A Deadly Shade Of Gold

Nora was gone a long time. A very long time. Though I was watching the church, I did not see her until she was about twenty feet from me. Her color looked bad, her mouth pinched.

“Let’s walk,” she said.

I got up and went with her. “Bad?”

“He’s a good man. It got to me a little. Let me just unwind a little bit.” She gave me a wry glance. “Mother Church. You think you’ve torn loose, but… I don’t know. I lit candles for him, Trav. I prayed for his soul. What would he think of that?”

“Probably he would like it.”

We. headed back out of town, toward La Casa Encantada. After we passed the last of the houses, there was a path worn through grass down toward the beach. She hesitated, and I nodded, and we went down the path. The beach was the village dump, cans and broken bottles and unidentifiable metal parts of things. There was some coarse brown-black sand, and outcroppings of shale, and tumbles of old seaworn rock. We went down where the tide kept it clean, and after a hundred yards or so, came to an old piece of grey timber. She sat there and leaned on her knees and looked out. The big protective islands looked to be about eight miles offshore. An old fish boat was beating toward town, with a lug-rigged sail tan as lizard hide.

“He didn’t speak very much English, Trav. Knough, I guess. When he realized who I was asking about, he became very upset. He said perhaps some people hoped Sam would come back here, but he hoped the man would never return. He said he had prayed that Sam would never return. Prayer answered, I guess. He kept getting excited and losing his English. He came here four years ago, at just about the time the hotel was finished. Sam showed op, he thought, over a year later. He arrived on a private yacht from California. He was the hired captain. There was some kind of difficulty, and Sam was fired. He stayed. The yacht went on. The hotel needed somebody to run one of the fishing boats for guests. They helped Sam get his workpapers straightened out, a residente permit. Then he… he lived with a girl who worked at the hotel, a girl from the village. Felicia Novaro. Then there was some trouble at the hotel, and he left and went to work for one of the families in one of those big houses beyond the hotel. Their name is Garcia. He abandoned Felicia for someone in the Garcia household. And there was trouble there. He left suddenly. I didn’t get all of it, Trav. Federal police came after he left, and asked questions. It’s possible that he killed someone. The priest was very cautious about that part. Trav… it didn’t sound as if he was talking about Sam. He was talking about some stranger, some cruel, dangerous, violent man.”

“What did he do for the Garcias?”

“Ran their cruiser, apparently, and perhaps something more. Several times he seemed on the verge of trying to tell me something, and then he would stop. Felicia Novaro doesn’t work at the hotel any more. She works in town. She does not go to church. He takes that as a personal failure. She works at the Cantina Tres Panchos, and her family do not speak to her. Her people are very devout. She lives over the cantina, and he said she does foolish things, but if she comes back to God, He will forgive her.”

“Will he talk to anyone about this?”

“I’m sure he won’t.”

I touched her shoulder. “We’ve got the starting place, Nora.”

“Maybe I don’t want to find out all these things.”

“We can stop right here.”

“No. I do want to find out. But I’m scared.”

We walked up the beach until we came to too many big rocks, and then we picked our way through nettles and brambles and sea oats, back to the road.

In my room, I rang for Jose, and he said it was perfectly possible to have “ahmbaorgers” served at poolside, with cold Mexican beer, and he would do it at once. I told him fifteen minutes would be better than at once. I changed to swim trunks and went down and found a white metal table shaded I by a big red umbrella. Nora came down in her beach coat and her green sheath suit.

The scuba kids and the newlyweds and two couples of young marrieds apparently traveling together were in and around the pool. Nora and I swam until we saw Jose coming with the draped tray, and then I climbed out and pointed out our table to him. The “ahmboorgers” came with crisp icy salad, and very small baked potatoes.

After lunch the pool boy got us two sun mattresses and I had him put them over on the far ridge of the big apron, near the flowers and away from the other people. We stretched out under high hot sun, with just enough sea breeze to make it endurable, a breeze that clattered palm fronds and rustled the wide leaves of the dwarf banana trees, and brought little creakings and groanings from a tall stand of bamboo on the slope leading down to the boat basin.

“So?” she said at last in a sun-dazed voice.

“So we don’t rush things. We don’t charge around. We give the folks a chance to label us.”

“As what, Trav?”

“Furtive romance, woman. You had to show identity for the tourist card. Connecting rooms. We couldn’t be Mr. and Mrs. Jones.”

“I realize that! But I just…”

“Excuse me,” a girl voice said. I sat up. It was one of the two scuba girls from the motor sailor, the blonde who had been in the bar in the expensive shirt. Now she was in a wet black tank suit that looked as if it had been put on with a spray can. She had the starlet face, bland, young, sensuously perfect, utterly unmarked with any taint of character, force or purpose. The lithe ripeness of her body had been tautened by the surfing, skin diving, water skiing and the beach games. This was the genus playmate, californius, a sun bunny.

She hunkered down, teetered, caught herself with knuckles against the concrete and said, “Oops,” and settled into tireless balance, sitting on her heels like a Kentucky whittler, the webbed muscles of her brown thighs bulging against a tanned softness. She was mildly, comfortably stoned.

“What it is,” she said, “it’s a bet. How about two years ago, three years ago? You were offensive end with the Rams. Right?”

“Wrong.”

“Oh shit,” she said. “Excuse me. The loser, that’s me, gets to go overboard and scrub the whole goddam water line with a brush. You looked like that guy, I can’t remember his name. They’d throw it right into his hands, he’d drop it, but throw it off target, he’d grab it like miracles. Anyhow, you look the type. You play pro with anybody?”

“Just pro ball for a college.”

“End?”

“Defensive line backer. Corner man.”

She looked at me like a stock yard inspector. “You’re big enough for pro.”

“It wasn’t such a big thing when I got out. And I had knee trouble off and on the last two years of it.”

“Excuse me too,” Nora said and got up and headed for the pool.

The sun bunny peered after her. “My asking you gave her a strain?”

“She just wants to cool off I guess.”

“She’s built darling for an older woman. I guess I got to get back and say I was wrong.”

“Are you people moving on soon?”

“I guess so. Maybe tomorrow. Chip hasn’t said. What we figured, we’d stay longer. It used to be there was always a brawl going on they say, one of the houses over there. None of us were here before, but Chip had a note to the people, a friend of a friend, you know, so we’d get in on the action, but he couldn’t even get past the gate, and Arista says no parties this year up there, so that’s it and it’s pretty dead here. I want to go where there’s good reefs. I just want to go down and cruise the reefs. It’s the only thing I can’t ever seem to get sick of. All the colors. Like dreaming it. Like I’m somebody else.”

“What house was it, where the parties were?”

“Oh, the pink one furthest up the hill there. People name of Garcia. Real rich and crazy, Chip’s friend said. Fun people, house guests and so on.

Well, see you around.“ She stood up and trudged back to her friends, giving me a parting smile over a muscular brown shoulder.

Nora came back and toweled herself, saying, “Just think how many of them would flock around if you were alone, dear.”

“She said you’re built darling for an older woman.”

“God, I couldn’t be more flattered.”

“Nora, even if I had sent for her, why should you get huffy?”

She looked angry and then smiled. “Okay. It was a reflex. The war between women. And that, you must admit, is quite a package.”

“Not my kind of package.”

“I’d say it was any man’s kind of package.”

“Take a look at the three gorgeous meatballs she and her girlfriend are slamming around with. They are the masculine parallel. Take your pick.”

She looked over at them, and then back at me. “No thanks. Okay. I never thought of it that way. There wouldn’t be anybody to talk to, would there?”

“Not after the first day. But she came up with something.”

“I beg your pardon?”

I told her about the fine parties, now over. And then I said, “What we’re both thinking becomes pretty obvious after a while.”

“Garcia. That’s like calling yourself John Smith, isn’t it?”

“Instead of Carlos Menterez y Cruzada.”

“But wouldn’t that be terribly difficult for him to arrange?”

“Expensive, maybe. But not too difficult. He had to scoot out of Havana nearly five years ago. A man Ilke that would be thinking ahead all the time. Mexico is a lot less corrupt than other Latin American countries. But immunity is always for sale, if you have enough money, if you work through an agent who knows the ropes. He would be afraid of people wanting to settle old scores. A remote place like this would be perfect. Big house, wall and gate, guards. Enough money to last forever. But he’d want a chance to live it up. Raoul told me about his taste for celebrities when he lived in Havana. And for American girls. He could make cautious contact with friends in California. He’d be afraid to go where the parties are, so he’d have to bring them here. Big cruiser at the dock over there on the other side. Goodies shipped in. It probably would have been impossible for him to get into any kind of business venture in Mexico. Is he dead? Is he sick? Has somebody gotten so close to him he’s had to slam the gates and stop the fiestas? Maybe the people who sold him the immunity have kept on bleeding him. Sam worked for Garcia. Sam got hold of the Menterez collection. And somebody knew he had it and took it away from him. We find that somebody by finding out what went on here.”

“How?”

“We nudge around until we find somebody who would like to talk about it.”

“Felicia Novaro?”

“Maybe. I’ll try her, alone. Tomorrow night.”

“Why not tonight?”

“I saw that cantina. It’s just off the square. I want to do a little window trimming tomorrow afteriuoon. With your help.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll tell you as we go along. It’ll be more convincing.”

An hour later Nora got sleepy and went yawning back to her room to take a nap. With a vague idea I went down the steps to the boat basin. It was the siesta lull. I padded slowly around, looking at the boats. The dockmaster had a shed office and supply store at the end of the basin, beyond a gas dock. They looked as if they were set up to do minor repairs.

The sun was a palpable weight against my back and I squinted into the water glare. Some fish I couldn’t identify hovered close to the cement pilings. I went to the office. A man with red-grey hair and a perpetual sunburn sat sweating at a work table, copying figures from dock chits into a record book. He turned pale blue eyes at me and said, “Ya?

“You the dockmaster?”

“Ya.”

“Pretty nice layout you’ve got here.”

“Something you want?” he asked. He had a German accent.

“Just looking around, if you don’t mind. I live aboard a boat. In Florida. I wish I could get it over here, but there’s no way, unless I want to deck-load it on a freighter.”

“Big boat?”

“Barge type houseboat. Custom, fifty-two feet, two little Hercules diesels. Twenty-one foot beam. I’ve got a four hundred mile range at nine knots, but she won’t take much sea.”

“Not good for these waters. Better where you are.”

“I guess so.” I wandered over to the side wall and began to look at the pictures. They were black and white polaroid prints, scores of them, neatly taped to the composition wall. Boats and fish and people. Mostly people, standing by fish hanging from hooks from a sign saying La Casa Encantada, smiling, sundark happy people, and limp fish. And I saw Sam Taggart. In at least a dozen of them, off to one side, grinning, always with a different group of customers, a raunchy yachting cap shoved back on his hard skull, his teeth white in his deep-water face. In most of them he was wearing a white, short-sleeved sport shirt, open down the front, the tails knotted across his waist.

The dockmaster had gone back to his records. He kept the office very tidy. I saw the books on a shelf, four of them, each labeled by year, each titled Marina Log.

“Mind if I see if I know any of the boats that slopped here?”

“Go ahead.”

I took the one for three years back, and sat on a crate by the window and slowly turned the pages. The sign-in columns were for boat name, length, type, port of registry, owner, captain. I found it for July 11th, over two months after Sam had left Lauderdale. Quest IV, 62 ft, custom diesel, Coronado, California, G. T. Kepplert, S. Taggart, Capt. All In Sam’s casual scrawl. It jumped out of the page at me. Business wasn’t tremendous. Page after page was blank. I put it back and took down the more recent book and went through that and put it back.

“You get some big ones in here,” I said.

“Anything over eighty feet, they anchor out, but it’s a protected harbor.”

I went back to the wall where the pictures were. A young Mexican in paint-stained dungarees came to the doorway and asked a question through the screen. The dockmaster rattled an impatient answer in fast fluent Spanish and the boy went away. He finished the accounts and closed his book and stood up.

“Lock up here now for an hour,” he said.

I had found the picture I wanted. “This man looks familiar to me. I’m trying to remember his boat.”

He came over and looked at the picture. “Him? He had no boat. Look, he is in this picture, that one, that one, lots of them. No, he worked for me.”

“That’s funny. I could have sworn. Haggerty? Taggerty?”

“So! Maybe you did know him. Taggart. Sam Taggart. Yes, now I remember, he was in Florida maybe. He spoke of Florida. Yes. He worked for me here. Find the fish pretty good. Handled a boat too fancy, roar in here too fast, showing off. Hard fellow to control. But the people liked him. They would ask for him first. Maybe once he owned a boat, not when he was here. Maybe in Florida he owned a boat.”

“That must be it.”

He put his hand out. “My name is Heintz. You want some nice fishing, it’s a good time for it now, and I reserve you a good boat, eh?”

“I’ll think it over. McGee is my name.”

“Five hundred pesos all day. The hotel packs lunch, Mr. McGee. A big man like you can catch a big fish, eh?”

“I can’t imagine how Taggart happened to come work here. Is he still around?”

“No. He hasn’t worked for me a long time. He took over a private boat. He’s gone now.”

I sensed that one more question was going to be one question too many. I went out with him and he locked the office door. He gave me an abrupt nod and marched away, and I climbed the steps back to the pool level. Nobody was in the pool. The brown bodies looked as if a bomb had exploded nearby. I climbed on up to the sun deck. I looked at the sea glitter, and then looked at what I could see of the pink house, near the crest of the small tropic slope beyond the boat basin, just a small pink peak, an angle of wall, a fragment of white slanting roof.

Sometimes, when things are coming together, when fragments start to fit, you can get the dangerous feeling of confidence that you are hovering over the whole thing, like a hawk unseen, riding the lift of the wind. Like all other stimulants, it is a perilous thing to rely on. It makes you reckless. It can kill you.

That night, at dinner and in the bar afterwards, Nora was strange. She wore a slate blue dress so beautifully fitted it made her figure seem almost opulent. She was very gay and funny and quick, and then she would get tears in her eyes and try to hide them with hard little coughs of laughter. At last, in the bar, the tears went too far, and when she saw she could not stop them, she said a strangled goodnight and fled. I did not stay long. I took a walk in the night. I thought of ways things could be done, ways that seemed right and ways that felt wrong. Slyness has no special logic. Sam had done something wrong. Knowing the shape of his mistake could help me. I took the problems to bed, and they followed me down into sleep.

But sleep did not take hold. I got hung up on the edge of it, caught there by something just below the threshold of my senses, too vague to identify. I was an Indian, and somebody was snapping twigs on the neighboring mountain. I have learned to respect these indefinite warnings. Once upon a time I had been stretched out on a rock ledge watching a cabin. Without thought or hesitation, I had suddenly rolled away into a thicket of scrub maple, then saw the stain of bright lead appear on the rock, heard the faraway smack of the rifle, the banshee ricochet. We know that in deep hypnosis a good subject can hear and identify sounds far below his normal threshold of hearing. Perhaps a customary state of caution is a form of autohypnosis, and, without realizing it or remembering it, I had heard the remote snickety-click-clack of the oiled bolt as the man had readied himself to kill me.

I got up, barefoot on cool tile, and made a soundless circuit of the room and stopped at the interconnecting door and, holding my breath, heard the faint sound that was disturbing me, a tiny little smothered keening, the small frail noise of the agony of the heart. I put my robe on and tried the door. It opened soundlessly into the other darkness of her room.

“Nora?” I said in a half whisper, so as not to alarm her. The answer was a hiccuping sob. I felt my way to her bed, touched a shoulder, thin and heated and shivering under silk. I sat with her. I stroked the lean firm back. She was down there in a swamp of tears and despair, where I could not reach her. Much of lust is a process of self-delusion. If I stretched out with her, could I hold her more securely, could I make her feel less alone? If I gathered all this straining misery into my arms, tucked the hot fierce salty face into my throat, gave her someone to cling to in the night? These caresses were merely for comfort, were they not? They had absolutely nothing to do with the spectacular legs, and the clover-grass scent of her hair, and her lovely proud walk. This was just my friend Nora. And if all this began to turn into anything else, I had the character to walk away from it, didn’t I? And certainly she could sense that seduction was the furthest thing from my mind, wasn’t it?

But there was one place to stop, and then the gamble of waiting just a little longer, and just a little longer. She had long since stopped crying. Then another stopping place passed, and beyond that there was a slope too steep for stopping, a slope that tilted it all into a headlong run. After the peak of it for her, she said something blurred and murmurous, something I could not catch, and fell almost at once into a heavy, boneless, purring sleep.

