawned. “I don’t know. Lots of things. After the roof fell in on all those people down there, I used to wonder what happened to the Menterez collection. I suppose he got out with it. And whatever else he could carry. I wondered if we would ever hear. Or if he would show up to peddle it all back to us. But somebody got it away from him, and you got it away from somebody else?”

“Something like that.”

“It doesn’t matter does it, darling? Whether he’s alive or dead. I’m so deliciously sleepy, dear. Let’s sleep for a little while.”

Something awakened me, perhaps the little tilt of the bed as she left it. I turned over, feigning sleep, and through slitted lids saw her, nude-white in the small amber of the night light, staring back at me, her body slightly crouched, the dark hair tangled across her pale forehead. After I took several deep breaths, she went plodding silently over to the chair where I had tossed my clothing. Though I could not see her clearly I knew she was going through the pockets. She would find cigarettes, lighter, change and a thin packet of bills. All identification was back in the bureau drawer of my locked room in the Wharton.

When she was through, she came stealthily back to bed, lay silently beside me for perhaps ten minutes, and then set about gently awakening me. When she dropped off into sleep again, I could sense that it was a very deep sleep. I tested it by shaking her, speaking her name. She made querulous little sounds that faded into a small buzzing snore. Ten minutes later I flagged down a hurrying cab on Third Avenue, in the first grey of a tomcat dawn. At the Wharton, I got my key at the desk and went up and took a shower.

After the shower, I sat on the bed and went through the envelope of photographs I had taken from her purse as I left her apartment. I took out the five pictures of the statues which had definitely belonged to Carlos Menterez y Cruzada and stowed them in my suitcase. I printed her name and address on the outside of the envelope in square block letters. It is an old caution, and the only way any person can completely disguise their own handwriting. Merely hold the pencil as straight up and down as possible, use all capitals, and base them all on a square format, so that the O for example, becomes a square, and an A is a square with the base line missing and a line bisecting it horizontally. No handwriting expert can ever make a positive identification of printing done in that manner, because it bears no relation to your normal handwriting. After I awoke, I would get it sealed downstairs, buy the stamps and mail it.

I slid between the hotel sheets and turned out the bed lamp. There was a brighter morning grey at the windows. I tried to sort out the facts I had learned. Facts kept getting entangled with textural memories of the woman, so gaspingly ardent. The facts and the woman followed me down into sleep, where the little gold figures came alive and one of them, an East Indian one, a woman with six graceful arms, made tiny little cries and fastened herself to my leg like a huge spider, bared little golden teeth and sank them into the vein while I tried to kick her away.

Seven

I CAUGHT an early afternoon flight out of Kennedy, after phoning Nora from the terminal. She was waiting at the gate, and as I had just my hand luggage, we went directly to her little black car in the parking lot. It was a warm beautiful afternoon. She looked very trim and chic in a pale grey dress, a light yellow cardigan.

“You look better,” I told her.

“Shaj took charge,” she said. “It was a lovely afternoon, and I spent all of it in the side garden, soaking up the sun. I was beginning to look mealy. The sun exhausted me. I slept twelve hours, had my hair done this morning, and I had a drink while I was waiting for you, and I feel almost human for the first time in a long time. You didn’t find out anything, did you?”

“A little bit.”

“Really? What?” The sudden intensity gave her that hawk look, the dark eyes very fierce, the lips thinner, the nose predatory.

I drove out of the lot. When I was clear of the airport area, I said, “A rich Cuban, a buddy of Batista’s, collected the figurines. He bought five of them from the Borlika Galleries. By the best luck you can imagine, one of the five he bought was the one Sam showed me. That gave me the break, and I did a little gambling, and it opened up very nicely. Carlos Menterez y Cruzada. Businessman, age about fifty now if still living.”

“They told you all that? Why?”

“They got the impression I have the collection. Twenty-eight pieces. They don’t care how I got them. We agreed on a price. A hundred and thirtyseven thousand, five hundred. Cash. A very quiet deal.”

“Sam thought they were worth more.”

“They are, if you can sell them in the open. They’re worth less on a back street. Anything is. I don’t think Sam’s title was exactly airtight.”

“Did Sam steal them for Carlos Whosis?”

“That wasn’t quite Sam’s style.”

“I wouldn’t think so. Then how?”

“However he got them, Nora, it attracted the wrong kind of attention.”

“All right. So you know who used to own them, you think. Does that really mean very much?”

“When we get to the boat I’ll show you something.”

I fixed her a drink and left her in the lounge. I took my bag into the master stateroom, changed quickly to slacks and a sports shirt, and took the pictures out and handed them to her. “The one on top is the one Sam showed me. The other four are from the Menterez collection.”

She looked at them very carefully, lips compressed, frown lines between her heavy dark brows. She looked up at me. “They’re strange and terrible little things, aren’t they?”

“I keep wondering how many people have gotten killed over them. I saw a golden toad with ruby eyes in New York, two thousand years old. He looked as if he couldn’t count the men he’d watched die.”

She rapped the sheaf of cards against her knuckles. “This is something definite. This is real, Trav. I… don’t know much about all the conjecture and analysis and so on. But something I can hold and touch…”

I took them away from her and took them forward and put them in my safe. Any fifty-four foot boat has innumerable hiding places, and a houseboat has more than a cruiser. Once I turned a very accomplished thief loose aboard the Busted Flush. I gave him four hours to find my safe. He was a friend. I watched him work. He was very very good. When his time was up, he hadn’t even come close.

“What will you do with the pictures?” Nora asked when I returned to the lounge.

“I don’t know. They’re bluff cards. And they’ll come as a great shock to somebody.”

“What do we do next?”

“Find out a little bit more about Menterez.”

That evening, in Miami, it took me well over an hour to locate my friend, Raoul Tenero. He is nearly thirty and looks forty. He was just beginning his career as an architect in Havana when Castro took over. I met him at some parties in Havana preCastro. When he got out of Cuba, he looked me up. I introduced him to some people. He worked for a time, and then went back in and was captured at the Bay of Pigs. He was finally exchanged with the others. His pretty wife, Nita, had a vague idea of his schedule.I finally caught up with him in a youth center building, part of the park system.

It was one of their endless committee meetings, not on political action, not on invasion, but on how to fit their people into the Yankee culture, find the jobs, assist each other. It works. They have that unyielding, unending, remorseless pride. They are the objects of considerable resentment, as is only normal for the human animal when a big batch of people of a different heritage move in. But of all the ethnic groups in the Miami area, the Cubanos have the lowest crime rate.

I spotted him on the far side of the room in a small group of about nine men, chairs pulled into a circle. Raoul has the true Spanish look, the long chalky face, deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks, and elegant way of handling his body when he moves. He saw me and held his hand up, thumb and first finger a half inch apart in the universal Latin gesture of indicating just a little bit more time. Six or seven groups were in discussion. Some of them were very loud. I moved out into the night and leaned against the building and smoked a cigarette and watched the asphalt hiss of night traffic.

In about ten minutes he came out. “You all sewed up?” I asked him.

“No. I’m through in there. It’s a resettlement thing. Winston-Salem. Ten families. Fifty-eight people. I took time off and flew up there and talked to the people who’ve been working on it. Nice people, Travis. Now it’s all reassurance, prying them loose from here, from the Havana Annex. They think there’s eight feet of snow all winter in North Carolina.”

“I need some information and a drink.”

“I’ll watch you drink, Seсor. While I have milk.”

“Still messed up?”

He gave a mirthless laugh. “I gave my stomach for my country. Tried some rum a week ago. One drink. Broken glass would have been easier. That Havana Yacht Club cruise, it was hard on the inside man. How’d you find me? You see Nita?”