Back in my own bed I said surly things to jackass McGee about taking rude advantage of the vulnerable, about being a restless greedy animal, about piling more complication on the shoulders of somebody who had enough trouble. I tried to tell myself this was no green kid. This was a mature, spirited, sensitive, successful woman, and grown up enough to do her own accepting and rejecting. But the intense wanting had come almost without warning, and together we had been more complete than I could have possibly guessed. Anxiety makes dreams all to vivid. In one that woke me up, I was in a small secret room, hot and murky as a steam bath, with a red battle lantern set into the ceiling. There was something there I did not want to find, but I had to look for it, knowing I was doomed if I could find it. I opened dozens of drawers and cupboards and they were all empty. I opened the last drawer, a great long low heavy drawer, and in there, wearing tall red shoes, were the severed glorious legs, side by side. As I stared at them, I knew the one with the knife was directly behind me, waiting for me to turn. I turned slowly, and Sam was grinning down at me out of his chopped face, and I lurched sweating up out of sleep.

At nine-thirty showered and dressed, I wondered if I should knock at her door. I decided against it and went to the dining room. Eduardo said she had not yet arrived. Just as I finished the papaya, I glanced up and saw her approaching the table, walking with a slightly constricted demureness, her head a little on the side, her smile crooked. She wore dark green bermudas and a green and white striped blouse. I stood up for her, and Eduardo hurried to hold the chair for her. A flush darkened her face as she looked at me with eyes vast, dark and quizzical and said, “Good morning, darling.”

“Good morning.” Eduardo took her order. She ordered a huge breakfast. When he went away, I leaned toward her and lowered my voice and said, “Nora, all I want to say…”

She leaned and reached across the small table very quickly and put two fingers against my lips, stopping what I had rehearsed saying to her. “You don’t want to say anything, Trav. There isn’t anything you have to say.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“I know things. I know we are very fond of each other. And I know that words don’t do any good. Words fit people into categories, whether they belong there or not. Then they have to keep explaining themselves. It was a lovely and beautiful accident, and I cherish it. Is that enough?”

“Yes,” I said, “But I just wanted you to know that…”

“Hush now.”

There is no man so assured that he cannot be made to feel slightly oafish if a subtle and complex woman puts her mind to it. She wanted no sex lectures from Father McGee, no apologies, no explanations, no resolutions for the future. They have an awesome talent for the practical, for the acceptance of the inescapable, for almost instantaneous adjustment.

During our sun time and swim after breakfast, no sensitive observer could have been left in doubt about our relationship. She was not obvious about it. She merely related herself to me in an entirely different way, with a dark adoration of Mediterranean eyes, hanging on my every word in a way that turned me pontifical, making small affections, walking in a changed way for me, posing herself for me, her voice slower and heavier and furrier. She was focused on me like a burning glass in the sun. I was surrounded by her, and though the talk was never personal, never intimate, never explicit, we were carrying on a second dialogue all the time, in words unsaid. And when we went back to the rooms, she came to me sun-hot, eyes heavy and blurred, lips swollen and barely moving as she murmured, “No accident this time.”

Later, when once again I succumbed to the dreadful compulsion to try to explain us to each other, she stopped me with fingertips on my lips. Hers was the better wisdom. Merely accept what had come to us. The emotional involvement was there, making it good. We were using each other as people, not as handy devices, and by making so forthright an advance, she had evenly divided any guilt or blame, made herself an accomplice. I knew without being told that henceforth the aggressor role was mine. She had made her statement of acceptance, in a way more telling than words could have been. In her acceptance, I was in a surrogate role, which had a slightly unpleasant connotation. But, because we would not talk about it, it could remain slight, and thus not bruise male vanity.

Bed is dangerous country. The physical act is the least chancy part of it, requiring only health, maturity, and a reasonable consideration. It is the emotional interaction that makes it mysterious and perilous, turns it into something that mankind finds so endlessly interesting. Perhaps it is this simple. If, through the physical act, you are affirming emotions you believe in, then bed is cleansing, heartening, strengthening. But if the emotional context is greed, or the need for domination, or the yen to humiliate, or just the shallow desire to receive a pleasurable sensation, then bed diminishes, coarsens and deforms.

The complicating factor is the great talent of the human animal to place a noble tag on ignoble emotions, intellectualizing something out of nothing, but the emotions are not deceived. They detect emptiness. Men use the available emptiness of the sun bunnies and call it a healthy release, and by so doing, over a period of time, reduce each other to a spiritless vulgarity. I wanted Nora for the sake of Nora, and her response was affectionate, joyous, and weighted with a sturdy practicality. She was saying, in effect, “Let’s not talk about what it means until we know what it means. But it means something, or it wouldn’t be like this.”

While she was dressing for lunch, I told her I would see her in the lobby. I had noticed that Senor Arista was usually at his desk in the small area behind the registration desk during the hour before lunch.

I leaned on the registration desk and said, “This is a fine place, Mr. Arista.”

He smiled carefully. “So glad you like it, sir.”

“No complaints. Say I was wondering about land around here. Like on the knoll over there where those houses are. Is it expensive?”

He got up and came over to the counter. “The land itself, by the square meter, is not too dear. But you see, the big expense is in construction. Skilled labor has to be brought in, as well as all the materials. And, of course, it is very awkward for a tourist to purchase land. One must have a change of status, to resident or immigrant. Are you really interested, sir?”

“Well… enough to want to talk to somebody about it.”

“All that land to the south of the hotel, approximately two miles and half a mile deep, is owned by the same syndicate which established the hotel, sir.” He got a card out of his desk and brought it to me. “This man, Senor Altavera, handles these matters for the group. This is his Mexico City office. The way it is handled here, there is the one road that winds up the hill, and the present houses, six of them only, are on that road, and they are connected with the hotel water and electricity. It would be a case of extending the road and the utilities, and there would be added charges for that, of course. But if you are genuinely interested…”

“Maybe you could give me some kind of an estimate of what the average house and land and so on would cost in dollars, total.”

“I would estimate… let us say a three bedroom house, with appropriate servants’ quarters, walled garden, a small swimming pool, all modern fixtures and conveniences, I would say that for everything, it would be about one hundred thousand American dollars. One must use the architect the syndicate recommends, and build to certain standards of quality and size. I suspect that the same kind of land in the United States, and an equivalent house, would be perhaps as much as half again the cost.”

“With use of the boat basin?”

“Of course, sir. And if one were to close the house for a time, an arrangement can be made with the hotel for care of the grounds, an airing of the house from time to time.”

“There are five houses now?”

“Six.”

“What kind of neighbors would I have?”

Arista looked slightly pained. “There is one United States citizen, a gentleman from the television industry. He is not in residence at this time, sir. And one Swiss citizen, quite an elderly man. The others are Mexican. It is not… a neighborhood in the social sense, sir. They are here for purposes of total privacy. You understand, of course.”

“Of course. I wonder if any of the existing houses are for sale.”

He hesitated, bit his lip. “Perhaps one that would be far more than the figure I… Excuse me. It is not at all definite. Really, that is all not a part of my duties. You should contact Senor Altavera on these matters. I am, of course, anxious that the property should be developed. It eases certain overhead expenses for the hotel operation, and it improves the hotel business.”

“How about the local supply of people to work for you? Cook, gardeners, maids and so on?”

“Oh, these people are most difficult, sir. They are a constant trial. They learn well, and they have energy, but they have a fierce independence. Perhaps that is true of all peoples who are accustomed to make a living from the sea. They can give great loyalty, but they are very quick to take offense. And then they merely fail to come to work, and one must go in search of them. They are strong, as perhaps you have observed, and well formed. But they have many superstitions. It is one of my greatest problems, sir. It is not satisfactory to import help to this place because the local persons make them unhappy and they go away. Excuse me, it is not entirely black. With patience and understanding, these things can be managed.” He smiled wanly. “One must be patient and understanding. When angered, these people can be very violent. At times there is murder done in the village, but somehow no one knows anything about it. Everyone is totally ignorant. I should say that for the people who own houses here, it is easier to have servants from the outside. They live at the houses and are in less contact with the village. We at the hotel are more at the mercy of the village.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nora approaching and I thanked him for all the information. He was wary, slightly skeptical, but willing to cooperate. I did not look like a man who would put up a hundred thousand dollar house in such a remote place, but he had learned not to judge Americans by looks. My woman was smartly dressed. The reservations had been made out of Los Angeles. I had the deep tan shared by the laboring classes and the leisure classes. It was best to be patient and polite. I guessed that compared to the size of the investment, La Casa Encantada was not yet showing a profit. The syndicate people might be slightly restive.

I followed Nora into the dining room, smugly and comfortably aware of the sleek flexing of elegant calves, taut swing of round hips under the linen skirt, the valuable slenderness of her waist. Possession always seems enhanced in public places, when the eyes of strangers follow the look of your woman, in secret speculation. She handled herself with the habitual grace of a model, and when I sat opposite her at our small table, her dark eyes were alight with our conspiratorial secrets, her mouth set in a different contour than on other days. The long days of strain, compression, despair had been eased for her. She had reached her breaking point and had endured through it and beyond it.

Now her mouth was softened, personal, intimate-but still spiced with a small wryness, an awareness of the irony of our new relationship to each other.

Ten

THE VILLAGE Of Puerto Altamura lay steaming in siesta, insects keening of heat, the birds making small complaints in the dusty trees of the square, brown dogs puddled in shady dust, vendors asleep in their stalls.

The Cantina Tres Panchos was down the side street toward the sea, a few doors from the square. Three male heads were painted on the sign over the dark doorway, a crude drawing with garish colors, their mouths open in song. We went in, blinded by the change from bright sunlight to gloom. It was a bare, oblong room, about eighteen feet wide and thirty feet deep. There were two doors in the back wall. Between the two doors was an aged and silent juke box, dating from the preplastics era when they made them of wood and gave them a reasonably pleasing design. The walls were plaster, yellow-tan, streaked and blotched with mildew, pocked with marks of old violences.

Calendar girls had been taped to the walls, frozen there in ancient provocative predicaments, caught halfway over barbed wire fences, caught on windy street corners with the leash of the poodle wrapped about one improbable ankle, caught on teetering ladders, caught midway in a fall into a swimming pool-all of them wearing precisely the same rueful, broad, inviting smile. The floor was of worn, scarred, uneven boards, the most recent green coat worn away in places, showing earlier coats of brown and grey and dark red. The bar was on the right, a tall scarred bar of dark wood, ornately carved. The brass rail was polished to a flawless brightness.

The bartender was hunched over the far end of the bar, reading a newspaper. The chairs and tables were on the left. They were of the drugstore style of long ago, of sheet metal and twisted wire. The sole customer was at a table at the rear, sleeping with his head on the table, next to his straw hat. The hot still air was flavored with stale spilled beer, perfume, sweat and spiced cooking.

I put Nora at a table near the doorway and went over to the bar. The bartender had a flat, broad, brown, impassive face, tiny hooded eyes, and a huge sweep of curved black mustache. In too loud and too contentious a voice I ordered a beer, a Carta Blanca, for Nora, and a tequila anejo for myself. The imitation of drunk is nearly always overdone. To be persuasive, merely let the lower half of your face go slack, and when you want to look at anything, move your whole head instead of just your eyes. Walk slowly and carefully, and speak loudly, slowly and distinctly.

I went back to the table. In a little while the bartender brought the order over, bringing a salt shaker and wedge of lemon, with my shot glass of tequila. In slow motion I took a wad of pesos out of my shirt pocket, separated a bill and put it on the table. He made change out of his pocket and picked it up. He went away. I left the change there. I had told Nora how to act, told her to sit unsmiling and look everywhere except at me.

I heard the clatter of heels. A girl came down the stairs in back and came out of the left doorway; a narrow, big-eyed girl with her dark hair bleached a strange shade of dull red. She wore an orange blouse and a blue skirt and carried a big red purse. She stared at us and went to the bar and had a brief and inaudible conversation with the bartender, and then went out into the sunlight, with one more glance at us, walking with a great deal of rolling and twitching. I hoped it wasn’t Felicia. The girl had a look of brash impenetrable stupidity.

I signaled the bartender and pointed to my empty glass. Nora’s beer was half gone. He brought me a shot and another wedge of lemon, took more money from the change on the table.

On cue, Nora said in a voice of dreadful clarity, “Do you really need that?”

“Shut up,” I said. I sprinkled the salt on the back of my hand, the one in which I held the wedge of lemon. I picked up the shot glass in the other hand. One, two, three. Salt, tequila, lemon.

“Did you really need that?”

“Shut up.”

She got up and hurried out. I sat there stupidly, and then I got up and lumbered after her. I left my change on the table.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey!”

She kept walking swiftly. I broke into a heavy run and caught up with her as she was walking through the square. I took her arm and she yanked it away and kept walking, toward the hotel, her chin high. I stood and watched her, and then caught up with her again.

When we were well beyond the village she looked behind us and then looked at me with a little nervous grin and said, “Did I do it right?”

“Perfectly.”

“I still don’t get the point.”

“Credentials. I’m the big drunken Americano who’s having trouble with his woman. I went away and left my money. When I go into town tonight, they’ll have me all cased. I’ll be the kind of a pigeon they can understand. Ready for plucking. I’ll have a lot of friends when I go back in there tonight.”

I arrived at the cantina at about eight-thirty. The tables were full, the bar was crowded, the juke box was blasting. The room was lighted by two gasoline lanterns, rigged with some kind of heavy orange glass, casting a weird and lurid light. Most of the customers were men. There were a couple of fat women with the groups at the tables, and there were four girls in circulation, the one with the red hair and three others. A sparrowy withered little white-haired man was the table waiter. My bartender was still on duty. There was a diminution of the dozen loud conversations as I came in. They made a small space for me at the bar.

The bartender came at once and placed the forgotten change in front of me. He stared at me without expression. I carefully divided it into two equal amounts and pushed half of it across to him. He gave me a big white smile, and, with suitable ceremony, gave me a free tequila. We were closely watched. He made explanation to all, of which I did not understand a word, and the room slowly came back to the full decibel level I had heard as I walked in. I looked no more and no less drunk than before. My only change was a constant happy uncomprehending smile.

It took them about ten minutes to rig the first gambit. She edged in beside me, shoving the others to make room for herself, a chubby, bosomy little girl with a merry face, a white streak dyed in her curly black hair, a careless and abundant use of lipstick. “Allo,” she said. “Allo.”

I pointed at my glass and pointed at her and she bobbed her head and gave the bartender her order. When it came I pointed to myself and said, “Trav.”

“Ah. Trrav. Si.”

I stabbed her in the wishbone with a heavy finger and looked inquisitive.

“Rosita,” she said, and laughed as if we had made wonderful jokes.

“Speak English, Rosita.”

“Af, no puedo, Trrav. Lo siento mucho, pero…”

I smiled at her, took her by the shoulders and turned her away and gave her a little pat, then filled up the space at the bar, my back to her. When I glanced back at her, she was giving me a thoughtful look. I watched her make her slow way through the crowded room and finally edge in near the wall and bend over and whisper to a girl who sat with three men. I could not see her very distinctly in the odd light, but I saw her look toward me, shake her head and look away. Rosita made her way back to the other end of the bar. She beckoned to the bartender. He leaned over and she spoke to him. He gave her a brief nod. A few minutes later he made his way to the girl at the table and bent over her and whispered to her. She shook her head. He said some more. She shrugged and got up. A man at the table yanked her back down into the chair. She sprang up at once. The man lunged at her and the bartender gave him a solid thump on the side of the head. There was a moment of silence, and then all the talk started again, over the persistent sound of the rock and roll. I saw the girl making her way in my direction, and I saw that she was what they call muy guapa. She wore an orange shift, barely knee length slit at both sides. She was quite dark, and she was big. Her dark hair was braided, pulled tight, coiled into a little shining turret on top of her head. Her jaw was squared off, her neck long, her mouth broad and heavy, her eyes tilted, full of an Indio glitter. Her bare arms were smooth and brown, slightly heavy. The shift made alternate diagonal wrinkles as she walked, from thrust of breast to round heavy hip. She came toward me with a challenging arrogance, the easy slowness of a lioness. She was not pretty. She was merely strong, savage, confident… and muy guapa.

Just as she reached me, there was a disturbance behind her, shouts of warning, a shift and tumble of chairs. The bar customers scattered, leaving the two of us alone in the emptiness. She turned her back to the bar, standing beside me. The man who had been thumped in the head crouched six or eight feet from us. He was young, and his face was tense and sweaty, his eyes so narrowed they looked closed. He held the knife about ten inches from the floor, blade parallel to the floor, winking orange in the light. He swung it slowly back and forth, the muscles of his thin arm writhing.

The bartender gave a sharp command. The young man bared his teeth and, looking at my belt buckle, told me exactly what he was going to do to me. I didn’t understand the language, but I knew what he said.

The girl made a lazy sound at him, a brief husky message, like a sleepy spit. She stood with an elbow hooked on the bar behind her, her rich body indolently curved. Whatever she said, in that silence between records, was like a blow in the face to him. He seemed to soften. He sobbed, and, forgetting all skill, lunged forward, clumsily hooking the knife up toward her belly. I snapped my right hand down on his wrist, brought my left hand up hard, under his elbow, twisting his arm down and under, giving an extra leverage to his lunge that sent him by her in a long running fall into the tables and people as the knife clattered at her feet. I swear that she did not make the slightest move until she bent and picked the knife up. The next record started. The man thrashed around. People shouted. His friends got him, one by each arm, and frog-marched him out. He bucked and struggled, crying, the tears running down his face.

As they reached the doorway, the girl swung the knife back and yelled “Cuidado, hombres!” They gave her a startled look and dived into the night.

She hurled the knife and it stuck deep into the wooden door frame. The populace whistled and cheered and stomped. A cautious hand reached in out of the night and wrenched the knife out of the wood and took it away.

She leaned on the bar again and turned toward me, a deep, dark, terrible amusement in her eyes, and in a clumsy accent, but a total clarity, said, “So what else is new?”

Then we were both laughing helplessly, and they applauded that too. She staggered and caught my arm for support, the tears squeezing out of her eyes. I bought her a drink. When we had stopped gasping, I said, “He would have killed you.”

“He? No! He would stop. So close, maybe.” She held up thumb and finger, a quarter inch apart. “Or cut a little small bit.”

“You are sure?”

She shrugged big shoulders. “Maybe.”

“You didn’t move.”

“It is…” she frowned, “how you say it. Proud. I am not proud to run and fright from such a one. Ai, you are quick for so big a one. You can think he cuts me, no? How could you tell? Maybe this time he does. I say him a bad word. Very bad. Everybody hear it. Proud for him too. You unnerstan?”

“Yes.”

She spread that big mouth in a warm approving grin. “Thank you for so brave, mister. Rosita say one man here wants a girl speaking English, but I say no. Then I say yes. Now I am glad. Okay?”

“Okay. So am I. What’s your name?”

“Felicia.”

“I am Trav.”

She tilted her head slightly, a small memory nudging her perhaps. “So. Trrav?”

“No, dear. Trav. Trav.”

“Trav? I say it right?”

“Just right, dear. Another drink?”

“Yes, please. You like some dancing maybe? Tweest?”

“No thanks.”

“Okay here? Or a table is better?”

“Okay here, Felicia.”

“Good!”

Over the rim of her glass she looked at me with approving speculation. This was no wan foolish heartbroken village girl. She had a coarse, indomitable vitality, a challenging sexual impact.

“You like the hotel?”

“It’s a nice place.”

“I was there. Kitchen work. Not any more.”

“Hard work?”

“Not so much. Unnerstan?”

“Sure.”

She leaned closer, breath heating my chin. “I like you, Trrav. You unnerstan that too?”

I looked down into the dark face, the soft-coarse pore texture, the unreadable darkness of her eyes. False jewels twinkled in her pierced ears.

“I understand.”

With a twisting and eloquent lift of her head she managed to convey the idea of a place of refuge for us on the floor above.

“You want to make some love with Felicia, Trrav? Two hundred pesos. Especial for you, uh? Much better than your skinny woman at the hotel, uh? I do this sometimes, only. When I like.”

“Okay, dear.”

She nodded, biting her lip. “What we do, you stay here ten minute, okay?” She was leaning close to me, leaning against me to be heard over the uproar. “Go out, go to the left, that way. Go beside this place to the back. To stairs. Up stairs is a door, unlock. Go in. Count three doors inside. One, two, three. Okay? It is number three door, mine.”

She dragged her fingernails down the back of my hand, squeezed her eyes at me, and then went away in that lazy, swaying, hip-rolling walk. She stopped at tables, talked to people, kept moving, and disappeared into the left hand doorway. I knew her departure had not gone unobserved. I hunched over the bar. I had the feeling that eight out of every ten people in that room knew how soon I would leave and where I was going. After a while I settled up, left a generous tip for the mustache and departed.

The alley beside the building was so narrow, my shoulders nearly brushed the side walls. There was a fetid smell in the narrow space. I stepped in something wet. After about twenty feet, it opened out into a small courtyard. I waited and listened. The noise from inside the place muffled the sound of anybody who might want to try something cute. The courtyard was littered with papers and trash. The stairway was open, with no guard rail. It creaked and sagged alarmingly as I went up it, brushing the side of the building with my fingertips. Mist had come with the night, haloing the few faint lights I could see.

I was careful about the door. Always be careful about doors. They can be the handiest surprise packages around. Do not carry your head inside just where it is expected to be, or at a predictable velocity. There was a clackety latch, the kind you push down with your thumb. It opened inward. I stayed against it as it opened, then moved swiftly sideways to flatten against the corridor wall. There was no sound close by that I could detect over the louder din from the room underfoot. No movement in the narrowing light as the door creaked slowly shut. When it was shut I had only a faint memory of the corridor. The blackness was total, except for a faint line of light ten feet or so away, close to the floor. I used my lighter, shading it with my other hand to keep from dazzling myself. One, two, three, with the thread of light under hers. It was the same kind of latch. I thrust it open abruptly and went in swiftly, and at an angle, giving her a dreadful start. She spun from her mirror, eyes and mouth wide.

I closed the door, saw a bolt lock and thumbed it over. With a definite effort I took my eyes from her and inventoried her small room. She had two fiberboard wardrobes overstuffed with bright clothing. She had one window, curtained with a heavy green fabric, a wash stand with pitcher and bowl, a dressing table fashioned of boards across crates, partially disguised with fringed green fabric, and loaded with a vast array of lotions, cosmetics, jars, perfumes.

There were two kerosene lamps, one at either end of the dressing table, casting an even yellowish glow. She had a nylon rug designed to imitate a leopard skin, a tin kitchen stool in front of the dressing table, a stained old upholstered chair near the window, with stacks of comic books in the corner nearby, a big sagging old iron bedstead painted hospital white, with lidded chamberpot underneath it, and she had the walls covered with pictures, all of them taped there. Jesus and Mary and Elvis, sunsets and madonnas and pinups, Mexican movie stars, fashion drawings clipped from magazines, sailboats and saints, Mr. Americas, kitty cats and sports cars, an astonishing, bewildering array from baseboard to ceiling, like some fantastic surrealistic wallpaper. The size of the room, no more than ten by twelve, made it all the more overpowering. There was a slant of corrugated metal roof overhead, radiating the remembered sun heat of the day. In the heated air was a strong scent of a dozen perfumes.

She stood up from the stool as I looked at her room, and tossed the hairbrush aside. The orange shift had been draped over the footboard of the iron bed. She had undone the braids and combed her hair out. It came below her shoulders. She was naked. She stood there for me, obviously and properly pleased with herself. Her body, a half shade lighter than her face, was broad and rich, rounded, firm and abundant, the slender waist flowing and widening into the smoothly powerful hips. Muy guapa and muy aware of it. She made me think of one of P. Gauguin’s women, framed against the Macronesian jungle. She came smiling toward me, two steps to reach me, arms lifting. She looked puzzled when I caught her wrists, turned her gently, pushed her to sit on the edge of the bed, near the footboard.

God, they were noisy downstairs, thumping and yelping. I turned away from her, took a fifty dollar bill from my wallet, turned back with it and held it out to her. Her eyes widened, and a look of sullen Indio suspicion came over her face. This much money might mean that something highly unpleasant was required.

“What for?” she asked, glowering.

“All I want to do is talk about Sam Taggart.”

She sat motionless for perhaps two seconds, then came at my face with such a blinding, savage speed that she nearly took both my eyes with those hooked talons, actually brushing the eyelashes of my right eye as I yanked my head back. She followed it up, groaning with her desire to destroy me with her hands. I have never tried to handle a more powerful woman, and the heat in the room made her sweaty and hard to hold. I twisted in time to take a hard smash of round knee against my thigh instead of in the groin. I got her wrists, but she wrenched one free and tore a line across my throat with her nails.

She butted me solidly in the jaw with the top of her head, and then sank her teeth into the meat of my forearm, grinding away like a bulldog. That destroyed any vestige of chivalry. I chopped the side of her throat to loosen her bite, shoved her erect and hit her squarely on the chin with a short, chopping, overhand right. She fell into my arms and I heaved her back onto the bed.

I found a pile of nylon stockings on the lower shelf of the sash stand. I knotted her wrists together with one, her ankles with another, then bent her slack knees and tied the wrists to the ankles with a third, leaving about ten inches of play. Then I looked at the lacerated arms which had made the whole procedure slightly messy. I wondered if girl bite was as dangerous as dog bite. There was a half-bottle of local gin on the floor by the comic books. Oso Negro it was called. Black bear. I poured it over the tooth holes, and clenched my teeth and said a few fervent words. I looked at my throat in her mirror, and rubbed some gin into that too. I tore away a piece of white sheeting and bound my arm and poured a little more gin on the bandage. Then I tried the gin. Battery acid, flavored with juniper. I picked my fifty dollars off the floor and put it in my shirt pocket with the pesos.

She began to moan and stir. She was on her right side. I sat on the bed near her, keeping a pillow handy. Her eyes fluttered and opened, and remained dazed for about one second. Then they narrowed to an anthracite glitter, and her lips lifted away from her teeth. She had good leverage to use against the nylon, all the power of her legs thrusting down, all the power of arms and back pulling. She tried it. I do not know the breaking strength of a nylon stocking. Perhaps it is a thousand pounds.

She closed her eyes, her face contorted with effort. Muscles and tendons bulged the smooth toffee hide. Her face bulged and darkened, and sweat made her body shine. She subsided, breathing hard, and then without warning, snapped at my hand like a dog. I yanked it away, and the white teeth clacked uncomfortably close to it.

I saw her gather herself, and I picked the pillow up, and at the first note of the scream, I plopped it across her face and lay on it. She bucked and writhed and made muffled bleating noises. Slowly she quieted down. The instant I lifted the pillow, the scream started and I mashed it back down again, and held it until she was really still. When I lifted it she was unconscious, but I could see that she was breathing. In about three minutes her eyes opened again.

“What the hell is the matter with you, Felicia?”

“Sohn of a beech!”

“Just listen to me for God’s sake! I wasn’t trying to insult you.”

“You wanna find Sam, uh?”

“No! I’m his friend, damn it. When I said my name you had a look as though you heard it before. Travis McGee. From Florida. Maybe he said my name to you.”

“His friend?” she said uncertainly.

“Yes.”

“I remember he say the name one time,” she said in a forlorn voice. Surprisingly the dark eyes filled, tears rolled. “I remember. So sorry Trrav. Please tie me loose. Okay now.”

“No tricks?”

“I swear by Jesus.”

She had pulled the knots fantastically tight. I had to slice them with my pocket knife. She worked feeling back into her hands. As I started to get up, she caught my arm and pointed to her foot. She turned it so that the lamps shone more squarely on the broad brown instep. “See?” she said.

There were about a dozen little pale puckered scars on the top of her foot, roughly circular, smaller than dimes.

“What’s that?”

“From the other ones who say questions about Sam.” She pronounced it Sahm. “Where is he? Where he go? Where he hide. Sohns a beech!” She looked at me and firmed her jaw and thumped her chest with her knuckles. “Pain like hell, Trav. Not a cry from me. Nunca palabra. Fainting, yes. You know… proud.”

“Who were they?”

She peered at my throat and made a hissing sound of concern. She slid off the bed and tugged me over to sit on the stool. She wiped my throat with something that stung, though not as badly as the gin, and put a Band-Aid on the worst part of the gouge. When she unwrapped my arm, she said, “Ai, como perra, verdad. Que feo!” She had iodine. That too was less than the gin. She wrapped it neatly, taped the bandage in place.

“So sorry.” she said.

“Put something on, Felicia.”

“Eh?”

“I want to talk. Put on a robe or something.”

“Some love maybe? Then talk? No pesos.”

“No love, Felicia. But thank you.”

“The skinny woman, eh? But who can know?” She stared at me, then shrugged and went to one of the cardboard wardrobes and pulled out a very sheer pale blue hip-length wrap. Before she slipped into it, she dried her body with a towel, and slapped powder liberally on herself, using a big powder mitten, white streaks and patches against bronze-brown hide. She knotted the waist string, flung her long hair back with a toss of her head and sat in the upholstered chair.

“So?”

“Who were the men who hurt you?”

“Two of them, burning, burning with cigarette, Trrav. Cubanos I think. One with the good English. Then they want love. Hah!” She slapped her bare knee. “With this I finish love forever for one of them I think. Screaming, screaming. He say to other one, cut the bitch throat. But the one, the one with the English, say no. Help his friend into car. Go away. Leave me there, seven kilometros from here. I walk on this bad foot back to here.”

“When did this happen, Felicia?”

“Perhaps five-six weeks. Sam gone then. Gone… three days I think. One night in this room. My friend is Rodriguez, with the fish truck going to Los Mochis. Sam walked before the day was light. Rodriguez, stop for him at a place on the road. I fix that. Every man thinks he is gone by boat. He…” She stopped and frowned. “Sam said come here?”

“In a way”

“How is that-in a way?”

I sat on the tin stool, arms propped on my knees, and debated telling her. It is so damn strange about the dead. Life is like a big ship, all lights and action and turmoil, chugging across a dark sea. You have to drop the dead ones over the side. An insignificant little splash, and the ship goes on. For them the ship stops at that instant. For me Sam was back there somewhere, further behind the ship every day.

I could look back and think of all the others I knew, dropped all the way back to the horizon and beyond, and so much had changed since they were gone they wouldn’t know the people aboard, know the new rules of the deck games. The voyage saddens as you lose them. You wish they could see how things are. You know that inevitably they’ll drop you over the side, you and everyone you have loved and known, little consecutive splashes in the silent sea, while the ship maintains its unknown course. Dropping Sam over had been just a little more memorable for Nora than for me. It would stay with her a little longer, perhaps. But I did not know how it would react on this one. He would be dropped over the side in this next instant. It would be brand new for her.

“Sam is dead,” I told her.

She sat bolt upright and stared at me. “No,” she whispered.

“Somebody followed him to Florida and killed him.”

She made a gargoyle mask, the stage mask of tragedy, and it would have been laughable had it not been so obviously a dry agony. She thrust herself from the chair, bending, hugging herself, passed me in a stumbling run to throw herself face down on the iron bed, gasping and grinding into the bunched pillow. The rear of the little blue wrap was up around her waist, exposing the smooth brown slope of buttocks. She writhed and strangled and kicked like a child in tantrum.

I went and sat on the bed near her. At my first tentative pat of comfort on her shoulder, she made a twisting convulsive leap at me, pulled me down in the strong warm circle of her arms, making a great WhooHaw, WhooHaw of her sobbings into my neck. I wondered how many women were going to hold me and cry for Sam. I endured that close and humid anguish, perfume and hot flesh and the scent of healthy girl.

The storm was too intense to last, and as it began to dwindle I realized that in her little shiftings, changing, holdings, she was beginning to involve herself in seduction, possibly deliberately, but more likely out of that strange and primitive instinct which causes people to couple in bomb shelters while air raids are in process. I firmly and quietly untangled myself, tossed a towel over to her and went and sat in the chair near the window. I looked down and saw that the comic book on top of one of the stacks was an educational epic in the Spanish language. I guessed that she would call it Oliver Tweest.

Finally she sat up in weariness, put a pillow against the bars of the headboard, hunched herself back and leaned there, ankles crossed. She - swabbed her face and eyes and blew her nose, and sighed several times, her breath catching.

“He was a man,” she said in a soft nostalgic voice. I sensed that she had wept for him, and would not have to weep again.

“How did you meet him?”

“I work in the kitchen there. I have seventeen years, no English, just a dumb kid. He is a boat captain, like Mario and Pedro. A little room he has there, not in the hotel. Near. Men and boys are after me, you know, like the dogs walking fast, tongue hanging out, so, follow the she? Sam chase them away, move me into his room. Ai, such trouble. The padre, my family, everyone. But to hell with them. We have love. I work in the kitchen all that time. A year I guess. More. Then he works for Senor Garcia. Big boat. Lives there in the big house. No so much time for love, eh? Time for the rubia… how you say… blonde. Yes. Blonde bitch in the big house. I work a little time more in the kitchen. They make laughs at me. Screw them all, eh? I am waiting like a mouse for when he wants love? Hell, no. I come here. Sam find me out. He beats me. Four-five times. Change nothing. He wants the rubia, I do what I like. Okay? More trouble from the padre, my brothers, everybody. Bad words. Puta. I have twenty years. By God I do what I want. Pretty good room, eh? Not so hard work. Dancing, copitas, making love. Sam come here sometimes. Give me pesos. I rip them in front of the face. I hear things about the big house. Trouble. Danger. Then he come in the night to hide. Marks from fighting. He is here all day. I fix with Rodriguez. Sam say he will send much money to me one time, so I am here no more. Such a fool! This is good place I think. Many friends. Then two man give a ride in a pretty car. Out the road and then into the woods, burning, burning the foot. Where is Sam? Then you are here. Sam is dead. In Florida.” She made one stifled sobbing sound.

“Who is that blonde? Is she still around?”

“She is a friend with Senor Garcia. It is a hard name for me. Heechin. A thing like that, I think.”

“Hitchins?”

“I think so. Many fiestas in that house. Very rich man. Very sick now, I think.”

“Is the blonde still there?”

“They say yes. I have not seen.”