“She looks wonderful.”

“How about her English? She’s working hard.”

“It’s flawless.”

“Oh boy. Hey, you follow me, okay?”

I followed his decrepit old Chev to a side street bar. The clientele was a hundred percent Cuban. He was known there. I went to a table in a far corner. He had to stop and talk to half a dozen people. Finally he came to the table, a glass of milk in one hand, dark rum on the rocks in the other.

“How’s the work going, Raoul?”

He shrugged. “They trust me more now. The estimates are close. They see me use a slide rule. It heartens them. Slowly, slowly they are letting me do a little designing. But it is strange, you know? They speak to me loudly, very distinctly. My God, that’s why my father sent me to Choate before the University of Havana, to speak the language. It’s going all right, Travis. I shouldn’t bitch. But my chance of a license, the A.LA.? I wouldn’t give you a Castro centavo for that, man. Hell, we had a closed shop over there too, you know. An American architect coming in, the only way he could work was team up with one of us, and the commission double. Now I get it in the eye the same way. What’s on your mind?”

“I want to know something about a man. Carlos Menterez y Cruzada.”

Raoul stared at me. “Hijo de… A long time since I heard that name. A son of a bitch, Travis. A murderous crafty son of a bitch. He is remembered. How long would he last in Miami? With luck, twelve minutes. Where is he?”

“I don’t know. If I can find out more about him, maybe I can find him.”

He leaned back. “I will tell you about that one. You have to understand how it was under Batista. You people here have never understood. He was, for my father, for other successful men in Cuba, a fact of life. They all knew him. They walked on eggs. They walked with great care. Circumspect. It is a question of honor. You are not such a great fool as to try to fight such power, neither do you get too close to a power which has a silent and secret side, sudden disappearances, quiet confiscations. What you do, you give him and the ones close to him no opening. How do businessmen survive under Salazar, Franco, any of them? I am not being an apologist for my class. Perhaps we should have done something sooner, before the communistas came in with their perversions of freedom. How could we tell? It was a fact of life. My father lived with it. Other men lived with it. Without too great a cloud on their selfrespect. The men who lived with it, such as my father, too many of their sons have died fighting what replaced the old evil. And more will die, Travis. Ah, Menterez was totally at home in that situation. Very important, Menterez. Import, export, warehousing, shipping. Big home, big grounds. His specialty my friend, was catching some man in a political indiscretion. Then he would say that only Carlos Menterez could give protection. Sell me just fifteen percent of your business for so many thousand pesos. Cheap. Then somehow would come litigation in corrupt courts, and finally Menterez and his cronies would own the entire business, with a suitable dummy ownership to cover the men in the government who had to have their share, of course. If a protest was too strenuous, the man might disappear. He was a barracuda, Travis. One little whiff of blood, and he would find a big meal. All honest men were afraid of him. He broke hearts and lives. No, he would not live long in this city. He got out in time, of course. But where did he go? I heard one rumor he is in Switzerland, another that he is in Portugal.”

“What about his personal life?”

“He had a wife, no children. A small silent woman, cowed by him I think. He was a womanizer. Always several mistresses in Havana. Many times they were foolish American girls he would keep there for a time. Big cars. A personal bodyguard. Another house at Varadero. A big cruiser. Also, a personal taste for gold. Gold fittings in cars and home and boats, gold accessories for himself and his woman, art objects of gold. A vulgar man, my friend. A dangerous and vulgar man, a kind we breed too often in Latin America.”

“Not just there. Everywhere.”

“But old Cuba was a place where such an animal can thrive. And the heart of it, always, is the corruption of the courts. Where justice can be purchased, animals like Menterez grow fat, and the common people despair. Then come the communistas, my friend. Look at the constitution of Panama. The president appoints the governors of the provinces for life. He appoints the justices of the Supreme Court, for life. And those justices appoint the justices of the inferior courts, for life. Can you imagine a more fertile soil for corruption? But you are not here for a political lecture. What else can I tell you about Menterez? That he sucked the life out of one of my father’s oldest friends? And my father could do nothing? That a woman died aboard his big boat under mysterious circumstances, and nothing was ever done about it? That celebrities from your country stayed at his house as his guests and thought him a fine charming man? That if he walked through that door, there would be a knife in his heart before he could take a second breath? They say you can’t take it with you. Menterez screwed millions out of Cuba, and he took it with him. And sent plenty ahead. Good men were excessively polite to him. In a way that was… an insult to which he could not take offense. His invitations would result in effusive and flowery apologies for not being able to attend. Let me see. What else? Oh, yes. He was a hypochondriac. Gold pill boxes in every pocket, and one week at the Mayo Clinic every six months. They say he was terrified of losing his virility. One understands that he had more than his share. He is on several lists. Many people would be delighted to diminish his virility. If you find him. Travis, promise you will tell me where he is. It would not be the same name, of course.”

“If I find him alive, I’ll get word to you, Raoul. But my hunch is that he is dead.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Some day when there is some kind of an end to the story, amigo, some day when your stomach can take the booze, we will sit around and get stoned and I will tell you all of it.”

He nodded, accepting that. “It has to be private and personal wars for you, eh?”

“I can understand the little ones. The big ones confuse me.”

After a silent moment he said, “I have never asked you this before. Maybe I shouldn’t ask it now. Haw close were you to coming on our little picnic at the Bay?”

“Very very close.”

“I thought so. What stopped you?”

“A nervous little C.LA. man with glasses and a rule book.”

“Then it was very close.”

“It occurred to him that I wasn’t a Cuban.”

He grinned. “Do you remember when you became an honorary Cuban, my friend?”

“At Rancho Luna?”

“When the soldados made the lewd remark to your girl. The three of them there, standing by the sedan, waiting for the politico to finish his lunch. What a damn fool, Travis. Never, never will I forget it. You went smiling up to them and in that horrible kitchen Spanish, you asked that peasant idiot if you might examine his machine gun. You took it so gently and hit him under the chin with the stock, and in the same swing, chopped the other one behind the ear.”

“And missed the third one, boy,” I said, “and you powdered him just in time.”

“And we ran like hell. And you were indignant because of all the people whistling. You didn’t know it is a kind of applause there.”

“I’ve never seen a pair of more terrified girls in my life.”

“We comforted them, amigo mio,” he said, and his smile was suddenly gone. “Yours was Teresa. She married. They waited too long. They tried to come out by small boat. Seventeen of them in a twenty-two foot boat. The motor quit. They drifted six days in August; near the Keys. They were alive when they were found, and two of those died later. Teresa was one of the dead. Her husband lived. He went on our picnic, and he died there in the weeds and the swamp water.”

“That makes my game with those soldiers sound pretty damned silly Raoul.”

“It was silly, of course. Idiotic, suicidal and foolish. I treasure it. The girls adored you for it. All Havana talked and laughed about it for weeks. One indignant tourist, armed only with rum, and three of Batista’s soldiers with Thompson submachine guns, all for the honor of a pretty Cuban girl.” He shrugged and sighed. “What made us think that was the most savage and dangerous of all worlds? Now it seems almost pure, something on a stage, with comedy uniforms.”

“Can you people work your way back to something easier to understand?”

His mouth had a sour curve. “It depends, I think, on how long and how hard we can laugh.” He looked around, then touched my arm. “I am getting signals from old friends. Do you have anything else to ask? No? Excuse me then. Come to our house soon, Travis. Nita will use the long words. She is in a strange limbo now, where neither Cubans nor Yankees can understand her. But she has become quite a good cook.”

By the time I reached the door, I looked back and saw Raoul hunched in fierce argument with men who all seemed to be speaking at once, in fierce low tones. God only knows how it will come out for them. All over the world are the fringe peoples, pushed out of their countries for varied reasons, each group thinking it the most hideous inequity since the world began, the most shameful oppression. In every tiny span of recorded history, the exiles have huddled and plotted, schemed and starved and died.

But perhaps it all used to be simpler to understand. Now the movements of nations have become like a huge slow solemn dance of the elephants, random power swaying in unpredictable directions, their movements obscured by a stifling rain of paper, pastel forms in octuplicate, programmed tapes, punch cards. Through this slow rain, in the shadowy patterns of the dance, scurry a half a billion bureaucrats, each squealing selfimportant orders. Beneath the wrinkled grey legs, ten thousand generals squat, playing with their war game toys. The billions of mankind sit in the huge gloomy reaches of the stands, staring without comprehension, awaiting the white blast that will char the dancers, end the act, and because tension and waiting can only be sustained so long, they make their own little games and charades in the stands, the charades of art, sex, money, power and random murder.

I went and sat in my old car of vulgar blue, and remembered the lovely, shy, mischievous face of Teresa, the night swim in a moonlight sea, the talk and the singing. I remembered her coming out of the sea in moonlight, combing her soaked hair back with her fingers, the phosphorescence twinkling around the wading thrust of her white thighs, seeing me waiting there, stopping, shielding herself for a moment with hands and arms, then lifting her chin and coming on toward me, boldly, making a single sound, deep in her throat, like a laugh. She loved her tropic sea and it had killed her dead, in the hot blazing days of August.

That’s why they can never make it. They kill off the good ones. They gut their dreamers. Their drab stone discipline is a celebration of mediocrity. If we can restrain ourselves from killing off our own rebels, our doubters and dreamers, all in the name of making ourselves strong, then we can prevail. But if we use their methods, then any victory will be but the victory of one iron symbol over another, and mankind will have lost the battle whichever way it goes.

I drove north at a sedate pace, measuring the new reality of Carlos Menterez y Cruzada, collector of gold, of women, and of many kinds of pills. He seemed the type who would have a special talent for survival. Bombs kill their chauffeurs. They catch the last flights out. They change their money in the right places at a favorable rate the day before the currency collapses.

I was very tired. I went back to Bahia Mar. As I approached the Busted Flush, I heard sweet and cautious singing, and I found that it was coming from my topside sun deck. I stepped over the chain, went aboard, and climbed the ladderway. In the starlight and the random lights of the yacht basin, I saw Meyer with four of the little seasonal girls, all bundled in sweaters, sitting on the deck in a close circle, singing one of the old English rounds Meyer liked to teach them. They were always about maidens fair, deadly knaves, lonely death in the castle tower.

They ended on a sweet synchronous chord of girl voices and Meyer congratulated them extravagantly. “Excuse the invasion, my boy,” Meyer said. “Junior here has a dull young man prowling around trying to create scenes. We’re in hiding. This group is in very good voice. Lassies, if any of you do not know him, this is the crude fellow who owns the boat. His name is McGee. Excuse me a moment. Practice that last one again, please.”

He took me over to a far corner of the sun deck. Behind us, the girl voices were heartbreakingly sweet and clear.

“A man named Branks was here, looking for you, Travis. He had some questions.”

“Such as?”

“Your habits, your livelihood. Rather a clever fellow, I suspect. He leaps on any nuance, any mild hesitation.”

“What kind of billing did you give me?”

“Why should I lie to him? I said you are a beach bum, a reasonably pleasant companion, that you seem to make a living from small speculative ventures, that you seem to enjoy practically anything, in moderation, in accord with your somewhat quaint standards of behavior.”

“You two had quite a chat.”

“It took a philosophical turn, the role of man in modern society, the decay of morals, the new permissiveness, group standards versus inner values. He said he would try to get in touch tomorrow.”

“Did he seem hostile?”

“Not at all. Not at all. Quite amiable, and curious. I can depart with my little flock now, or, if you feel festive, we can all go below, for an hour of song and discussion.”

“I don’t feel that festive.”

“Can I offer you a flower from my little garden? The one facing us, the alto, with the perfectly straight strawberry blonde hair?”

“Meyer, this is not like you!”

“She is more than old enough to vote, and she met you the other day and was curious about you, and she is in a horrid emotional state, on the verge of scampering off to commit untidy indiscretions with bad companions. Better a devil I know than several she doesn’t know. I cannot keep her in my little gaggle of sweet geese much longer. She is disaster prone, compelled by a bruised heart. Otherwise… I would not step so far out of character.”

I looked and saw the girl’s eyes intently watching me, the mouth making the round tones of the song, and was tempted. But any man who thinks of himself as therapy should not have a license to practice. If it could be guaranteed that she would remain a thing, a pleasure item, a recreation device-as recommended by Playboy, then the diversion would be so meaningless as to make the decision easy. But she would insist on being a person, a special soul hunting its own special agonies, and we would try to make those marks upon each other which prove that nothing is ever casual. I was wearing all the old marks I could handle, never, having been quite able to play the recreation game, not for itself alone. So let her go find her own untidiness, her own bad companions, as I had done in my own seeking way. Any bandage presupposes a wound, and in these brave, hearty days there are more than enough wounds to go around. So take your strawberry hair elsewhere, dear. McGee’s Clinic is closed for repairs.

“No thanks, Meyer.”

“Too bad. She is in need of a rare additive. Kindness. Scientific tests show that with that special additive-KDS we call it-any woman fresh out of the show room, right out of dealer stock, will travel an additional eight hundred and seventy-one yards before stalling.”

He repaired a shaky lyric, coached them in a chord, then trooped his little flock off and away, the girl voices calling their goodnights. One goodnight in a sad alto echoed in an empty corridor in my mind, and after I had at last fallen asleep in the vast custom bed in the master stateroom, I stood on a dream bridge and looked down and saw an open boat drift under the bridge on the black tide, full of a lost tumble of dead maidens, all with strawberry blonde hair, wide marbled eyes accusing.

Ken Branks, in yellow knit shirt, shapeless felt hat and racetrack tweeds, sat in my lounge and took cautious sips from the steaming mug of coffee and made small talk and watched me with clever eyes in a supremely ordinary face.

Finally he said, “You’ve been questioned a few times, McGee. Here and in Miami.”

“I haven’t been charged with anything.”

“I know. But you seem to get a piece of the action on little things here and there. It interests me.”

“Why?”

“Sam Taggart’s death interests me too. It didn’t check out the way I thought it would. We worked all the bars and came up with nothing. You know, I thought it was an amateur hacking, some guy working blind in the dark, drunk maybe, chopping at him, finally getting him.”

“Wasn’t it like that?”

“I thought maybe the murder weapon could have been ditched behind those cabins, somewhere in all those junked automobiles, so I had a couple people check it over. They found it. A brand new dollar-nineteen carving knife. Fifty supermarkets in the area carry that brand. There was some other stuff with it. One brand new cheap plastic raincoat, extra large. One brand new pair of rubber gloves. One set of those pliofilm things that fit over shoes. The stuff was bundled up, shoved into a car trunk, one with a sprung lid. Except for the blood, which is a match for Taggart’s, the lab can’t get a thing off that stuff. What does that all mean to you?”

“Somebody expected to get bloody.”

“Somebody didn’t like Taggart. They wanted it to last. They were good with a knife and they made it last. They wanted him to know he was getting it. Look at it that way, and study the wounds, and it was a professional job. Somebody played with him, and then finished him off. We traced Taggart’s car. It was bought for cash off a San Diego lot nearly two weeks ago.”