“Felicia, what was going on at Garcia’s house?”

“Going on? Parties, drunk, bitch blondes. Who knows?”

“Did Sam say anything?”

“He say he keep what he earn. Some big thing he had, locked. He was sleeping, I try to look. Very very heavy. Big like so.” She indicated an object about the size of a large suitcase. “Black metal,” she said.

“With a strap he fix to carry. Only a strong man like Sam can carry far.”

“He got to Los Mochis?”

“Rodriguez say yes.”

“You were willing to help him, to hide him here?”

She looked astonished. “How not? He is a man. No thing changes that, eh? I am wife for a time. This stupid girl pleased him good, eh? He… we have a strong love. It can not be for all my life, with such a one.”

“He never told you anything about what went on at Garcia’s house?”

“Oh yes. Talk, talk, talk. Persons coming and going in big cars and boats. Mucho tumulto. What is a word? Confusion. I do not listen so much to him, I think. When he is close I do not want all the talking. I say yes, yes, yes. He talks. Then soon I make him stop talking. I think misterioso y peligroso that house and those persons. No man from here ever works at that house. Just Sam.”

She got up from the bed and padded over and got a nail file and took it back to the bed and began working on her nails, giving me a hooded glance from time to time. The downstairs hubbub was vastly diminished.

“Is now late, I think, Trrav,” she said. “You can stay, you can go. I think those two man find Sam, eh?”

“Perhaps.”

“Shoot him?”

“A knife.”

She made the Mexican gesture, shaking her right hand as though shaking water from her fingertips.

“Ai, a knife is a bad dying. Pobre Sam. You look for them?”

“Yes.”

“Because you are a friend? Maybe you are a clever man, eh? Maybe what you want is in that heavy box.”

“The box is why he was killed.”

“Maybe you send me some money instead of Sam, eh?”

“Maybe.”

“Down stairs you make me think of Sam. So big. Dark almost like me, but white, white, white, like milk where the sun is not touching.”

“Felicia, please don’t tell anyone what we’ve talked about. Don’t tell anyone he’s dead.”

“Maybe only Rosita.”

“No one. Please.”

“Very hard for me,” she said, and smiled a small smile. I took the fifty, folded it into a small wad, laid it on my thumbnail and snapped it over onto the bed. She fielded it cleanly, spread it out, looked content. As one is prone to do with animals, it was a temptation to anthropomorphize this girl past her capacity, to attribute to her niceties of feeling and emotion she could never sense, merely because she was so alive, had such a marvelous body, had such savage eyes and instincts. She was just a vain, childish, cantankerous Mexican whore, shrewd and stupid, canny and lazy.

She had done all her mourning for Sam Taggart, and had enjoyed the drama of it. She was not legend. She did not have a heart of gold, or a heart of ice. She had a very ordinary animal heart, bloody and violent, responsive to affection, quick in fury, incapable of any kind of lasting loyalty. Sam had not made her what she was today. I suspect she was headed for the rooms over the Cantina Tres Panchos from the time she could toddle. Perhaps villages fill their own quotas in mysterious ways, so many mayors, so many idiots, so many murderers, so many whores.

“Not even Rosita,” I said.

“Okay Trrav.”

I stood up. “I may want to come back and ask more questions.”

“Every night I am down there. I am not there, you wait a little time, eh?”

“Sure.”

She yawned wide, unsmothered, white teeth gleaming in membranous red, pointed tongue upcurled, stretched her elbows high, fists close to her throat.

“Love me now,” she said. “We sleep better, eh?”

“No thanks.”

She pouted. “Felicia is ugly?”

“Felicia is very beautiful.”

“Maybe you are not a man, eh?”

“Maybe not.”

She shrugged. “I am sorry about the biting. Good night, Trrav. I like you very much.”

I let myself out into the blackness of the corridor. Downstairs a single male voice was raised in drunken song, the words slurred. I hesitated when I reached the mouth of the narrow alley. The street was empty. There were no lights at night in the village. But I had the feeling I was observed from the darkness. The American spent a long time with Felicia. I walked in the middle of the dusty road. A warm damp wind blew in from the sea. When I reached the outskirts of the village I could see the hotel lights far ahead of me.

As I crossed the small empty lobby, Arista appeared out of the shadows, suave and immaculate. “Mister McGee?”

“Yes?”

“There was some trouble in the village tonight?”

“What do you mean?”

“Over a village girl?”

“Oh. Yes, a young fellow started waving a knife around and I knocked it out of his hand.”

“And you were drinking?”

“You are beginning to puzzle me, Arista.”

“Forgive me. I do not want you to be hurt, sir. It would be bad for our reputation here. Perhaps you were fortunate tonight. Those men are very deadly with knives. Forgive me, but it is not wise to… to approach the girls in the Tres Panchos. There has been much violence there. People tell me things, and the story worried me, sir. I believe a girl named Felicia Novaro was involved.”

“People tell you very complete things, I guess.”

“Sir, she is a wild reckless girl. There is always trouble around her. She worked for me here. Her… behavior was not good. She cannot be controlled. And… that is a squalid place, is it not, sir?”

“It seemed very cheerful to me.”

“Cheerful?” he said in a strained voice.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Sure. Local color. Song and dance. Friendly natives. Salt of the earth. Pretty girls. Man, you couldn’t keep me away from there. Goodnight, Senor Arista.”

He stared at my arm. “You have been hurt?”

“Just chawed a little.”

“B-Bitten? My God, by a dog?”

I gave him a nudge in the ribs, a dirty grin and an evil wink, and said, “Now you know better than that, pal.” I went humming off to my room.

Eleven

As SOON as I turned my room lights on, Nora came out of the darkness of her room, through the open doorway, wearing a foamy yellow robe with a stiff white collar. She squinted at the light, and came toward me, barefoot, looking small and solemn and strangely young.

“You were gone so long I was getting… What’s wrong with your arm?”

“Nothing serious. It’s a long story.”

I held her in my arms. After a little while she pushed me away and looked up at me, wrinkling her nose. “Such strange smells. Alcohol, and kerosene and some kind of terrible cheap perfume. And smoke and sort of a cooking grease smell… Darling, you are a veritable symphony of smells. You are truly nasty.”

“It is, in some ways, a nasty story.”

“I am particularly curious about the perfume, dear.”

“First I need a shower.”

She sat on the foot of my bed and said, primly, “I shall wait.”

When I came out of the bathroom, the lights were out, and she was in my bed. When I got in, she moved into my arms and said, “Mmmm. Now you smell like sunshine and soap.”

“This is quite a long story.”

“Mmmmhmmm.”

“When I got there, that bartender with the mustache presented me with the change I left on the table when… Are you listening? Nora?”

“What? Oh sure. Go ahead.”

“So I split it with him. That was a popular gesture. He bought me a free drink… I’m not sure you’re paying attention.”

“What? Well… I guess I’m not. Not at the moment. Excuse me. My mind wanders. Let me know when you get to the part about the perfume.”

“Well, the hell with it.”

“Yes, dear. Yes, of course,” she said comfortably.

After breakfast, Nora and I walked up the winding road past the houses on the knoll beyond the boat basin. It was a wide graveled road with some kind of binder in it to make it firm. The drainage system looked competent and adequate. The homes were elaborate, and for the most part they were well screened from the road by heavy plantings, beautifully cared for. Each was so set on the hillside as to give a striking view of the sea. Gardeners worked in some of the yards.

There were entrance pillars at the private driveways. There were small name plates on the entrance pillars. I made mental note of the names. Martinez, Guerrero, Escutia, in that order, and then Huvermann-who had to be the Swiss by process of elimination. Arista had said the Californian was not in residence, and I could see, in a graveled area, a man carefully polishing a black Mercedes, and a swimming pool glinting a little further away. The next one was Boody. There was a chain across the drive.

The last one was Garcia, the big pink one at the crest of the knoll. The grounds were walled. I made Nora walk more slowly. The wall, better than ten feet high, curved outward in a graceful concavity near the top. At the top, glinting in wicked festive colors in the sun, I could see the shards and spears of broken glass set into cement. Any trees which had stood near the wall on the outside had been cleared away. The wall was cream white in the morning light, following the contour of the land. It did not enclose a very large area, perhaps less than the area Garcia owned. The beauty of it obscured the fact that it was very businesslike.

I noted another interesting detail. The wall and the big iron gates were set back from the road, and the private drive, with a high cement curbing, made a very abrupt curve just before it reached the gates. No one was going to be able to get up enough speed to smack their way through in anything less than a combat tank. A man moved into view and stared morosely at us through the bars of the spiked gate. He wore wrinkled khaki, a gun belt, an incongruous straw hat-one of those jaunty little narrow-brim cocoa straw things with a band of bright batik fabric. He had a black stubble of beard.

I found his appearance promising. Guard morale is one of the most difficult things in the world to maintain. A long time of guarding against no apparent danger is a corrosive boredom, and is usually reflected in the appearance of the guards. When they are smart and crisp and shining, they are likely to be very alert.

In a low voice I told Nora what to call out to him. She turned to him and in a clear, smiling voice, called out, “Buenos dias!”

He touched the brim of the hat and said, “Buenuh dia.”

Beyond the far corner of the wall, at a wide turnaround area, the road ended. “He’s a Cuban,” I said to Nora. “I didn’t think he would answer me if I tried it.”

“How can you tell?”

“They speak just about the ugliest Spanish in the hemisphere. You hear the best in Mexico and Colombia. The Cubans leave the’s endings off words. They use a lot of contractions. They make it kind of a guttural tongue. A friend of mine said once that they sound as if they were trying to speak Spanish with a mouth full of macaroons.”

We went back down the road. The guard looked out at us again, almost wistfully. He looked as if he wanted to walk down the road, go to the village and see how much pulque he could drink. But he had to hang around the gate in all the morning silence, listening to the bugs and birds, counting the slow hours of his tour of duty.

We were around a curve and out of sight of the Garcia place when we came to the Boody house. I stood by the chain and looked in. The hotel people weren’t doing too good a job on maintaining the grounds. It looked scraggly. The drive needed edging. I stepped over the chain and said, “Let’s take a look.”

She looked a little alarmed, but came with me. It was a pale blue house, with areas of brick painted white. It was shuttered. Within the next year it was going to need some more paint. The pool area behind the house was, despite an unkempt air, a nymphet’s dream of Hollywood. A huge area was screened. The pool apron was on several levels, separated by planting areas. There was a bar area, a barbecue area, heavy chaises with the cushions stored away, a diving platform, a men’s bathhouse and women’s bathhouse with terribly cute symbols on the doors, weatherproof speakers fastened to palm boles, dozens of outdoor spots and floods, a couple of thatched tea houses, storage bins, big shade devices made of pipe, with fading canvas still lashed in place.

The pool was empty, the screening torn in a few places, the bright paint peeling and fading. It all had a look of plaintive gayety, like an abandoned amusement park. The effect was doubled when I remembered what had bought this hideaway paradise. Arista had said Boody was in television. Thus the armpits, nasal passages and stomach acids of America had financed this unoccupied splendor. In an L shaped building beyond the pool plantings were garages and servants’ quarters. There was one red jeep in residence. We made our comments in hushed tones.

I took a closer look at the rear of the main house. An inside hook on a pair of shutters lifted readily when I slid the knife blade in.

“Are you out of your damned mind?” Nora asked nervously.

“I’m just a delinquent at heart,” I said. The windows behind the open shutters were aluminum awning windows, horizontal, with the screen on the inside. I closed the shutters and wedged them shut with a piece of twig, and continued my prowl.

“Do you want to get in there? Why?”

“Because it’s next door to Garcia.”

“Ask a stupid question,” she said.

It finally turned out that the front door was the vulnerable place. The big brass fittings were more decorative than practical. The sturdy plastic of a gasoline credit card slid the latch out of the recess in the frame. I invited Nora in. She shrugged and came in.

Bright spots of light came through openings in the shutters. The big living room was persuasively vulgar, white rugs, white art-movie furniture, and some big oil portraits on the wall in kodachrome technique, of a jowly man looking imperious, a pretty dark-haired woman with a look of strain around her mouth; and two little girls in pink sitting on an upholstered bench with their arms around each other. The Clan Boody. There was a white concert grand piano, and as I passed it I ran a fingernail down the keys.

Nora started violently and said, “My God! Don’t do that.”

The basic plan of the house was pleasant. Big bedrooms, playrooms, studio, library, big kitchen and service area. It was moist and hot and still inside the house, with a smell of damp and mildew. The immediate procedure was to set up rapid access. She watched me rig the door at the side, a solid door opening onto the pool area from the bedroom wing. It was locked by an inside latch, and the aluminum screen door beyond it was latched. I unlocked them both. I found a piece of cord in the kitchen and tied the screen door shut. Anyone checking the house would find it firm. But if I wanted to come in in a hurry, all I had to do was yank hard enough to break the cord, then latch both doors behind me.

“I don’t understand you,” Nora whispered.

“The gopher acts like a very sassy and fearless beast, honey. But he is all coward. He spends a lot of time and labor preparing escape tunnels he hardly ever gets to use. But sometimes he needs one, and that makes him feel real sassy. Just settle down. You saw me try the lights and the water. If they were coming back in a hurry, they’d have them turned on, and the hotel would get the grounds in better shape and fill the pool and so on. Now let’s check a couple of things.”

I used my lighter to look at the cans in the storage pantry. “See, dear? Plenty of canned fruit juices. And stuff that doesn’t taste too bad cold-beans, beef stew, chili. This is an advance base, next to unfriendly territory. Maybe we never use it.”

She followed me to the library, staying very close to me, saying, “It just makes me so damned nervous, Trav.

“ When I sat at the desk and began to look through the papers in the middle drawer, she sat on the edge of a straight chair, turning her head sharply from side to side as she heard imaginary noises.

“Claude and Eloise Boody,” I said finally, “of Beverly Hills. Claude is Amity Productions. He is also Trans-Pacific Television Associates, and Clabo Studios, unless these are all obsolete letterheads.”

“Can we leave now? Please?”

We went back out the front door. It locked behind us. She was a dozen feet in the lead all the way to the driveway chain, and she kept that lead until we were a hundred feet down the road. She slowed down then, and gave a huge lifting sigh of relief.

“I don’t understand you, Trav.”

“Carlos Menterez y Cruzada has or had a taste for the Yankee celebrity, show biz variety. He partied it up here. Boody would be a pretty good procurement agent. He lived next door. I wanted the California address. If things peter out here, it’s another starting point.”

“But still…”

“The houses seem to have been done by the same architects. I wanted the feel of one of the houses, what to expect about the interior planning -materials, surfaces, lighting, changes of floor level. Garcia’s is bigger and it will sure as hell be furnished differently, but I know a lot more about it now.”

“But why should you…”

“Tonight I’m going to pay an informal call.”

She stopped and stared at me. “You can’t!”

“It’s the next step, honey. Over the wall, like Robin Hood.”

“No, Trav. Please. You’ve been so careful about everything and…”

“Care and preparation can take you just so far, Nora. And then you have to make a move. Then you have to joggle the wasp nest. I’ll be very very careful.”

Her eyes filled. “I couldn’t stand losing you too.”

“Not a chance of it. Never fear.”

I told her too early in the day. It gave her a bad day. She got very broody and upset. She toyed with her food. I knew what was happening to her. She was shifting to a new basis for her emotional survival. Maybe it was good, maybe it was bad. I couldn’t judge her. The steam was going out of her. She was identifying more closely with what we were becoming to each other. God knows it could not have been a substitute for Sam. But they set the mad ones to weaving baskets, and it seems to help. Maybe the baskets become important-when all you have is a basket.

I left her by the pool in the afternoon while I walked into town and made some random purchases here and there. I had become some kind of a minor celebrity. I could tell by the way the kids acted. They didn’t hustle me for coins. They followed me in a small and solemn herd, about twenty feet behind me.

At one corner two bravos were squatting on their heels. As I went by one of them spat across my bows. I stopped and stared at the pair of them, at two lazy smiles. One of them unsheathed a great ugly toadstabber of a knife and began cleaning his nails. I began to feel like the tortured hero of a thousand westerns, the fast gun, the one everybody wants to try their luck against.

On that almost deserted corner I had the feeling I was being watched by many more eyes than just the round ones of my pack of children. I remembered an old trick I had learned the hard way, from some marines. They had used combat knives. Unless I gave these characters something to think about, there was a chance they might keep challenging me, and get a little ugly.

I went smiling to the man with the knife and held out my hand and said, in my hideous Spanish, “Su cuchillo, por favor. Por un momentito.”

He hesitated and handed it over. It was just barely long enough. I stuck it into the side of the building, shed my shoes and socks, and then stood out in the dust with the knife, facing the pair of them. I held the very end of the haft in one fist, and the end of the blade in the other, edge up. Then I jumped over it like over a jump rope, forward and back. You have to be reasonably limber and agile, but there is a very simple trick to it.