“What do you want to ask me?”

“Who could take that much of a dislike to him?”

“He’s been gone three years. He never wrote.”

Branks scowled at his coffee. “You saw him that afternoon. You’d take an extra large size. Maybe he came back to find out if you were still sore at him. Maybe you got back to your boat minutes before Nora Gardino arrived there.”

“If you could sell yourself that idea, you wouldn’t be trying it on me.”

His smile was wry. “You’re so right. We’re understaffed, McGee. We haven’t got time to futz around with something that gets too cute.”

“A man would get an extra large size to cover more of himself.”

“Sure. I don’t want pressure. I don’t want newspapers howling about a mystery slaying. So I’m trying to keep it on the basis of a brawl, a vagrant, a dirty little unimportant killing. No release on the blood-proof clothing. I’ve asked California if they’ve got anything at all… I’ve checked him out three years ago here, and I don’t find anything special. He had a job. He worked at it. He took off. What did the two ofyou talk about that day?”

“People we’d both known, where are they, how are they. Do you remember this and that. He said he was back for good, and he borrowed forty dollars.”

“He was right about that. He’s back for good. A man doesn’t get burned that black in any kind of job except on boats.”

“I got the idea that’s what he’d been doing.”

“Out of California?”

“Or Mexico. I told you before he said he’d spent some time in Mexico.”

“You take a man on boats, and an international border, and you can come up with reasons for somebody getting killed. Smuggling. Maybe he was a courier, and he kept the merchandise and ran with it.”

“He had to borrow forty dollars.”

“Maybe he had something he could change into money. And somebody came after him and took it back. Maybe he tried to make a deal.”

“Aren’t you reaching pretty far?”

“Sure. Maybe there were two of them, and he didn’t say anything to you about the other party.”

“Maybe they couldn’t agree on how to split it up. Maybe it was woman trouble, and the husband followed him. I can reach in a lot of directions, McGee. It doesn’t cost anything: It’s just that something like that, a man carefully dressing up to do bloody work, it bothers me. If he took that much care, he took a lot of other kinds of care too. I don’t think my chances of unraveling it from here are very good. I can’t believe anybody was waiting here three years to do that to him. They came with him or followed him, or agreed to meet him here. That’s what my instinct says.”

“I’d have to agree.”

All the questions were about as welcome as a diagnosis of Hansen’s Disease. He was noodling. Good cops have that trait and talent. The mediocre ones pick a theory that pleases them and try to make the facts fit it, one way or another. The good ones keep dropping a little bit at a time, so that you have no way of knowing how much or how little they know, and then they watch how much effort you make to cover yourself regarding information you think they might know.

The best solution is to give them a little bit, particularly when you suspect they might already have it.

“I may have misled you about one thing, but I don’t think it’s too pertinent,” I said.

“Did you now?”

“Maybe I understated the relationship between Nora Gardino and Taggart. I told you she was fond of him. I guess it was a little more than that. And I guess Sam had some business he wanted to take care of before he saw her again, because he told me to tell her he wasn’t going to be in town until the next day, Saturday. I guess you could say they were in love with each other.”

“And he went away for three years? Were they in touch?”

“No. It was a misunderstanding.”

“So if this was a lover’s reunion, what the hell were you doing there, McGee?”

“She didn’t know where he was staying.”

“So what made her think you’d know?”

“Well… I’d told her he was due back in town.”

“Now how would you have known that?”

“He phoned me Thursday from Waycross, Georgia, to ask me if she was so sore at him she never wanted to see him again. I said no.”

“Couldn’t he wait to get here to find out?”

“Maybe he wasn’t even going to come here if I told him she was too angry or married, or moved away.”

“Okay, so why didn’t you just tell her where she could find him?”

“Sam wasn’t in very good shape, and that was a crummy place he was staying. And I didn’t want him to think I’d tipped her off that he’d come in Friday instead of Saturday. I thought it would give him a chance to pull himself together, and go out to the car. It wasn’t much of a setting for a reunion, you see.”

“I can buy that. It ties up a few loose ends, McGee. Like the way she damned near passed out on Thursday night out at the Mile O’Beach.”

“That’s when I told her he was coming back. Did you think that’s when I told her somebody was going to kill him?”

“The thought passed through my mind. I even wondered if last night in Miami you were trying to find the Cuban who did it.”

“You’re pretty good.”

“I wondered if you went to New York to find out which Cuban to look for.”

“You make me very happy I leveled with you.”

“Did you?”

“And I intend to keep right on leveling with you. Nora is still pretty shaky about this whole thing. We’re old friends. She has a gal who can run the store. I think it would do her good to get her away from here for a while.”

He thought that over. “Mexico?”

“It might be a nice change at that.”

“You are a brassy bastard, McGee. Don’t push it too hard.”

“Listen to me. I did not kill him. Nora did not kill him. Neither she nor I have any idea who did kill him. We would both like to know. You have a limited budget and you have a limited jurisdiction. And a lot of curiosity. And some anger about the way it was done. We’re angry too. What do you know that could be any help to us? I trade that for my confidential report to you about how it all comes out. If you don’t want to play, you won’t get a chance to listen.”

“My God, you are a brassy bastard! If there’s anything that turns my stomach, friend, it is the amateur avenger sticking his civilian nose into a rough situation, muddying everything up.”

“I’ve seen it rough here and there, around and about.”

He thought it over. He leaned back and looked at the lounge, tilted his balding head and gave me an oblique glance. “Just what is it you do?”

“I do favors for friends.”

“Did Taggart want you to do him a favor?”

That damned instinct of his. “I don’t know. Either he didn’t get around to bringing it up, or he changed his mind.”

“Nobody gives me the same story on you, McGee.”

“I never exert myself unless I have to. A genuinely lazy man is always misunderstood.”

“l even heard that you won this barge in a crap game.”

“A poker game.”

He waited, and then gave a long sigh. “All right. Except for this little morsel, I would have taken you in, just for luck. I don’t think it’s going to do me much good to sit on it. A bartender made him from the picture. A highway bar a half mile south of here. He came in about quarter of nine. He made a call from the pay booth. He sat at the bar and nursed beers. At maybe quarter after he got a call on that phone. He seemed jittery. A half hour later a well-dressed man arrived, carrying a briefcase. Dark, medium height, maybe about thirty. They seemed to know each other. They went back to a booth. They had a long discussion. They left together, somewhere around eleven. This was a handy bartender. Observant. The well-dressed type did not drink. He kept his hat on. Dark suit, white shirt, dark tie. The bartender said they seemed to be dickering over something, making some kind of a deal, and they didn’t seem very friendly about it.”

“It isn’t very much.”

“It’s something, but not very much. It’s enough to take pressure off you. He called somewhere and left a number. Briefcase phoned him back and he told him where to come. When Taggart thought he had the deal made, he took Briefcase back to the cabin. Assume Taggart was selling something. Two cars. Briefcase followed him. They make the deal. Briefcase leaves.

“He goes down the side road, parks by the car dump, puts on his blood suit, takes the knife and comes back, having cased the cabin. Maybe his orders were to make the deal, but rescind it good if Taggart gave him half a chance. Five dirty minutes used up in killing Taggart. Recover the money. Stash his costume in a junk car, drive away.”

“In a rental car? Back to the Miami airport?”

He looked at me approvingly. “Maybe you’re not a clown after all.”

“But you couldn’t check it out?”