You appear to hold the knife in your fists, but actually only the middle finger overlaps it. Then at the peak of the jump you turn the blade down by extending the index and middle fingers of each hand. You hold the knife between those fingers. It gives you more jumping room, and you are jumping over the dull side. As you land you curl your fingers back into fists, and this gives the knife the half turn back and brings it blade upward. It is very hard to detect, and even after you know the trick of it, it takes practice.

I put socks and shoes back on and presented the knife to its owner with a flourish, saying, “Gracias, amigo. ”

They looked at me without expression. The knife owner got slowly to his feet and moved away from the building. He held the knife as he thought I had held it and looked questioningly at me. I smiled and nodded. People very seldom cut themselves seriously. The hands release the knife instinctively. Some of the most agile ones can go over the blade side even when held in the fists.

He looked dubiously at the blade, moistened his lips, gathered himself and tried it. The knife flew through the air. He landed on his rear with a roar of dismay. The bright blood speckled the dust, and the children howled with laughter. His friend was rolling in the dust, helpless with laughter. A crowd began to gather, and I went on my way. Puerto Altamura was going to have an epidemic of gashed feet. I felt like a cruel bastard. I looked back. One of the children had acquired a knife and was gathering himself to make a try.

I roared at them and raced back. I took the knife from the kid. Slowly and carefully I showed them all the trick. Then the laughter was greater than ever. Men began practicing. Then all sound stopped and I saw the first man limping toward me, holding the big knife low. I had made a fool of him. It was a point of honor. He had the splendid idea of gutting me like a fish. I smiled and held my hand out to him and took a chance on saying, “Su cuchillo, por favor.”

He stopped the advance and glowered at me. Then the corner of his mouth twisted. Then he grinned foolishly. And then he began to laugh. Everybody laughed. Arm in arm, in the midst of a pack of his buddies, we went across the square and into the Cantina Tres Panchos, and I bought a drink for the group. The hubbub was heard upstairs, and two of the girls came down, the one with dyed red hair Nora and I had seen, and Felicia. Felicia was a fantastic vision in purple stretch pants, a white canvas halter, and golden slippers with four inch heels.

My new friend was hobbling about leaving bloody footprints on the floor. The kids were clotted in the doorway, staring in. All the men explained simultaneously to the girls, recounting the action with many gestures. One tried to demonstrate and gave himself a good slice on the bottom of a horny foot. The girls shrieked and got the two wounded over to a table and bound up their gashes.

Felicia came over to me at the bar, and slipped an arm around my waist and hugged herself close to me. There was a small tentative silence and then it was accepted. I patted the taut purple fabric of a haunch and confirmed it. Somebody fed coins into the juke, and the narrow redhead began a solo twist. Felicia put her mouth close to my ear and said, “Goddam fool, you, Trrav. You get killed in my village one day.”

When somebody led her off to dance, I gave Mustache enough money for another round for them all, and went off to finish my shopping. Mustache seemed to have become very fond of me. Maybe he hoped I’d come and jack up business during the slack hours every day.

After an after-dinner drink, Nora and I left the bar and went back to the rooms. She paced back and forth, complaining, while I improvised a grapnel. I had bought three monstrous shark hooks, some heavy wire and some cheap pliers. I bound the shanks of the hooks together to form a huge gang hook, using plenty of wire to make it firm and also give it a little extra weight. I had also purchased fifty feet of nylon cord that looked as if it would test out at about five hundred pounds breaking strength.

“If you insist on being an idiot, why go so early in the evening?”

“When people are moving around, a little extra noise doesn’t mean too much.”

“When people are moving around, where are you?”

“Watching them, dear. If everybody is asleep and all the lights are out, I can’t find out anything, can I?”

“Do you expect to be invisible?”

“Practically, dear.”

“How long will it take?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“Honest to God, Trav, I don’t see why…”

I put the pencil flashlight in my pocket and took her by the shoulders and shook her. “How did Sam look?”

The color seeped out from under her tan. “You cruel bastard,” she whispered.

“How did he look?”

“My God, Trav! How can you…”

I shook her again. “Just say the word, honey. I’ll put away my toys and we’ll get into the sack. And then we’ll go on back home anytime you say, and you can refund my split of all the expenses, and we’ll forget the whole thing. Call it an interesting vacation. Call it anything you want. Or you can let me go ahead my way. It’s your choice, Nora.”

She moved away from me. She walked slowly to the other side of the room and turned and looked at me. Barely moving her lips she said, “Good luck tonight, darling.”

“Thank you.”

I had on dark slacks, a long sleeved dark blue shirt, dark canvas shoes. I had no identification on me. I had the silly bedroom gun in one trouser pocket, the pencil light and pocket knife in the other, the grapnel coiled around my waist.

We turned the lights out. I opened the draperies and cautiously unhooked the screen, turned it and brought it into the room and stood it against the wall beside the window. I looked out, it was all clear. I turned back to her and held her and kissed her hungry nervous mouth. She felt exceptionally good in my arms, good enough so that I wished for a moment she had said the hell with it. Then I straddled the sill, turned, hung by my fingertips, kicked myself away from the side of the building and dropped.

It was about nine feet down to soft earth. I had the right window marked by its relationship to a crooked tree. On my return, I would flip pebbles against the window to signal her. I would toss the line in and she would make it fast. If for any reason we could not anticipate, anyone had to come into the rooms, she would turn my shower on and close the bathroom door before answering the hall door.

She had the waiting. Maybe that was the hardest part.

Twelve

IT was almost over before it began. It was almost over in one of the world’s nastiest ways for McGee. I saw a man’s body after it had happened to him that way, and it is one of my most persistent memories.

When I went up the road, the third of a moon was high enough to make the going easy. I stayed in the shadows. Halfway up I heard a car coming and saw lights and had all the time in the world to go down the slope on the sea side of the road and flatten out. It turned into the Escutia driveway, fifty feet before it got to where I was.

When I got to the Boody place, I stepped over the chain and went around to the side of the house opposite the swimming pool, and made my way to the Garcia wall through the Boody grounds. I stood by the wall a long time, listening, and heard nothing but the normal noises of the night, and the whining of mosquitoes looking for the meat of my neck.

After debating a moment, I decided to try a place where the top of the wall wasn’t shadowed by the trees inside. I might be more visible, but I had that damned glass to fool with. I wanted the hooks to catch the inside edge of the wall. If they’d rounded it off, I’d have to try flying it into a tree. That made retrieving it more of a problem. I straightened the loops out and tossed the hooks over the wall. I heard them clink against the inside of the wall. I pulled them slowly, worrying about sawing the nylon against sharp glass. They caught, but when I put on a little pressure there was a tink of breaking glass, and a piece of glass and the hooks came back to me. After a third try, and more glass each time, I knew the wall was rounded off on the inside, another little touch of professionalism.

I moved back away from the wall and moved along parallel to it, moving further away from the road, until I came to a tree I liked, growing on the inside. I held the very end of the line in my left hand, the loops between thumb and finger, and swung the grapnel around my head a few times with my right hand and let it fly. It arched into the leaves with too much noise. I listened, then slowly pulled it tight. It was fast, and apparently on a good solid branch, because when I put my weight on it, there was only about a six-inch give.

The angle of the line took it across my edge of the wall. At least it was out of the glass. I put my rubber soles against the white wall and walked up it, at an acute and unpleasant angle. The damned nylon was so thin it dug painfully into my hands. The concavity near the top was tricky, but I took a giant step and got one foot on the edge, and then the other, and pulled myself erect, wiggling my toes into areas between the shards of glass.

Holding the line lightly for balance, I looked into the grounds. Off to my right I could see a faint light which I guessed was the gate light. I could see the lights of the main house almost dead ahead, between the leaves. I broke a few shards off, snubbing at them with the toe of my right shoe, and got myself a more balanced place to stand, then tried to yank the damned hooks free. They would not come free. All I did was make a horrid rustling in the leaves.

I certainly could not go up such a thin line hand over hand to free it. As I decided it was hopeless, I gave a last despairing yank and it came free so unexpectedly that I did a comedy routine on top of the wall, my back arched, waving my arms wildly to keep from falling back outside.

When I had balance, I brought the grapnel up and fixed it firmly onto the outside corner of the wall at a place where the line lay between the sharpness of glass as it crossed the top of the wall. I lowered myself on the inside, and let myself down in the same way as I had climbed up. I knew I might want to find the line in one hell of a hurry. There were too many trees, and the wall was too featureless, the white of the line too invisible against it. Then I had an idea, and I fumbled around and found some soft moist earth and took it in both hands and made a big visible smear on the white wall. I knew I could find that in a hurry.

I started toward the house. I had not gone ten feet from the wall when I heard it. Something coming at me fast, with the little guttural sound of effort, a scrabble of nails skidding on the ground. It came into the silver of moonlight a dozen feet away, and made one more bound and launched itself up at me, a big black silent murderous Doberman. A killer dog is peculiarly horrible in the silence of the attack. A long time ago I sat with others on hard benches and listened to a limey sergeant talk about and demonstrate hand-to-hand assault and defense. They gave us three days of him. He knew all the nasty arts, and knew them well. We learned interesting little facts from him-for example, an inch or two of the tip of a knife high enough in the diaphragm, just under the breast bone, will cause an instantaneous loss of consciousness, whereas the whole blade into the chest or belly will give them time to bellow.

He spent about fifteen minutes on the guard dogs we might run into around enemy supply installations. He had a healthy awe of them. He said they leap for the throat, bowl you over like being hit by a truck, savage you to death in moments. The attack is so swift, a gun or knife is often useless. But he said there was one weak point in their attack. And you had to be very quick to take any advantage of it.

Once the dog launches itself into its final leap, it is committed. He had his assistant sling an imitation dog at him, a canvas sack of sand with the two front legs sticking out of it. The man swung it close to the ground and hurled it at the sergeant’s chest. The sergeant snatched at a forepaw, grasped it, pivoted and fell back, using the momentum of his fall and all the strength of arms and back to hurl the imitation dog on beyond him, in the same direction as its charge. He could throw it a startling distance. I remembered how it bounced in the dust.

He said that in the leap the forepaws are relatively motionless. Snatch too soon and it can twist and tear your hands off. Wait too long and it is very hard to throw something that has hold of you by the throat.

He threw it a final time and dusted his hands and said, “Tykes the art out of im. Spoils is bloody leg for im. All you chaps do a spot of practice.”

With that black shape launched at me, I wished I’d given it some more practice. Fear either freezes you or makes you eerily quick and strong. I was pivoting and falling as I felt my fingers of both hands dig into the corded forearm of the dog, with no memory of how I had managed to grasp it, an index finger hooked around the knob of the elbow.

Unless I could impart enough centrifugal force to keep his head away from my hands, I was going to lose meat in a painful and ugly way, so I heaved as hard as I could, combining his leap, my backward fall, the pivot, into a single flight. I felt something give as I let go, heard a small whistling whine, a meaty thud as he struck the wall combined with a clopping sound as it snapped his jaws shut, a softer thud as he fell to the ground.

I bounded up, feeling as cold as if I’d handled snakes. From the instant he bounded at me until he fell to the ground at the base of the wall, the total elapsed time was perhaps less than two full seconds. I wiped my hands on my thighs and waited for him. It is possible to age a year in two seconds. Animals that come at you in the night is one of the horror dreams of childhood. You never really get over them.

I moved to him carefully, screened the small pen beam with my body and took a two second look. He was about eighty pounds of sinew, black hair and fangs-and he was quite dead.

It put an unknown limit on the time I could spend there. I had no way of knowing when they would call him. Perhaps they pulled in the human guard at nightfall and let the dog roam the grounds all night. He was too near my escape line. I waited until my eyes had readjusted to the night, then with a squeamish hesitation, took him by the hind paw and dragged him a dozen yards into a thickness of shrubbery covered with fragrant white blooms. Some variety of jasmine. Suddenly I wondered if they had a pair of dogs, and the thought nearly sent me hustling toward my escape line. I couldn’t expect that much luck twice. Few men have ever given me as much instant fright as that dog gave me. And it was an unpleasant clue to the Garcia attitude about visitors. Uninvited visitors. Watchdogs trained to bark are a lot more common, and more civilized.

As I moved carefully toward the house, avoiding open patches of moonlight, listening for the slightest sound of a charging dog, I took note of direction and landmarks. I wanted to be able to leave at a headlong run, if need be, with a certainty of hitting the wall at the right place. When I had an unimpeded view of the big pink house, I stopped in the shadows and moved to one side and leaned against the trunk of a tree and hooked my thumbs in my belt and stared at it. By assuming one of the postures of relaxation you can trick your body into thinking things are perfectly under control. I was still shaky from the extra adrenaline the black dog had stimulated. I looked at the roof shape against the sky. There weren’t many windows lighted. It was a big house, at least double the size of the Boody place. The complex of smaller buildings behind it was more elaborate, and there were lights showing there, too, and a faint sound of music from there.

I selected the next spot. There was a shallow patio with a low broad stone wall, the patio next to a wing of the house, parallel to it and up against it. Two sets of glass doors and two windows were encircled by the patio wall. The doors and window to the right were lighted. The light seemed to come through opaque white draperies. The doors and window to the left were dark. Once you decide, it is it strategic error to wait too long. Then it becomes like jumping off a roof. The longer you wait, the higher it looks. I had to cross a moonlit area. I bent double and moved swiftly, angling toward the dark end of the shallow patio. I went over the wall, moved close to the side of the house and lay on rough flagstones close against a low line of plantings. I listened. Now the fact of the dog was in my favor. Nobody was going to stay terribly alert, not with a monster like that cruising the grounds. When they’ve killed you, they stand and bay until somebody comes to congratulate them.

I wormed on over to the lighted doors, and found a place at the bottom corner I could look through. I was looking into a big bedroom with a sitting room area at one end of it, the end nearest the doors. A wall mirror showed me the reflection of the end of an elaborately canopied bed. A man sat on a grey chaise, turned away from me, so that all I could see of his face was a shelf of brow, curve of cheek. He wore shorts. One leg was outstretched, one propped up. They were pale legs, thick and powerful, fuzzed with a pelt of springy black hair. He was reading a book. His left side was toward me. Gold wrist watch and gold strap were half submerged in the curl of black hair on forearm and wrist.

I saw a movement in the mirror and then a girl came into view. She was walking slowly, barefoot, fastening the side of a green knit skirt, her head angled down so that a heavy sheaf of shining blonde hair obscured her face. She wore a white bra covering small breasts. Her upper torso was golden tan, with the narrow and supple look of youth. She fixed the skirt as she reached the foot of the chaise. She threw her hair back with a toss of her head, and stood and looked at the man with a cool, unpleasant expression. It was a very lovely face. I could guess that her earliest memories were of being told how pretty she was. It was a cool and sensuous face.

The springing blonde hair, with a few tousled strands across her forehead, fell in a glossy heaviness in two wings which framed the sensitive and bad tempered face. I had seen her before, and I groped for the memory, and finally had it. She had stared very earnestly at me many times, looked deeply into my eyes, held up a little squeeze bottle and told me it would keep me dainty all day long. Despite all rumors to the contrary, these huckster blondes were not interchangeable. I knew this one because her eyes were set strangely, one more tilted than the other.

She said something to the man. The curl of her mouth looked unpleasant. He lowered the book, said something, lifted it again. She shrugged and turned away and walked out of my field of vision. I lay in controlled schizophrenia, split between my interest in the lighted room, and my alertness for any sound behind me in the night. When she appeared again she was fastening the top half of the green knit two piece suit and she wore shoes. She had that contrived walk of the model, like Nora’s walk but more so-the business of putting each foot down in direct line with the previous step, toeing outward slightly, to impart a graceful sway to the body from the waist down. She was not tall. Perhaps five-four. She made herself look tall.

She stopped at the right side of the chaise and perched one hip on it, facing the man. She spoke to him. I could hear the very faint cadence of her voice. She was intent, persuasive, half-smiling. It was like a commercial with the volume turned down. As she talked, he put two cigarettes between his lips, lit them, handed one to her. She stopped talking and looked expectantly at him. He reached and caught her wrist. She sprang up and wrenched her wrist away, her face ugly with sudden fury. She called him a ten letter word, loud enough for me to hear it through the doors. She was no lady. She strode out of range in the opposite direction, and I heard a door slam.

She left with the look of somebody who was not coming back immediately. There was no profit in watching a hairy man read a book. I eased back and crouched in the moon shadows and stood up slowly. From what I had seen of the Boody house and what I could observe of this one, the dark doors and window would open onto another bedroom unit. They were sliding doors, in an aluminum track. I tried the outside handle. Locked. It would turn down about an inch, and then it stopped. I stood close to it; got a good grip on it, then began to exert an ever-increasing pressure. Just as my muscles began to creak and protest, some part of the inner mechanism snapped with a sharp metallic sound. I waited and listened. I tried the door. It slid open with a muted rumble. I crouched, tensed up, ready to go. Burglar alarms seemed like a logical accessory to a killer dog. It didn’t have to be a clanging. It could be a muted buzz at a guard station, inaudible to me. So I counted off six hundred seconds before I slipped through the eighteen inch opening, brushing the draperies aside. I stood in the darkness in total concentration.