“How many phone messages come in? How many cars are checked out? How many medium-sized, dark-haired guys, thirty years old fly in and out every day? Maybe it’s an organization thing, and Briefcase is a local operator. It fades out into nothing, McGee. When it’s professional, it always fades out into nothing, unless we get one hell of a break.”

“What’s so professional about hacking him up like that?”

“A professional with a personal interest, maybe. Or maybe that’s the way he goes for kicks, when he has the time.” He grinned. “I’m a pro too. That’s why you’re going to come along and sit in my car while I talk to Miss Gardino. It’s the only way I can be sure you don’t get on the phone.”

He couldn’t trick her or trap her. All he could do was break her down to the tears and the truth. And he left me there at the shop with her, back in the office, steadying her down. The big sobs were less frequent. Shaj stared in at us and gave a little nod and went away. I patted Nora’s lean shoulder. Her dark hair smelled grassy, like summer grass and clover. She gulped against my chest, sighs between the fading sobs.

The little office was functional, rubber tile, steel, electrical computation, posture chairs. Out in the shop the women were drifting in the buying glaze, touching fabric, pursing lips, standing hipshot and pensive, the chic skilled clerks in attendance, amid a readiness of mirrors, a piped music barely audible. The office girl lurked in one of the store rooms, in impatient diplomacy.

Nora launched herself back into self-dependence, giving a little push at me to turn herself away, delving for tissue, honking into it and then trying to smile.

“He hits the nerve, doesn’t he?”

“He opens you up like a guide book. It’s his trade.”

“Trav, I didn’t… let him make me say anything about… the gold.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“But he got the rest of it. The loving.” That narrow, vital, ugly-lovely face twisted into a grimace that pulled the flesh against the bone, showing the skull shape, the tooth-look of death.

“So we can leave any time,” I said. “As soon as you’re ready.”

She looked flustered. The eagerness was still there, but the actual fact of departure made her uncertain. “I… I have a lot to do.”

“As soon as you’re ready.”

Eight

THE TRAVEL agent in Los Angeles was a darling fellow, in tight green pants, yellow shirt, green ascot, desert boots. At a distance he was still a subdeb, but at close range he wore a thousand wrinkles, fine as cobwebs, and his eyes were as old as tombs. Nora and I sat on his moulded plywood chairs and talked to him across a pale pedestal desk. I had made it clear to him that it was Miss Gardino and Mr. McGee.

He looked pained and said, “If that is REALLY the sort of thing you have in mind, I think you would be TERRIBLY pleased with Mazatlan or Guaymas, or perhaps as far down as Manzanillo. Puerto Altamura is so DIFFICULT.”

“In what way?”

“Transportation wise, sir.” He studied the folder he had taken from the file, and went over to a large map of Mexico on the side wall. He put a manicured finger next to Puerto Altamura and said, “I could arrange some HORRID little flight into Culiacan, and from there you could rent a car and driver to take you to Pericos, and then over a DESPERATE little swamp road. Or perhaps a flight into Los Mochis, and a car over to Boca del Rio, and a rented boat from there. Or, I understand there is a little charter amphib at Navojoa. And then, of course, there is really only the one place to stay there… and suppose you are not comfortable?”

“It’s supposed to be pretty good, isn’t it?”

He shrugged, fluttered his hand. “The Casa Encantada. The literature always says they are luxurious. I’ve never been there, or talked to anyone who has stayed there. As you see here, sixty beautiful rooms, pool, beach, gourmet food, boating, fishing, tennis… Really I can TRULY recommend a lovely place in…”

“Puerto Altamura sounds pretty good to me,” I said. “We’d like something… a little off the beaten track.”

His eyes moved sidelong toward Nora, a reptilian flicker of understanding. He gave up. “I’ll see what I can do, sir. It may take some time to arrange. Such perfectly GHASTLY phone service. I’ll try to book you through by the most comfortable means, believe me, provided I can arrange reservations. How long would you want to stay there, sir?”

“A month. Six weeks.”

“My word!” he said, aghast. “Uh… two rooms, sir?”

“Please.”

He looked at his watch. “I suggest you phone me in, say, an hour and I may be able to report some progress.”

We went out into the milky overcast sunlight of the March morning. She looked up at me with a crooked smile ancl said, “Isn’t he a dear?”

“He seems to know what he’s doing.”

“Could we just walk for a while? I feel very tense and restless.”

“Sure, Nora.”

I phoned him at noon. He said, “I’m doing MUCH better than I expected, sir. I have you reserved there, beginning tomorrow night. The manager, a Mr. Arista, assures me the accommodations are most pleasant. He suggested a way of getting there, and I have ticketed you through to Durango, leaving at nine-twenty tomorrow morning. I am working on the link from Durango to Culiacan, where a hotel vehicle will meet you. Suppose you stop by at three this afternoon, and I shall have everything all ready for you.”

The Aviones de Mexico prop jet made one stop at Chihuahua, and then flew on to Durango. About thirteen hundred miles all told. It was one-thirty when we got there. It was a mile in the air, windwashed, dazzlingly clear, very cool in the shade. The men in the customs shack were efficient in an ofthand way, armed, uniformed, officially pleasant. The one who spoke English phoned Tres Estrellas Airline for us, and ten minutes later an ancient station wagon appeared and took us and our luggage on a fast and lumpy journey to a far corner of the field.

We waited a half hour for the third passenger to arrive, a young priest. The plane was a venerable Beechcraft. The pilot looked far too young. He wore pointed yellow shoes, a baseball hat, and a mad smile. Between us and the sea were peaks of up to ten thousand feet, all jungled green with occasional outcroppings of stone. It was over two hundred miles to Culiacan. He did not waste company gas with any nonsense like climbing over the peaks. He went through the valleys and gorges, the tricky gusts tipping and tilting us, the treetops streaking by Nora’s hand was clamped upon mine, her fingers icy.

And when at last we came out of the crumpled terrain, he followed it downhill, building up more speed and vibration than the aircraft was built to take. Finally, when we reached Culiacan, he achieved some altitude, merely for the purpose of slipping it in, a very flamboyant gesture indeed, and set it down without a bounce or jar.

At sea level the heat was moist, full of a smell of garbage and flowers, and a faint salty flavor of the sea. It was nearly four o’clock. There was a round and smiling little man there in a bright blue uniform. It said Casa Encantada on his hat, and it said Casa Encantada on the side of the bright blue Volkswagen bus. He kept smiling and saluting. He would load a piece of luggage and salute again. “Hello!” he kept saying. “Ah, hello!” But he had no other English.

When I tried my broken Cuban Spanish, and Nora tried her fragments of Italian, his smile merely became slightly glassy. The back end of the bus was stacked high and heavy with supplies. In his own way he was as fearless as our pilot. He kept bouncing up and down in the seat, humming, muttering, swaying back and forth trying to achieve more speed.

We whined north on Route 15 to Pericos, and there he made a violent left onto an unpaved road. We had twenty miles of it, part sand, part shell, part crushed stone, part mud. The tropic growth was dense and moist on both sides.

At five-thirty we came bouncing out of the jungle, climbed a small ridge, and went dashing down into the town of Puerto Altamura, a grievous disappointment in spite of the blue bay and the low green of the tropic islands shielding it. Our driver was shouting and waving at everyone, blowing his horn as though he had just won the Mille Miglia.

Unpaved streets of mud and dust, some clumsy churches, a public square with a small sagging bandstand, naked children, somnolent dogs, snatches of loud music from small cantinas, scores of small weathered stalls, squatting street vendors, ancient rickety trucks, a massive, pervasive almost overpowering stench composed of a rare mixture of mud flats, dead fish, greasy cooking and outdoor plumbing. The village was a semi-circle on a curve of the bay, and between the waterfront building we could see rotting docks, a scrabbly beach, nets drying, crude dark boats.