We are given certain atavistic faculties which can be trained through use. You can stand in a dark room and after a time be absolutely certain there is no other person there. When I was quite certain, I used the pencil light, pinching the beam smaller between thumb and finger. It was a big bedroom-sitting room, less luxurious than the one I had looked into. There were no coverings on the two three-quarter beds.

I went back and closed the door I had broken, and checked the three other doors. One opened into a roomy dressing room. One opened into a tiled bath, where an astonished cockroach sped into the darkness. The third opened onto a broad and dimly lighted hallway. There was a window at the blind end. The other end opened out into a big room as weakly lighted as the hallway. I could see the dark shapes of heavy furniture.

Four doors opened onto the hallway. Two on each side. Four guest bedroom units, I assumed. The resident quarters would be in the other wing. I could hear no sound. I debated trying iny luck with a quick and silent run into the living room at the end of the corridor, taking a chance on finding a dark pocket behind some of that heavy Iurniture. But there was too much chance of being cut off. I locked the bedroom door on the inside, and went back out through the glass doors, listened for a time, then left the patio and moved along the side of the house and around to the back, feeling more confident.

That is the familiar trap of course, the one that catches the cat burglars. They begin to feel invulnerable, and they push it a little further and a little further, until one day in their carelessness they wake up the wrong person-and then kill or are killed.

I sped through an area of moonlight, and crouched beyond the swimming pool, a layout almost identical to the Boody construction, near the building where the servants would be housed. Mexican radio was loud. Windows were lighted. The rooms were small and plain. I wanted a reasonable tiead count. The smell of cooking was strong. I saw a heavy woman walking to and fro in a small room, carrying a whining child, while a man sat alone at a table playing with a set of greasy cards. A screen door slapped. Somebody hawked and spat. I saw three men in a room, playing dominoes, placing them with large scowls and gestures, loud clacks of defiance. One of them was my wistful gate guard. A woman sat near them, stirring something in a large pottery bowl. A kitten mewed. The radio advertised Aye-low Shahm-boo. I looked through a gap in a sleazy curtain and saw, on a cot, under the bright glare of an unshaded bulb, in the direct blast of the music of the plastic radio, a muscular man and a very skinny woman making love, both of them shiny with sweat.

A quiet evening in the servants’ quarters. I drifted away, and made my way back across to the big house, and came up to it at the rear, on the other side. I looked into a big bright white kitchen. A square-bodied, square-faced, dark-skinned woman in a black and white uniform sat on a high red stool at a counter, polishing silver. A man leaned against the counter near her. A guard type, in khaki, armed, eating a chicken leg.

I passed dark windows. I came to a lighted one. I looked in. It was a small bedroom. A thin drablooking, middle-aged woman sat there in a rocking chair without arms. She wore a very elaborate white dress, all lace and embroidery, strangely like a wedding dress. It did not look clean. Her hair was unkempt, strands of grey long and tangled. She had her arms folded across her chest. She was rocking violently, seeming to come close to tipping the chair over backwards each time. Her underlip sagged and her face was absolutely empty. There is only one human condition which can cause that total terrible emptiness. She rocked and rocked, looking at nothing.

As I moved along the side of the house I heard a woman’s voice. I passed more dark windows and came to three lighted ones in a row. They were open. As I crept closer I heard that she was speaking Spanish. And as it went on and on, I realized from the cadence of her voice that she was reading aloud. The accent seemed expert, as far as I could tell, the voice young and clear, nicely modulated. But she stumbled over words from time to time. She seemed too close to the first window for me to take a chance, so I wormed on along to the last of the three lighted windows. I straightened up beyond it, and took a careful look. I saw a fat brown woman in a white uniform sitting on a couch sewing, her fingers swift and her face impassive. And off to the right, near the first window, I could see the blonde girl in the green knit suit, sitting on a straight chair beside a bed, her back to me, bending over the book she held in her lap. I could not see who was in the bed.

I waited there. She read on and on. Mosquitoes found my neck and I rubbed them off. I settled into the stupor of waiting. She could not read forever. Something had to change. And then I might learn something. At last she closed the book with an audible thump, and in a lazy loving tone she said, “That’s really all I can manage tonight, darling. My eyes are beginning to give out. I hope you don’t mind too much.”

There was no answer. She put the book aside and stood up and bent over whoever was in the bed. All I could see of her was the rounded girlrump under the stretch of knitted green. The fat woman had stopped sewing and she was watching the girl, her eyes narrowed.

The girl made the murmurous sound of a woman giving her affection and then straightened. “Carlos, darling,” she said, “I’m going to ask you to try to write your name again. Do you understand, dear? One blink for yes. Good.”

She went out of my range and came back with a pad and pencil. She apparently sat beside him on the bed. I could see her slim ankles. “Here, darling. That’s it. Hold it as tightly as you can. Now write your name, dear.”

There was a silence. Suddenly the girl sprang up, and made a violent motion and there was the sound of an open palm against flesh. “You filth!” she shouted. “You dirty bastard!” The pad and pencil fell to the floor. The fat woman started up off the couch, hesitated, settled back and picked up her sewing.

The girl stood back from the bed, her body rigid, her fists on her hips. “I suppose that’s your idea of a joke, writing a dirty word like that. God damn you, you understand me. I know you do. Try to get this through your head, Carlos. The pesos in the household account are down to damned near nothing. If you expect me to stay here and care for you and protect you, you are going to have to write your name clearly and legibly on a power of attorney so I can go to the bank in Mexico City and get more money. You have to trust me. It’s the only chance you have, brother. And you better realize it. When the money stops, these people of yours are going to melt away like the morning dew, and you’ll die and rot right here. Oh brother, I know how your mind works. You think I’m going to grab it all and run. If I did, you wouldn’t be any worse off, would you? And what the hell good is money going to do you from now on? Listen, because I probably owe you something, Carlos, I swear I’ll go and get the money and come back here and take care of you. I’ll keep them from killing you. Don’t you realize those men must have told somebody else before they came here to fix you? You think it over, my friend. You’re not going to get too many more chances. I’m getting sick of this whole situation. Gabe and I may leave at any time. Who have you got left who could go for the money? Your wife, maybe? Your kook wife? We’ll put wheels on her rocking chair. Jesus Christ, you make me sore, Carlos. Do me a personal favor. Have lousy dreams tonight. Okay.”

She whirled and went out. She was a door banger.

I went back to the first window and took a look. The bed was directly under the window. Carlos Menterez was propped up on a mound of pillows. They’d dressed him in a heavy silk robe. With his bald head and his shrunken face, he looked like the skeleton of a monkey. The left eye was drooped almost shut, and the left side of his mouth and face fell slack, in grey folds. The look of severe stroke. But the right eye was round and dark and alert. In my interest, I had gotten a little too close to the screen. The good eye turned toward me, and suddenly became wider. His mouth opened on the good side, pulling the slack side open. He made a horrid cawing, gobbling sound, and lifted his right hand, a claw hand, as though to ward off a blow. I ducked down and heard the fat woman hurry to him. She made comforting sounds, patting and adjusting, fixing his pillows. Carlos made plaintive gobblings, wet sounds of despair. She worked over him for quite a while, and then she turned several lights out.

I went around the front of the house, completing the circuit. There was a light over the gate, but no guard. I could see that a heavy chain was looped through the bars of the gate. I wanted to get around and see what the blonde and Gabe were doing. I wondered how I could make myself a chance to hear what they were saying. It would be too much to expect that he might have opened the window. He hadn’t. But as I lowered myself to look through the same place as before, I heard him bellow, “For Chrissake, Alma!” She was sitting huddled on the foot of the chaise. He was pacing back and forth, making gestures. He had a hard handsome face, glossy black hair worn too long.

Then behind me I heard a shrill whistle. A man yelled, “Brujo! Eh, perro! Brujo!” He whistled again. But Brujo had retired from the dog business. I went from the patio into the moon shade of the trees. I heard two men talking loudly, arguing. I saw lights moving beyond the leaves.

They both called the dog. And I made a wide furtive circle behind them as they moved, angling toward my escape line. I could sense that they were getting too close to where I’d left the dead dog.

There was a sudden silence, and then excited yelling. Then a shocking and sudden bam-bam of two shots rupturing the night. I was flat on my face before I could comprehend that they had not been aimed at me, that they were warning shots, fired into the air. More lights went on. There were more voices, raised in loud query. Suddenly at least fifty decorative floodlights went on, all over the pool area, all over the grounds.

I guess I had seen some of the lights. They hadn’t registered. I was in the cone of radiance of one of them. I swiftly pulled myself into darkness, momentarily blinded. Somebody ran by me, a few feet away, shoes drumming against the earth. All I had to do was wait for them to spot the smear on the wall, investigate, find the Ihin nylon rope, then hunt me down. Already they were beginning to fan out, five or six of them, shining flashlights into the dark places. And one was moving slowly toward me. He would have a gun in one hand and the light in the other. There was an unpleasant eagerness about them, as if they were after a special bonus.

I could not circle behind him. I would have had to cut through the revealing lights. I moved back, came up against a tree, wormed around it, stood on the far side of it and went up it almost as fast as I can run up a flight of stairs. It had sharp stubby thorns sticking out of the trunk, and I did not pay them much attention at the time. I stood a dozen feet up, balancing in the crotch of a fat branch, holding the main trunk for support. Below me, the diligent fellow came through the lights and swept his light back and forth where I had been. I looked around. The others were just about far enough away. When he moved into the relative darkness under my tree, I stepped into space and dropped onto him, feet first, landing on the backs of his shoulders, driving him down to the ground. I rolled to my knees and snatched his flashlight. It had rolled away from him. I swept the beam over, saw his hand gun and picked it up. He stirred and I hammered him down again, laying the side of the revolver against the back of his skull. I stood, sweeping the light back and forth, as though searching.

A man thirty feet away rattled a question at me.

“No se,” I grumbled. Avoiding the lights, I worked my way away from him. A few moments later, I reached the stain on the wall. I found the line. It was firm. In that instant all the lights flickered and went out, and I knew it was midnight. The big generator had been turned off. They called to each other, swinging their lights around dangerously. Somebody yelled, “Chucho? Chucho?” I guessed I had his gun and light. I turned the light off, then threw it toward the house as hard as I could, arching it up over the trees. There was a satisfying crash and chime of glass. As the shouts came, as they all began moving toward the house, I went up the line, stood on the wall, freed the hooks and jumped into the darkness. I landed on uneven ground, hit my chin on my knee and jarred my teeth, rolled over onto my side. I yanked the rest of the line over the wall, and hastened across the Boody grounds, coiling it as I went, the gun a hard lump between belt and belly. I could hear more shouts, and I wondered if they’d found Chucho. I wondered if he was the wistful one, the chicken eater, the lovemaker or one of the others.

When I rattled the first pebble into the room through the open window, she whispered, “Trav? Darling?”

“Get away from the window.”

I tossed the hooks in. They clanked on the tile. She dug the hooks into the overlap of the wooden sill. I walked up the side of the building, caught at the edge, slid over the sill belly down, and spilled into the room. As I rolled over, she nestled down upon me, sobbing and laughing, smothering the sounds against my chest.

“I heard shots,” she said. “Far away, and I thought…”

“There was some excitement while I was leaving.”

She let me up. I pulled the line in. We went into the bathroom to inspect damage. The only room lights on the night circuit were weak bulbs in the bathroom. Twenty-five watts. Those thorns had torn me up pretty good, puncturing and tearing the flesh on the insides of my arms and legs. Fear had been a marvelous anesthetic. I put the gun on the shelf above the sink and stripped down. It was a respectable weapon, a Smith and Wesson.38, a standard police firearm with walnut grips. It hadn’t received tender loving care, but it looked deadly enough. And the damn fool had been carrying it hammer down, on the empty chamber, instead of hammer back with a fresh one in position.

Nora made little bleatings of concern when she saw how torn up I was. She hurried off and came back with antiseptic, cotton and tape. I took a cold shower first, bloodied a towel drying myself, then stretched out in the restricted area of the bathroom on my back so she could do a patch job. She bit down on her lip as she worked. She had trouble getting out of her own shadow. I could feel the exhaustion seeping through me. I told her there was a bad dog and I had killed it. I said I had been in the house. I had seen a few things, heard a few things, and I would tell her about them later. I had had to hit a man on the head to get out of there. It had been a little closer than I cared for things to be. The closeness of it made her weep, and then I had to make jokes to prove it had not been really that close.

Then we went to bed. She was dubious about my obvious intentions, but she was very very glad to have me back. And we had grown to know each other. It was no longer the mysterious business of strangers being too curious about the reaction to this or that, holding themselves in a kind of tentative reserve. Now I knew the arrangements of her, the strictures and the willingnesses, the fashioning of her for her needs and takings, so that I could lose myself in all that and become one striving thing with her, both of us all of one familiar flesh. There are anesthetics more wondrous than fear. In that time when past and future fade, when they are eclipsed by the reiterant now, I caught a receding glimpse of the man and the skinny woman under the bright bulb glare, felt an ironic aftertaste, then knew that all the differences which mean anything are subjective. In the drinking of a fine wine or a deadly poison, the mechanical functioning of elbow and wrist are identical. Whether the eye sees blood or roses, little sub-electrical impulses in the brain identify the color as red. I could fault us only on the grounds our coupling had a symbiotic tinge, a union keyed to survival of two discordant species. She had the wisdom to keep us from trying to explain that to each other. Her wisdom gave us the power to accept completely, using in place of value judgments the deep, ancient, rhythmic affirmations of the flesh.

Thirteen

AFTER BREAKFAST I sat in umbrellaed shade while Nora swam, shirt and slacks covering the thorn wounds, my curled hand concealing the random stigmata, the girl-bite bandage also hidden under the long sleeves of the white shirt. I had some sore and creaking muscles, and a couple of bruises which felt as if they went all the way down into the bone marrow.

The revolver, sealed by a rubber band fastening into a plastic shoe bag, rested in the bottom of her toilet tank. The improvised grapnel was buried in the soft black dirt under a bush. I had rinsed the smeared stains of blood from my hand off the thin nylon rope, coiled it and stowed it in a bureau drawer. The ruined slacks and shirt were a minor problem. Nora had them stowed in her beach bag, tightly rolled. We could bury them at the beach.

She came out of the pool and returned to our table. She wore a sheath suit, vertical red and white stripes. She had explained the artifice of it to me. She said it was a suit for the underprivileged girl. The stripes were designed to be further apart at hip and breast, closer together at the waist, thus creating the illusion of more abundance than was there. She said that for some reason she could not understand, they had a most difficult time at the shop trying to keep very heavy women from buying them. I told her I hadn’t noticed she was particularly underprivileged. She said a woman’s ribs shouldn’t resemble a xylophone, nor should hip bones be capable of inflicting a nasty bruise.

She toweled her face and shoulders, fluffed her dark hair, moved her chair into the sun and frowned at me.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“There was something between Sam and the blonde.”

“If Alma’s last name is Hitchins, and if Felicia is right, yes.”

“Then she’s been there a long time.”

“Maybe. Back and forth is a better guess, I’d say. The intermittent house guest. For a nice long stay every time.”

“Who is Gabe?”

“God knows. The relationship with Alma had a. flavor of intimacy. But she seems to be in charge.”

“Do you think she wants to get the money and run?”

“What else? Maybe Menterez was a lot of laughs before something gave way in his head. But what’s there for her now? You know, she has it locked up pretty good. If anybody comes around who really wants to help him, she can keep them from getting past the gate. He is incapable of communicating with anybody. Speech is gone, but he can understand and he can write. I don’t think that fat nurse understands English. I have the idea nobody gets into that room except Alma and the fat nurse. I don’t think anybody else will get in there until he’s ready to sign a power of attorney. I would bet the bulk of his fortune is in Switzerland, but he’s likely to have a nice chunk of cash in a lock box in Mexico City. I don’t think it would be on deposit. I’d lay odds it’s in dollars or pounds. And he damn well knows she wants to clean him out. If she does, who can touch her? How far can he get by complaining to the Mexican authorities? I think I know what’s eating her. She’s afraid he’ll have another one before she can soften him up. I think he’s suffering the fate of all vultures. When they get sick, the others eat him.”

“Don’t be so damned vivid, Trav.”

“I’d like to unravel that remark she made about some men having told somebody else where he was before they came here to fix him. They tried and they didn’t make it, and evidently they didn’t survive the experience. That was the inference. But if any kind of big dramatic violence went on around here, I think Felicia would have known about it and told me about it. How did Sam earn those gold figures? Who got all but one of them away from him? Honey we’re up to here in questions.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Pry Alma open.”

“You can’t go back there!”

“Nora dear, I wouldn’t go over that wall again for a thirty dollar bill. So we got to get sweetie pie out of there somehow.”

“Is she another one of those… what did you call them?… sun bunnies?”

“Not this one. This one is bright and cold and hard and beautiful.”

She gave a mirthless laugh. “Sam kept pretty busy.”

“I think this one would have gone after Sam if she thought he could do her some good. And I think if she went after him, he wouldn’t stand much of a chance. And I think her nerves are good enough to carry on another intrigue right in Menterez’s house. This one has the cool sexually speculative look, like the one who married the prince.”

“Or like poor little Mandy? Christine’s pal?”

“I think this one is a little more commercial than that.”

“She and that Gabe are a team?”

“I don’t know. He’s a little too pretty. She’ll cross him up when it comes his turn. I think he’s just a stud she imported to liven the dull days of waiting. But I have the idea he knows what she’s trying to do.”

“I keep thinking of that black dog.”

“Please. I keep trying not to think about him. How do we get her out of there?”

“Darling, the mail comes to the village by bus, and they bring the mail for those houses out here to the hotel. I… I might put a little note in there for her. My handwriting is obviously feminine. So is my note paper.”

“Nora, you are a fine bright girl.”

“I don’t know what to say. But it should be something that… She shouldn’t be able to rest until she finds out the rest of it. Maybe I should phone her.”

“There is one phone in this whole hotel, in Arista’s office. I think there are two in the village. There are none on the hill.”

“Oh.”

“But the idea is superb. Let’s give it a lot of thought.”

“Shouldn’t we make sure of her name? Wouldn’t that help?”

“It would help indeed.”

It seemed a difficult project, but like many such problems, it turned out to be extraordinarily simple. I found one of the hotel porters at a small table near the lobby door sorting mail, the mail he would carry up the hill and leave at the tenanted house. He was checking the addresses against a tattered, dog-eared sheet. The principal names had been typed. Other names in the household had been written under them in pencil. There was a long list under Garcia, well over a dozen names. Among them was the girl’s name. She had phonied up the first name, as girls are inclined to do these days. Almah. Miss Almah Hichin. The porter was trying to tell me I would not find my mail in that batch. I misunderstood him. By the time Arista came over to straighten me out, I had what I needed.

Nora and I spent a long time composing a draft of a very short note.

“My dear Miss Hichin, I have heard so many things about you, I feel that I know you. ST told me rnany things, including one thing I must pass along to you in person. He said it would deeply concern you, and might change your future plans. It does not mean much to me, but from the sound of it I would judge it important. I am at La Casa Encantada, but for obvious reasons, that would not be a good place for us to meet.”

“What obvious reasons?” Nora asked, scowling.

“If you don’t have any, she will. Or she’ll wonder what the hell your reasons are.”

“Where should we meet?”

“I saw three cars up there. One is a dark red convertible Ghia. Say this: Drive the little red car down to the village tomorrow at one in the afternoon. Stop in front of the largest church. Please be alone. I shall be.”

Her initials, NDG, were embossed in the top corner of the blue note paper. There was no address. I had her sign it with merely an N.

“What if she should know Sam is… dead?”

“She’ll wonder what he said before he died.”

“Do you think she’ll come?”

“She’ll have to.”

“Tomorrow will mean the day after tomorrow. We can’t get it to her until…”

“I know. You’ll give it to that old porter, with a lovely smile, and a five peso note.”

“Then what do we do with her if she does come?”

“I’m going to take a long walk to find out, dear.”

“Can I come?”

I did some mental arithmetic. A kilometer is sixtenths of a mile. “Can you manage ten miles in the heat?”

She could do better than that. She proved it. She became very mysterious, made me wait for her, came back full of suppressed amusement, then led me out to the back of the hotel, to the out buildings lluere, the supply sheds, generator building, staff barracks, back to a place where Jose, our room waiter, stood proudly beside a fantastic piece of transportation. It was an Italian motor scooter with fat doughnut tires, all bright coral, poisonous yellow-green and sparkling chrome. It had a single monster headlight, and two fluffy pink fox tails affixed to the handlebar grips. It had a radio antenna, but no radio, with a blue fox tail fastened to the tip of it. There was a broad black cycle seat, and behind that a padded black lid to the stowage compartment, a place for the passenger to sit. It was incongruous transportation for that severe, polite little man. He would not consent to rent it until he had checked me out on it. It had two speeds. I kicked it on and wheeled it sedately around the area, flatulently snarling. I comported myself with dignity and appreciation. I told him it was strikingly beautiful, and I would treat it with the greatest care.

When the deal was struck, Nora straddled the rear compartment, her dark hair tied in a scarf, and we took off for the village, Jose watching us with an enigmatic expression. There were little cleats for her to brace her feet on. She found that her best way to hold on was to hold onto my belt. She shouted that this experience had come to her about twelve years too late. With the soft tires and the heavy coil springs on the front fork, it was really quite comfortable on the rough road. In high gear, along a relatively smooth area, the speedometer showed a little over 50 kph, or something over thirty miles an hour.

Again I ruptured siesta by making three circuits of the public square. Brown dogs yapped and ran after us, then waited, gasping, for us to come around another time. Children shouted and imitated the art of jumping over an invisible knife. Dark faces grinned. I went down the road which headed in the opposite direction from the hotel, and found the ice plant and more fish docks, some old trucks at a loading platform, and more packs of kids and dogs.

I discovered that the brake was tender. It had a tendency to lock the rear wheel. I made my turn, scattering a flock of white hens, and went back and made two more circuits of the square to the cheers of the populace, and then turned inland over the crude road we had traveled in the blue bus.

After I was over the ridge and across the rocky flats and into the narrow road with the heavy growth on either side, I slowed it and stopped it, turned the key off and set it on the brace.

Nora was amused and indignant. “Really Trav! My God, what were you trying to prove?”

“That we’re nutty harmless Americans. Smoke screen, honey. Anybody who went over that wall couldn’t possibly clown around in this gaudy machine the very next day. And I think the village damn well knows they had trouble up there last night. And what point is there in looking as if we had any special destination? When we come back, we’ll bomb them again.”

“It just made me feel so ridic…” Suddenly she began to make squeaking sounds and went into a wild dance, slapping at her feet and ankles. And at the same moment, one of them got me on the leg, a dark red ant with husky jaws and a sting like sulphuric acid. We leaped onto the machine and escaped, slapping the persistent ones off while in transit.

We bumbled along through sunny areas and through the jungly shadows where the trees met overhead. The previous mudholes were cracked and drying. I found that the most comfortable speed was about fifteen miles an hour. And it gave me time to inspect both sides of the road. Pebbles clinked off the festive mudguards. The fox tails rippled in the hot breeze of passage. Dust curled behind us. The woman clutched the back of my belt snugly. Once she shouted and pointed and I saw a flock of small bright parrots tilting and skimming through a shadowy green of the high trees.

We met a bus coming to the village. It came clanking and wheezing and shuddering along, going too fast for the condition of the road. The name on the front of it was El Domador. It blew a squawky horn at us as we waited in the shallow ditch for it to go by and the passengers whooped.

After it was gone, two hundred yards further, I found the place Felicia had probably been talking about. A smaller road, just a trace of a road, turned off to the left. It ended after about a hundred feet, in a little clearing which the jungle was reclaiming. I silenced our vehicle and we got off. The silence was intense. There had been a shack at the edge of the clearing. It had fallen in, and the tough vines were curled around the old poles of which it had ten fashioned. We could have been a hundred feet or a hundred miles from any other road. In a little while the bird sounds began again, tentative at first. Then the bug chorus started. Nora peered carefully and rather timidly at the ground, looking for ants among the tough grasses.

There was an eeriness about the place that made it more suitable to speak in a half whisper.

“This is where they brought that girl?”

“Yes. Three days after Sam took off.”

“Who were they?”

“Nobody from the house. Three days, it would be time to come in from somewhere else.”

And you want me to bring that girl here?“

“Yes.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll be here when you get here with her. I’ll have to walk it. I think her nerves are very good. I think she’s tricky and subtle. So we have to plan it carefully Nora. We have to make it look very good to her. So I’m going to give you some lines to say, and we’re going to go over them, and then you’re going to walk away from it, because I don’t want to give her a chance to read you.”

“Will she read you, dear?”

“I don’t know. At least I know enough not to try to overact.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sympathy and reluctance are a hell of a lot more impressive than imitation villainy, Nora.”

I arrived at the clearing a little before one in the afternoon. I had cut across country rather than going through the village. I had had to take cover from only one vehicle, a burdened fish truck laboring out toward the markets. I had sweated the layer of repellent off, and I rubbed on more. I paced and I worried about Nora. If Almah Hichin showed up, if Nora did exactly as I had told her, as I had demonstrated to her, if she had tried no improvisation, and had kept her mouth shut, maybe it would work.

I paced back and forth in the clearing. I cut a reedy-looking thing and tried to make a whistle. The bark wouldn’t slip. I kept stopping, tilting my head, listening. When I heard it, it seemed to merge with the bug whine and die away, and then it came back, stronger than before. Then it was recognizable as the doughty whirr of a VW engine. It turned into the overgrown trace. I saw at last the glints of dark red through the foliage.

It came into the clearing and stopped, ten feet from me. Almah Hichin was at the wheel. She stared at me, frowning slightly as I walked over to the car. I reached in and turned the key off. The top was down. Almah wore a dark blue kerchief, a pale blue sleeveless silk blouse, a white skirt, flat white sandals. She looked up at me with respectable composure and said in a reasonable tone, “May I ask who you are, and what this is all about?”

“No trouble?” I asked Nora.

“None at all.” She sat half turned toward Almah, holding my little bedroom gun six inches from Alma’s waist. Almah’s white purse was on the divider between the black bucket seats. I reached over her and picked it up and opened it. I saw her decide to snatch at it and then change her mind. Combination wallet and change purse, lipstick, very small hair brush, mirror, stub of eyebrow pencil.

I took the bills out of the wallet. Three U.S. twenties, a ten, and three ones. A wad of soiled peso notes. I tossed the money into Nora’s lap. I put the billfold back into the purse, snapped it, took a step back and slung the purse deep into the brush. I looked at the girl. Her eyes had widened momentarily. They were an unusually lovely color, a deep lavender blue, and their asymmetry made them more interesting…

“Won’t somebody find that?” Nora asked on cue.

“It isn’t likely.” I knew how the inevitable formula worked in the girl’s mind. Nobody expected her to be able to go look for it. I saw a slight twitch at the corner of the controlled mouth.

I took the coil of nylon line off my shoulder, separated an end and dropped the rest of it. “Clasp your hands and hold them out,” I told her.

“I will not!”

“Miss Hichin, you can’t change anything. All you can do is make a lot of tiresome trouble. Just hold your hands out.”

She hesitated and then did so. Her wrists looked frail, her forearms childish. I lashed them together, swiftly and firmly. I opened the car door, gave a firm and meaningful tug at the line and she got out, saying, “This is altogether ridiculous, you know.”

Nora slid over into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut.

“Enough gas to make Culiacan?” I asked.

She turned the key on and checked. “More than enough.”

I reached and plucked the dark blue kerchief from Almah’s blonde head and handed it to Nora. “This might confuse things a little.”

She nodded. She glanced at Almah. “How about her blouse too?”

“I’ll bring it along,” I said. “You don’t want any part of this do you?”

Her little shudder was very effective. “No, dear.”

“Neither do I. Park it up there in the shade, just short of that last bend. Okay?”

“Yes, dear. Miss Hichin? Please don’t be stupid about this. You see, we have a lot of time. The plane doesn’t come until eight to pick us up. You’re such a pretty thing. It will be very difficult for him if you… let it get messy.”

“Are you people out of your minds?” Almah demanded.

“I’ll handle this. You get out of here,” I ordered.

She spun the little red car around deftly and headed back out again. The motor sound faded, and then it stopped.

I picked up the rest of the line and led the girl over to the spot I had picked, near the ruin of the shack. I flipped the line over a low limb, caught the end, took it over to another tree, laced it around the tree and then carefully pulled until she had her arms stretched high over her head, but both feet were firmly on the ground. I made it fast. I went to her and reached and checked the tension of the line above her lashed wrists. I wandered away from her and lit a cigarette and stood with my back to her, staring off into the brush.

“You’re making some kind of fantastic mistake,” she said.

“Sure,” I said and went back to her. She looked sweaty but composed. Small insects were beginning to gather around her face, arms and legs.

“No need for you to be eaten alive,” I said. I took out the 6-12 and poured some into the palm of my hand. “Close your eyes.” She obeyed. I greased her face, throat, arms and legs with the repellent. I made it utterly objective, with no slightest hint of caress. She stared at me and moistened her lips. I knew that the small courtesy had shaken her more than anything which had gone before.

I walked away from her again. I wanted to sag against a tree and give a great bray of laughter. I had properly anticipated most of it, but not the comedy of it. The most wretched melodrama becomes high comedy. This was a little darling, a little lavender-eyed blonde darling, trussed up like a comic book sequence, and I could not harm a hair of her dear little head. And, of course, she could not believe it either. Nobody hurts the darlings. So our spavined act was balanced on that point which was just beyond our comprehension or belief. She was right. It was some kind of a fantastic mistake. Nora had bought it more readily than blondie or I could. Her Mediterranean acceptance of the violence just under the surface of life, perhaps.

I turned and looked at her. She stood sweaty and indignant and uncomfortable, reaching high, ankles neatly together. She was, of course, weighing me most carefully, estimating my capacity for violence, even though she could not believe this was real. It was a ponderous, embarrassing joke. She was angry and wary. She was trying to guess if I could hurt her. I saw myself through her eyes-a great big brown rangy man, wiry hair, pale grey eyes, broad features slightly and permanently disarranged by past incidents.

I went close to her, and looked through the hypnotic impact of so much prettiness, and got a better look at the details of her. Caked lipstick bitten away, fingers narrow and crooked and not pretty, nail polish chipped and cracked, the thumbnails bitten deep, a furzy little coppery stubble in her armpits, little dandruff flakes in the forehead roots of the blonde hair, slender ankles slightly soiled, pores enlarged in her cheeks and a blackhead near the base of the delicate nose, a tiny hole burned in the front of the pale blue blouse, a spot on the hip of the white skirt. She was lovely, but not very fastidious. It made her seem a little sexier, and more manageable. The signs of soil were slightly plaintive.

“You and that woman are going to get into terrihle trouble about this,” she said. “I’m an actress. A lot of people know me. Apparently you don’t know who I am.”

“I think you got mixed up in a lot of things, Almah, without knowing how serious they were. I guess it works sort of like the law. Ignorance is no excuse.”

“You don’t make any sense. I am a house guest.”

“That’s what Carlos Menterez y Cruzada called a lot of his shack jobs, I guess. House guests. But you’d be a little young for the Havana scene. Actually I guess you aren’t any different than any of the rest of them. But you are the last one he had. And when he had no more use for you, in that sense, you should have gone back where you belonged. The big mistake was hanging around, Almah.”

She stared at me as though she was peering at me through gloom, trying to identify me. She started to say something and stopped and licked her lips again.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m just somebody who’s been ordered to confirm a few things. Double check the details. They’ll think you left when the going got rough. We sent some people in there last night to look around. It’s all falling apart now. It’s over for him, Almah. And it’s over for you.”

“But it isn’t the way you think!”

“How do you know what we think?”

“You sound… you make it sound as if I’m there with Carlos out of some kind of loyalty or something. My God, it isn’t like that! Honestly, I don’t know anything about the political side of it. Listen, I came down here a lot, when there were parties and all. By boat a couple of times and private airplanes. For over two years, and I’d stay on for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Okay, so I belonged to Carlos when I was here, and that was understood. Is that some kind of a crime all of a sudden? His wife is crazy. Ever since he built that house, she’d been out of her head. He liked me. He wanted me to stay there all the time, but I went back and forth. I mean I have a life of my own too.”

“You should have left for good when you had the chance, Almah.”

“You have to understand something. I lost some good opportunities on account of him. I mean they would have called me for more things, if I’d been handy all the time. A good series I could have been in. But they couldn’t get hold of me for the pilot because I was here. So he owes me something. Right?”

“What are you driving at?”

“Look. There’s a boy there with me. Gabe. Gabriel Day. You could check it out. He’s a lawyer. He can’t practice in Mexico, but he knows the right forms and everything they have to use down here. He’s been down here for three weeks. I sent for him. You can check that out. Carlos is going to sign something for me, and people are going to witness the signature, and then Gabe and I can go get the money. It’s in Mexico City. He’s got over six hundred thousand dollars there. That’s why I’m staying. It isn’t political or anything like that. This is all some kind of mistake.”

“Sweetie, that’s what they used to say in Batista’s prisons and what they say now in Fidel’s prisons. This is some kind of a mistake.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with the political part.”

“No more than Sam Taggart did? He had enough to do with the political part so that it got him killed.”

She stared. “Sam is dead?”

“‘Thoroughly.”

“Gee, it’s hard to believe. He… He told me it was time to get out, when Carlos got the stroke and Sam couldn’t get the money Carlos promised him. I guess they could have guessed it was Sam who… got rid of those people.”