“Paradise,” Nora murmured.

We made a turn around the bandstand and headed south. The houses became a little more elaborate, and then stopped; the road curved and ahead of us, and a half-mile away, perched on a continuation of the ridge we had crossed, we saw the Casa Encantada, low and white and cleanlooking, with many white out-buildings, all roofed with orange-red tile.

The driver beamed, nodded at us, pointed and said, “Hello! Hello!”

He drove into a cobbled front courtyard, banked with rainbows of tropical flowers, stopped with a great flourish at the broad steps leading up to the main entrance. Small boys in bright blue came hurrying to get our luggage. We got out.

The hotel faced the sea. It was on a headland, projecting into the bay. We could see out through the broad pass to the southwest across water sparkling in the evening sunlight. There was a big pool down the slope to the south of the hotel; with a dozen or so people taking the late sun. In the small bay down beyond the pool, at the end of a long curving cement staircase was a small yacht basin, with a half dozen cruisers and sports fishermen gleaming bright down there, and space for twice as many more. Across from the small bay, on the opposite knoll, I could see several impressive-looking homes barely visible among the lush plantings.

“Paradise?” I said to Nora.

“It is absolutely unbelievably fantastic.”

A bald brown mustached man in a white suit came down the few broad steps and said, “Miss Gardino? Mr. McGee? My name is Arista. I am the manager here. I hope your stay with us will be most pleasant.”

“It’s lovely here,” Nora said.

“Was your trip enjoyable, Senorita?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

We went in and registered. The lobby was small, with a center fountain, tiled floor, massive dark beams, bright mosaics set into the walls.

He said, “We are almost half full at the moment. Dinner is served from eight until eleven-thirty. We have our own water supply and it is tested frequently so do not be afraid to drink it. We generate our own electrical power and so, unfortunately, we halt all kitchen and bar service at midnight when we turn off the main generator and go onto the smaller one which handles our night lighting. It is switched back at seven in the morning. There are brochures in the rooms explaining the hours for everything and what activities are available. We are happy you are staying with us. Will you follow me, please?”

He snapped his fingers and the boys picked up the luggage. He took us down a long passageway, with room doors on one side and, on the other, open arches overlooking the sea. We were two-thirds of the way down that wing, in rooms 39 and 40. The interconnecting door was open, thus saving him the minor awkwardness of unlocking it for us. If we chose to close it and bolt it, that was our affair. Blue tile floors, plaster walls, broad low beds, graceful straw furniture, coarse draperies in crude bright colors, deep closets, low chests of drawers, small bright tiled baths, with tub and shower and geometric stacks of thick white towels.

“These rooms are satisfactory? Good.” A shy brown broad-faced young girl in a blue uniform dress appeared in the doorway. Arista said, “This is Amparo. She will by your room maid while you are here. She has some English.” The girl smiled and bobbed her head. She had coarse black braids tied with scraps of blue yarn. A wiry little man in blue with a face like braided leather appeared behind her, with gold-toothed smile. “And Jose is your room waiter,” Arista explained. “You push the top button here for Amparo and the other for Jose. She will do laundry, pressing, sewing, that sort of thing. PIease tip them at the time you leave us. I have given you table ten, and you will have the same waiter each day, so arrange the tip with him in the same fashion, please.” He gave a little bow to each of us in turn. “Welcome to La Casa Encantada,” he mid, and left.

Nora selected number 39. Jose moved her luggage into that room. Amparo went in to help her unpack and Nora closed the interconnecting door. Jose unpacked my two bags. I took out the two items I did not want him to handle, the zipper case which contained the statuette pictures, and my slightly oversized toilet kit.

When he was through, and had asked if I wanted anything else, and had bowed himself out, with golden smile, I checked the room for a suitable hiding place for the five pictures. I did not hope to find anything that would defeat a professional search. I just wanted to thwart amateur curiosity.

One table lamp had a squat pottery base. I dismantled the fixture. The base was half full of sand for stability. There was ample room for the pictures, slightly curled, shoved down partway into the sand. I put it back together again. Now the leather folder contained misleading information, a sheaf of typed sheets of computations, percentage returns on real estate and investments, detailed recommendation for purchase of things I would never buy.

I took the toilet kit into the bathroom. It has a shallow false bottom, so inconspicuous as to be quite effective. I had debated bringing a weapon, and had at last decided on a flat little automatic pistol I had filched from an unstable woman’s purse, a Parisian woman. It is a ridiculous little thing made in Milano, silver-plated, with an ivory grip, one inch of barrel, without safety or trigger guard. The six clip has a sturdy spring however, unusual in these junk weapons. It is 25 caliber. I’d brought a full clip and a dozen extra shells. At eight feet I could be reasonably certain of hitting a man-sized target every time. At fifteen feet I would be half sure. At twenty-five feet it would be better to throw stones. It is a bedroom gun, with a brash bark like an anxious puppy. Its great advantage is its size. It is very thin. The grip fits the first two fingers of my hand. I can and have carried it in my wallet, tucked in with the money. It makes an uncomfortably bulky wallet.

I dumped the toilet gear out, pried up the false bottom and felt a little ridiculous as I looked at the toy gun. I had more faith in the other two items concealed there, the little vial of chloral hydrate, and the tin of capsules of a tasteless and powerful barbiturate, labeled respectively as nose drops and cold medicine. I checked the clip on the little gun and transferred it to the side pocket of my trousers. It was safe. It could not fire until I had jacked a shell into the chamber. I left my medicines and extra shells concealed.

After I had showered and changed, Nora rapped on the interconnecting door. I opened it and she came in, in an ivory linen dress that darkened her skin.

“Amparo is a jewel,” she said. “Nice rooms.”

“Maybe the food will be good too.”

“I hope so.”

“Shall we walk around? Explore?”

“If you’d like.”

“Why are we almost whispering?” she asked, and smiled nervously, her dark brown eyes glinting in the diminishing light of dusk.

“Before we go out, is there anything in your room, anything that ties you to him in any way?”

“You told me to be sure of that. I was. There’s nothing at all, Trav. But… he could have talked to someone about Gardino and McGee. Old friends.”

“There has to be a scrap of bait left out, a hint of bait, nothing definite.”

“I have the feeling someone is listening to us.”

“Not from this room. You’ll feel that way all the time we’re here. Until we know. Until we’re sure.”

“It isn’t anything like I thought it would be.”

We walked to the far end of our exterior corriclor, away from the lobby and found a sun deck at the end, large, with an iron railing, with a short curved staircase leading down to a path that led to the apron of the pool. The sunbathers were gone. A couple swam, dived, the man full of the spurious peppiness of the mid-forties living up to the demands of a lovely young girl, making his youthful motions, keeping his belly tucked in, having a whee of a time.

We walked to the far side of the pool and looked down at the little yacht basin. Two more sports fishermen had arrived, unloaded the customers, and the crew of two aboard each one was hosing down, oiling reels, slipping the canvas covers onto the boat rods, talking and laughing across the dock to each other.

We took a flagstone path through the flowers toward the main entrance, watching the orange sun slip down beyond the far islands which guarded the bay from the hundred and fifty mile sweep of the Gulf of California.

“We’re almost opposite La Paz,” I said. “I guess it’s just a little south of us.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Once upon a time.”

“Trav, tell me why I feel so strange and uncertain and… unreal?”

“After we find the bar.”

“Okay. After we find the bar.”

It was on the level below the lobby, an upholstered little room hoked up with candles, nets, tridents, glass floats, but dim and pleasant enough. We got our drinks at the bar, took them to a banquette corner. Several tables had been pulled together to seat ten people, five couples-the men big and brown and beefy, and their women smallish, tough, leathery. I needed one glance for the whole story.

“Those are the big game fish buffs,” I told Nora. “Names in the record books. Invitation tournaments. Except for the fox hunting crowd, they are the most insular, most narrow and arrogant and self-satisfied bores in creation. If you can’t kill fish in proper style, you’re vermin. They clutter up Bimini. They ought to be restricted to Cat Cay, where the only ruder people in the world are the Cat Cay dock hands.”

“How about the four dark suit types in the corner?”

“Mexican businessmen. Maybe looking for another place to stick up a hotel.”

“And those kids at the end of the bar?”

Three towering and powerful young men, and two slim sunbrowned girls, and a huge black dog. “That’s tougher. I’d say scuba types, if this was a better area for it. I’ll say it anyway. From the way they’re dressed, they’ve got a boat here. Probably came down the coast of Baja California and around to La Paz and cut across to here and will end up in Acapulco. How about the gal clothes?”

“That simple little beach shirt on the blonde is a forty dollar item.”

“It would have to be a good hunk of boat. So it’s that big motor sailor at the far dock out there. Fifty something feet.”

“And the couple just coming in?”

“Ah, the firm tread and the steady eye of shutterbug tourists. Kodachrome and exposure meters, and hundreds of slides of the real Mexico.”

She lowered her voice. “And the couple at this end of the bar?”

The woman was dark, hefty and handsome, glinting with gem stones. The man was squat and powerful, with an Aztec face and a gleaming white jacket.

“Just a guess. They’re from one of the houses over there beyond the boat basin. Drinks and dinner at the hotel tonight, for a change.”

“You’re good at that, Trav.”

“And often wrong,” I said, and went to the bar and brought fresh drinks back.

She sat closer to me and said, “Why do I feel so strange?”

“Because on the other side of the continent it looked easy, Nora. Now all you can see is closed doors, and no way of knowing if any of them will open. Baby, nothing is easy. Life comes in a thousand shades of grey, and everyone except madmen think what they do is reasonable, and maybe even the madmen do too. People don’t wear signs, and being dropped into a strange area is like a starfish landing on a strange oyster bed. You don’t know which one to open, or if you can open anything. On serial television it’s easy. For Superman it’s easy. For Mike Hammer it’s easy. But real people wander around in the foggy foggy dew, and never get to understand anything completely, themselves included. You put on your heroine suit, honey, and now you feel a little jackass in it. That’s good for you. I brought you along as cover. A place like this, a man comes here with a woman, or comes after the fish. With you along they classify me harmless, as I did most of the people in this room. So keep your head close to me and glow at me. You had to come here or you’d never feel right about him, so it’s good for you. But remember, we’re standing at the plate blindfolded. They give us an unlimited number of strikes, so you swing until your arms get too tired, and hope you don’t get hit in the head.”

She leaned closer and said, “What kind of a lousy defeatist attitude is that?”

“It’s the attitude that keeps me from getting anxious and careless. And dead.”

Her eyes looked sick and I knew the vision of Sam dead had flashed in her mind.

“You’re in charge,” she said.

Table ten overlooked a sunken flood-lighted garden behind the hotel. The food was good. It was almost very good. The individual table lights made little cones of privacy in the expanse of the big mom. Our waiter, Eduardo, was deft and diligent. We lingered long over coffee and brandy, and at ten o’clock we wandered down and sat in deck chairs by the lighted pool. The area had been fogged for bugs, a taint that spoiled the heavy scents of the night blooming flowers.

“Listen,” she said.

I heard small music from the boat basin, a deep drone of the faraway generator, a distant competitive chorus of tree toads.

“It’s so quiet here,” she said.

“It would be good to be here for other reasons.” After a little while she said, “Maybe he would have brought me here some day.”

“Cut it out, Nora.”

“I’m sorry.”

A few minutes later she stood up and said, “Goodnight, Trav. I’ll try to… keep things under better control.”

“Want me to walk you back?”

“No thanks. Really.”

“Sleep well, Nora.”

I watched her, slim and slow, her dress pale in the warm night, climb the stairs to the sun deck and disappear along the corridor.

After a little while I went back to the bar for a cold Carta Blanca. Aside from a young couple with a honeymoon humidity about them, sitting in the corner, the bar had turned into a men’s club. The men at the bar gravely caught conversational fish, found them too small, explained how badly they had handled them, released them without regret. They lost decent billfish to the sharks, had reels bind at the wrong moment, frayed their lines, broke their tips. The occasional fisherman tells of triumphs. The compulsive ones relate only disaster. I listened, and picked up crumbs of information. The hotel owned four sports fishermen. One was hauled for repairs.

“If you don’t have your boat down here next time, Paul, the one to sew up is Mario. He’ll keep you stern on, beautifully. He anticipates. George was out with him last year when he got that bruising son of a bitch of a blue. What did it go, Harry?”

“Four ten and a bit. Three hours, twenty minutes. Six thread. George swears by Mario. Pedro is second best.”

“But Pedro’s mate is a cretin entirely.”

They got into a travelogue then. Fishing around the world. Zane Grey in Australia. Tarpon in the Panuca River as compared to tarpon in Boca Grande pass. They told each other stories of tragic disaster.

I like to fish. I like to fish absolutely alone, wading the flats, or casting from shore into the tide patterns. And when I catch something I like to eat it as soon as possible. I spent my slave time popping my shoulder muscles and bursting my blisters on tuna the size of Volkswagens. I gave it up, much the same way I gave up climbing trees, driving motorcycles, dating actresses and other equivalently boyish sports.

I tuned them out, and leaned on the padded rail of the little bar and tried to relate myself to time and place. They haul you too far too fast, and unless you can think of the distances, unless you know distances from the brute process of walking them, sore-footed, scared and hungry, every place you go becomes a suburb of every other place.

The screaming machines had whipped me from Florida to California and down into Mexico, and the soul tried to follow along at its own pace, tracking me down. This was an ancient tropic coast backed by cruel mountains, and La Casa Encantada was an implausible oasis, Americanized by fish money. The people in the village of Puerto Altamura-a thousand of them? Fifteen hundred?-would find it even less plausible than the tourists could imagine. For all the years the generations of them, in the dust and the mud and sea smell, had lived and worked and died in this coastal pocket, the young always dreaming of going far away, and few of them making it.

Then suddenly, down the beach, appeared the big hotel and the new homes of los ricos. What could make Puerto Altamura so attractive to people that they should come incredible distances? Fishing? But fishing was a brute dangerous business of nets and gambles and bad prices and the unpredictable and hostile sea, a fact of life. It brought in new money. Dozens of villagers had a new kind of employment. Insane touristas would walk into the village and buy things foolishly, and click click their cameras at the most ordinary and ugly and familiar things.

But, on the whole, the change was less than the sameness. The old things continued, sin and salvation, sickness and death, work and school and fiesta, drinking and violence, drowning and dancing, politics and pesos. The sprained bus came waddling in three days a week, and the old ice plant clattered, and the trucks limped and groaned out over the bad road with the unending harvest of fish.

One thing was obvious to me. From what Sam Taggart said, he had spent an appreciable amount of time here. He had become a residente. He would be known. It was inescapable that he would be known, and known well. He said there had been trouble. So people would not want to talk. I had to find some way of unwinding it, of following the single strands to the marks he had left on this place and these people.

From the shadowy corner came the sound of the bride’s febrile chuckle, and soon they walked out, obsessed with the legality of it all, the permissive access, and all the fishermen at the bar turned slow heads to appraise the departing ripeness of her, and all seemed to sigh.

I signed my chit and went to my room. Amparo had turned the bed down. Nora slept beyond the closed door. Or lay restless and heard me come in, and wondered what would happen to us here, among the flowers and fishermen.

Nine

I SLEPT heavily, and longer than is my habit. Nora was not in her room. It bothered me. There was a quality of impatience about her which could get us in trouble, or slam all the doors before we could even begin.

I dressed quickly, but as I left the room, I saw her coming along the corridor in swim suit, pool coat and clogs, towel and swim cap in her hand, the ends of her dark hair damp. Her weight loss had not changed the impact of those excessively lovely legs, so beautifully curved, so totally elegant.

For over two years, she had told me, she had made upwards of fifty dollars an hour modeling those legs for fashion photography in New York, had lived meanly, saving every dime, and then had gambled the savings on opening the shop in Fort Lauderdale. She was Jersey City Italian, her father a stone mason, and she had driven herself a long hard way and made it on her own terms, acquiring along the way that gloss and poise which hid her origins.

She had a curious attitude toward those perfect legs. They had been a valued property, like inherited shares of stock. She was grateful to them, pleased with them, and utterly indifferent to any admiration from others. Too many lenses had stared at them, too many studio lights had been moved to illuminate them properly. The George Washington Bridge was a memorable sight. It carried traffic. Her legs were memorable. And they carried her around.

“I’ve been up forever,” she said. “And I’m absolutely starving. Are you going to breakfast now? Tell Eduardo I’m practically on my way. It’s a lovely pool. A lot of boats went out early. You were right about those kids on the motor sailor. They’re checking tanks and things. Isn’t it a gorgeous morning? I won’t be long. What will I put on? What are we going to do?”

“Walk to the village. Skirt instead of shorts, I’d say. Flat heels.”

By the time we reached the public square, we had adjusted to the rich odors of the town. The brown kids had flocked around us, demanding pesos, dollars, dimes, two beets, neekles, and in the face of smiling, polite refusal, had accepted the rejection cheerfully enough, somehow passed the word to other hopefuls, and let us go our way. The slightest unbending, the smallest gift, would have made any future trip to the village one vast annoyance.

We wandered, looked at the stalls, then sat on a bench in the square, where the inevitable pigeons pecked at the walks and the scrub grass. There were beads of perspiration on Nora’s upper lip. We watched the people. Aside from the very few bureaucratic types in the ubiquitous dark suits, the men wore khaki and twill and denim, clean, faded with many washings. The women, the older ones, wore either skirts and white blouses, or shapeless cotton dresses. The young girls wore the bastard American clothes of the catalogue houses, the pastel pants to mid calf, brief tops and halters. They moved in flocks, chittering, slanting their dark glances. I had located the post office, the police station, the public market. These were handsome people, trim and muscular, with the broad faces, dusty black hair, liquid tilting eyes of the Indio blood. Not too many hundreds of years ago they had roamed these coasts in their dugout canoes, leaving mounds of shells at their camping places, weaving complex fish traps of tough reeds.

I thought of using the post office as a possible approach. Looking for an old friend. Yes indeed. Good old Sam Taggart. He still around here? But it seemed clumsy.

A young priest walked by us and glanced over and said, “Good morning!”

“Good morning, Father,” Nora said meekly. I recognized him as the same one who had been on the Tres Estrellas flight. I watched him head toward the church on the other side of the square and disappear into the dark interior. And I had a little idea worth developing.

“Are you Catholic?” I asked Nora.

“If I’m anything. Yes. I don’t work at it. But it sort of builds up… and then I go to mass. Twice a year, maybe. I had an awful lot of it when I was a kid. When I was sixteen I had a brother who died, terribly. Some kind of cancer. Big horrible lumps all over his body. He got immune to the drugs. Way down the street they could hear him screaming when he had to be moved, for dressings and keeping him clean. I wore my knees out and my beads out, praying for God to take him to end that agony. He was a sweet boy. He was the best of us, really. But he lasted and lasted and lasted, until you wouldn’t think he had the strength to scream like that. But he did. Almost to the end. Why should a kid endure such torture? By the time he died, my religion was dead too. I had terrible fights with my family about it. But I wouldn’t pray to anything my brother’s death had proved didn’t exist. Are you religious at all, Trav?”

“I think there is some kind of divine order in the universe. Every leaf on every tree in the world is unique. As far as we can see, there are other galaxies, all slowly spinning, numerous as the leaves in the forest. In an infinite number of planets, there has to be an infinite number with life forms on them. Maybe this planet is one of the discarded mistakes. Maybe it’s one of the victories. We’ll never know. I think the closest we can get to awareness is when we see one man, under stress, react in… in a noble way, a selfless way. But to me, organized religion, the formalities and routines, it’s like being marched in formation to look at a sunset. I don’t knock it for other people. Maybe they need routines, rules, examples, taboos, object lessons, sermonizing. I don’t.”

“By the time I was twenty I saw that it was kind of shallow to blame God for what happened to my brother. I didn’t go back to the church. The hold was broken by then. I go sometimes. It’s kind of sweet. Nostalgic. There’s a girl there I used to be, now it’s the only way I ever find her again.” She sighed. “How did we get onto this?”

“Check me on the routine. Any talk you have with a priest is privileged information, isn’t it?”

“Up to a point. I mean if a person confessed a murder, the priest would have to tell the police. What are you getting at?”

“That priest might know some things that would help us.”

She looked startled, and then she comprehended. “But… how could I go about…”

“Ask for his help in a confidential matter. Wouldn’t that keep him quiet?”

“I suppose it would.”

“‘Tell him you were in love with the man, that you lived in sin with him and he left you and you have been searching for him for three years. I have the idea these village priests know everything that goes on. And he speaks English.”

“It would feel so strange… to lie to a priest.”

“I hear it’s done frequently.”

“But not this way” She looked in her purse. “I have nothing to cover my head.”

We went to one of the sidewalk stalls. She picked a cotton scarf. It was ten pesos, then five, then four, and finally three pesos fifty centavos, sold with smiles, with pleasure at the bargaining.

She gave me a tight-lipped and nervous look, and went off toward the church. I watched her go. Blue and white blouse in a diamond pattern, narrow white skirt, with a slit at the side to make walking easier, blue sandals. I saw her go up the worn steps, stop and tie the dark blue kerchief around her head, then disappear into the interior, through the pointed arch of the doorway.

I went back to the bench. The broad leaves of a dusty tree shaded me. Lizards flicked across the fitted stones of the pathways. A strolling dog eyed me in unfriendly inquiry. Two small boys wanted to shine my shoes. Two black and white goats stopped and snuffled among wind-blown debris. A fat brown man with one milky eye came smiling over and, with fragmentary English, tried to sell me a fire opal, then an elaborately worked silver crucifix, then a hand tooled wallet, then a small obscene wood carving, and then, in a coarse whisper, a date with a “friendly womans, nice, fat.” He sighed and plodded away. I had the feeling I was the object of intense scrutiny, of dozens of people wondering how best to pry some of the Yankee dollars out of my pocket.

I knew it would not have been that way before the hotel was built. But now the village had begun the slow transformation to the eventual mercilessness of Taxco, Cuernavaca, Acapulco. Too many Americans had shown them how easy it could be. Greed was replacing their inborn courtesy, pesos corrupting their morals. The village cop, agleam with whistles, bullets and buckles, strolled by, whapping himself on the calf with a riding crop.