I sat on my heels, my back against the tree. I said, “I don’t want to play psychological games with you, Almah. We know some of it, and there’s some of it we don’t know. But you have no way of knowing the parts we know and the parts we don’t. I can’t promise you anything, because there’s nothing to promise. Suppose you just tell me the whole thing.”

“And you’ll let me go?”

“I want to see if you put in any mistakes.”

“The way it started? All of it?”

“Yes.”

“I guess you could say it started when Cal Tomberlin came down on his boat, with a lot of kids I know. That was about five months ago. Cal is sort of spooky. Maybe from having everything he ever wanted, and getting it right now. His mother was Laura Shane, from the old movies. And she put all the money she made into land. No taxes then. She got fabulously rich and Cal was the only child. He’d met Carlos one time in Havana, and they didn’t get along, and he didn’t know that Carlos was here calling himself Garcia. It made Carlos sort of nervous when Cal showed up. Carlos had three collections in his study, in glass cases. The gold statues and the jade and the coins. But Cal Tomberlin saw the gold statues and wanted to buy them. He couldn’t imagine anybody saying no. When he wants something, he has to have it. And sooner or later he gets it. It can be a boat or a special kind of car or a piece of land or somebody’s wife or those horrid little gold statues. They were here about five days and he kept after Carlos all the time, and it got pretty ugly. Toward the end, Cal Tomberlin started making little hints, talking about what a nice hideaway Carlos had found for himself. But that just made Carlos more stubborn. Finally they left. Some of the kids stayed on for a while.

“About a month later, Cal Tomberlin came back on the boat again. What I think he was doing, he was just trying to put some pressure on Carlos to make a deal with him. Maybe he knew how much trouble he was causing. Maybe he was just trying to get even with Carlos for turning him down. But he brought a Cuban man with him, and the Cuban man stayed sort of hidden on the boat until there was a big party and Cal Tomberlin went down and got the man and smuggled him into the party. I was there when Carlos saw him. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I didn’t know anything could terrify Carlos so much.

“He never talked to me about such things, but that night in bed he had to talk to somebody I guess. He said that he had been in a business deal in Havana with that man’s brother. It had gone wrong somehow, and the brother had killed his wife and himself, and then their son had tried to kill Carlos and had been arrested and had died of sickness in prison. He kept saying he would have to leave Mexico and go somewhere else. But after a few days he quieted down. He stopped going outside the walls for anything. I guess he couldn’t think of a place where he would be safer.

“About two weeks later, that boat came down, that Columbine N out of Oceanside. It anchored out. That same man was on it, and two other men. They looked Cuban. I saw them in the village. They called me a filthy name. Carlos had Sam find out everything he could about them. The boat was chartered, and they were running it themselves. It was small enough so they could have tied up at the docks, but they anchored out. They didn’t do anything. It made Carlos very nervous. He’d watch it with binoculars. The other two men were younger. I guess they could have been friends of the one who died in prison. They just seemed to be waiting for something.

“Then one night they tried to kill Carlos. When they ran, they left the ladder against the wall. They’d fired at him, he thought with a rifle, from the top of the wall, from a place where you could see into his bedroom. It ripped through his smoking jacket and made a little red line across his belly, and just barely broke the skin. Instead of going all to pieces about it, he got very calm and thoughtful. I said he should get the police, but he said there were political reasons why he couldn’t ask for that kind of protection. He had to make do with the people he had brought from Cuba.

“I think it was two nights later he came to my room as I was going to bed and told me he knew all about me and Sam. He knew I’d been cheating on him with Sam from just about the second time I’d come down to visit. He said it had amused him. I made some smart remark and he gave me a hell of a slap across the face and knocked me down. He wanted me to work on Sam to get Sam to do what Carlos wanted him to do. He told me the lie he had told Sam. He had told Sam that the men on the boat were Castro agents, and that for several years Carlos had been financing underground activities against Castro, and those men were assigned to kill him so it would stop.

“I guess Sam never thought much about that sort of thing. I guess it would sound reasonable to him. He offered Sam a hundred thousand dollars in cash to get rid of those men on the boat. Carlos had it all worked out how it could be done. But Sam didn’t want to kill anybody. It made me feel funny to think of Sam killing anybody. With Carlos not going out in his own boat any more, not since Cal had brought that Cuban man around, Sam didn’t have much to do. The man who helped him on Carlos’ boat is named Miguel. He’s still at the house.

“When I was with Sam, it was usually on Carlos’ boat, and sometimes in Sam’s room. It wasn’t anything important with us. It was just something to do. And I enjoy it. Unless there were parties, it was quiet around there. Sort of sleepy. Siestas in the afternoon. I don’t like to sleep in the day. Maybe I’d be by the pool and Sam would give me a look and go away and I’d stay there and think about him, and then I’d have to go find him. I thought the servants probably knew. I didn’t know Carlos knew.

“Anyway I made Sam tell me about it, not letting on I knew, and then I worked on him to do it. I told him if he didn’t have any guts, I wasn’t interested any more. And besides, it was sort of patriotic. I said if he did it, I’d arrange to go away with him for a while. He was always a little more eager than I was. I guess guys always are. I didn’t tell him Carlos had promised me a little money for talking him into it. And I wouldn’t do anything with him until he said yes. I told him when he said yes, it would be the most special thing that ever happened to him. It did get me pretty excited, thinking of him killing those men in the way Carlos had it all figured out.

“They did it. Sam and Miguel. On the first calm dark night. They went out in the dinghy from Carlos’ boat, I guess about three in the morning, making no sound at all. They went aboard barefoot. Sam told me all about it. He held onto me, shivering like a little kid. He was too sick to make love. Twice he got up and he went and he was sick. It wasn’t like he thought it was going to be. One of the men was sleeping on deck. Miguel sneaked over to him and cut his throat. Sam said the man flopped and thumped around while he was dying. But it didn’t wake the others. They went below. One of the men was easy. The other one put up a terrible fight. He knocked some of Sam’s teeth out, hitting him with something. Sam strangled him. Then there was the woman. Nobody had known anything about the woman. She’d stayed below the whole time. There was some kind of little light on below. She came out of the front of the boat somewhere, and flew at Sam. He got her by the wrists. He said she was dark and pretty. He said that holding her, he could feel Miguel putting the knife into her back, and he could see her face changing as she knew she was dead. That was what made him so sick. He cried in my arms like a little kid.

“The dinghy was tied astern. They cut the anchor lines. Sam started the boat up and they went out the main pass, dead slow, without lights, heading southwest. Once they were pretty well out, Sam put the boat on automatic pilot. Miguel had taken the other body below. Sam disconnected the automatic bilge pumps and opened a sea cock. He said Miguel had been scrambling around with a sack, getting money and watches and rings and cameras and things like that. He made Miguel quit and got into the dinghy. Sam closed it up below.

“He went to the controls then and yelled to Miguel to cast off, and he put it up to cruising speed, and ran and dived over the rail and swam back to the dinghy. They sat in the dinghy. He said they could see the boat for just a little while, and then they could hear it for a lot longer. When they couldn’t hear it any more, they started the little outboard on the dinghy and came on back. They were about five or six miles out. They stopped the motor and rowed the last mile in.

“Sam said he estimated that the cruiser would run for maybe an hour before the bilge got full enough to stop the engines. Then it would go down pretty fast, and it would be nearly twenty miles out by then. About two or three days later we heard they were hunting for a boat. There were some search planes. Some men came and asked questions at the hotel. But all they could say was that the boat had left one night. That was about two months ago. After he did it, Sam wanted the money right away so he could leave. But Carlos stalled him. He said he had to make a trip to Mexico City to get it. He said he would go soon. I guess I was going to go with him. I don’t know. Maybe I was partly to blame. He wanted to shove some of the blame off on me, so he could feel a little better about it.

“Then one morning Carlos was sitting by the pool and I was swimming. I heard a woman scream. I climbed out and I asked Carlos if he heard it. I was looking around. He didn’t answer me. I looked at him again, and I realized he had made that sound. The doctor came up from Mazatlan by float plane. At first he thought Carlos would die. He was unconscious for four days. Then he was conscious, with his whole left side paralyzed and he couldn’t talk. The doctor said there might be some future improvement, but probably not much. Dead brain cells don’t come back. Sam was drunk for days.

“Then I found him in the study. He’d opened the glass case and he was putting those gold statues in the case Carlos had had made for them when he left Cuba. They go in little fitted places. He said he was going to get his money one way or another, and the whole thing made no sense at all unless he got his money. He said he was going to take them away and sell them to Cal Tomberlin. He said he’d earned them. I said they were worth more than what Carlos had promised him, that Cal had offered Carlos a lot more. He said then it would have to be a bonus, and the way he felt about it, the bonus could be for the woman.

“But maybe Cal wouldn’t want to pay him as much as he had offered Carlos anyway. He told me I should leave with him. But he was acting sort of wild and unreliable. I didn’t see how he could get those things across the border. He looked as if he was going to get into terrible trouble. And by then-I didn’t tell him-I’d gotten into Carlos’ wall safe, in his bedroom. He’d watch me with that one eye whenever I was in there. I looked everywhere and found the combination in his wallet, written on the edge of a card. I thought there would be a lot of money in there, but there was just some pesos, a little over twenty thousand pesos. And some bank books for accounts in Zurich, and the keys and records of the bank drawer in Mexico City. The money there is in American dollars.

“Sam left. That case was terribly heavy. He fixed it so he could sort of sling it on his shoulder. He wanted to take one of the cars. I didn’t want any trouble to be traced back to Carlos. I told the men not to let him take a car, to let him take the heavy case, but no car. But before he could leave, two men came. They had been at the house before. Friends of Carlos, from the old days in Havana. When they would visit him, they would have long private conferences about money and politics. They didn’t know Carlos had had a stroke. It made them very nervous.

“I took them to him and showed them how to talk to Carlos. He can blink his good eye for yes and no, and if you hold his wrist steady he can scrawl simple words on a pad. I wanted to stay there, but they shoved me out of the room and locked the door. At dusk they were still in there. Sam decided that they were going to take over, and if they knew what he was going to take, they would stop him. So he left, and he told me to tell those men, if they asked, that he’d left by boat. He thought they would get around to looking for him.

“Those men spent a long time with Carlos. They talked to me about what the doctor had said. They spent most of the next day with him. I guess it was slow work, finding out things from him. Maybe he didn’t want to tell them. That would make it slower. Once I listened at the door and heard Carlos make that terrible sound he makes when he gets frightened or angry.

“At last they knew all they wanted to know, from him. They found out I could open the safe. They made me open it. I’d hidden the keys and records for the Mexico City box. They didn’t seem to know or care about that. They took the Swiss bank book. They said fast things to Carlos and laughed, and the tears ran out of his good eye. They took the jade and the coin collection too. They asked me about Sam. One’s English was good, as good as Carlos‘.

“They said Carlos had done a very stupid thing, and that Sam had been very stupid to obey Carlos’ orders. They said that the friends of the people who had been on that boat would be told what had happened, so that nobody would start blaming the wrong people. And they said it would be very nice if they could turn Sam over to those friends, because that would satisfy them, and then the security of a lot of people living quietly in Mexico would not be endangered through political pressures. They said it would be nice if I told them every helpful thing I could think of about Sam, because if the authorities caught him with all that gold, and if Sam talked too much about where he got it, a lot of private and semi-official arrangements might collapse, and the newspaper publicity might make certain officials take steps they had already been bribed not to take.

“I made a sort of arrangement with them. I said I would stay on and sort of take charge of the household. They gave me some money. They said they would send me draughts on the bank in Culiacan to cover household expenses, plus a salary for me. Then when Carlos dies, they’ll send people to arrange about disposing of the house, getting the staff resettled, getting Mrs. Menterez into an institution. And they said I’ll get a bonus at that time. But I was to live quietly. No big parties and lots of house guests like before.

“They gave me an address in Mexico City to write to if anything happens. So… I told them all I knew about Sam, about how he planned to sell the statues to Cal Tomberlin. And I told them his village slut, Felicia, might know something. They went away in their car. After a few weeks I… thought of Gabe and sent for him. He’s been here three weeks. Then yesterday I got that note… and I wanted to know what the message was. From Sam.

Her voice had gotten increasingly husky. Her head lolled. “Please,” she said in a faint voice. “I’m getting awful uncomfortable.”

Perspiration darkened the blue blouse, pasting it to her midriff. I got up and stretched the stiffness out of my legs and went over and gave her three feet of slack and made the line fast in that position. She brought her arms down, moved in a small circle, rolling her shoulders.

“I’ve leveled with you,” she said. “Completely. I’ve told you everything. Maybe it doesn’t make me look so good. I can’t help that. I know one thing in this world. If you don’t take care of yourself, nobody else is going to.”

“Have they sent you money?”

“Once. I guess it’s going to come once a month. It wasn’t as much as they said it would be.”

“What are the names of those two men?”

“They never said. One was Luis and the other was Tomas. They had a white Pontiac convertible, great big sunglasses, resort clothes, a very sharp pair. The other times they were here, they were very respectful to Carlos.”

“Do you know the names of the people on the boat?”

“Just the one that Cal brought to the house, the older one. Senor Mineros. I don’t know his first name.”

“Where does Tomberlin live?”

“He has a lot of places. The only one I was at was a sort of lodge, way up near Cobblestone Mountain. I don’t mind fun and games. But that got a little too rich for me, believe me. He had a lot of kids up there that weekend. I knew most of them. It got crazy up there. You couldn’t walk without stepping on a jumbled up pile of kids and getting pulled down into a lot of messy fooling around. I got out of there.”

She looked at me with delicate indignation, a righteous little snippet, asking my moral approval.

“How old are you, Almah?”

“Twenty-four.”

Nora was having a long wait. I looked at the lovely and slightly soiled little blondie. I wondered what I would do with her if I really had the power to judge her and sentence her. Like the true eccentric, she thought she was just like everybody else. She was a cold mischief, with looks which had kept her from paying any penalties. In a small wind in the clearing, blowing toward me, she smelled of scent, of repellent, and a small sharp smell of nervous perspiration. She was too self-involved, in money hunger and pleasure hunger, to be the legendary femme fatale. She was a blunderer, but she would keep landing on her feet. She was never going to bring anyone any luck.

She had explained something I had felt about Sam Taggart. There had been a strangeness about him. During the short time I’d been with him, I’d felt that we could never again be as close as we had once been. He’d traveled too far. That little boat ride had taken him a long long way. At the time he died, he was trying to come back, but he probably knew he could never make it all the way back. He could pretend for a time. But the act of murder was still with him. Nora would have immediately sensed that strangeness, that apartness. And she would not have rested until she learned the cause of it.

Little Almah Hichin, with her lavender eyes, and her slender girlish figure, and her greedy and available and random little loins, was going to go her way, making out, aiming for the money, spicing it with her kicks. As most of the people who would become involved with her would be as trivial as she was, she would probably do no great amount of human damage. A child of her times, running free as long as she dared, then setting herself to entrap some monied fool old enough so no childbearing would be asked of her. She felt herself to be infinitely sweet and precious and provocative. Enchantingly foolish sometimes. But talented and admirable. A lovely smile is really all a girl needs.

“Why don’t you say something?” she asked.

Suddenly it didn’t seem suitable to merely untie her. She would preen herself and pat her hair and tell me chidingly that I had been horrid to her. Her manner would be flirtatious and self-satisfied. I wondered if it would be possible to convince her of her own mortality, and if it would do any good. That cold little sensuous brain thought it would live forever.

“I guess I’m stalling. This isn’t something I’m going to enjoy.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “Chivalry or something, I guess. And when… a girl is as pretty as you are, Almah, it seems like such a hell of a waste. And, to tell the truth, I’m sort of an amateur at this. I’ve never killed a woman before.”

Her mouth sagged and her eyes bulged. “Kill!”

“Sweetie, I told you I couldn’t promise a thing.”

“But I’ve told you everything! My God! You can’t be serious! Look I’ll do anything you say. You could get in terrible trouble. People will look for me.”

I pointed a thumb over my shoulder. “They won’t look back in that jungle. I guess I’m not doing you any favor by stalling. I know I have to do it. But I feel squeamish about it.”

She tried to smile. “This is some kind of nasty joke, isn’t it?”

“I wish it was. I’ll make it easy on you. I won’t hurt you.”

“But I haven’t done anything!”

“I have to do as I’m told.”

I stared somberly at her. Her color had become quite ghastly. “Now wait a minute!” she said, her voice high and thin. “I’m going to get that money. Listen, you could come back with me and I could get you into the house. You could be with me every minute. You could come with me when we go to get the money. You can have half of it. You can have all of it.”

“You can scream now if you want to. It might help a little. It won’t make any difference, but it might help.”

She had begun to babble, her voice high and thin and fast and almost out of control. “But you don’t even know me. You’ve got no reason! Please! I can hide here. You can say you did it. Then I’ll go wherever you want me to go. I can wait for you. Please. I’ll belong to you. I’ll do anything for you. Please don’t do that to me!” She began to dash back and forth, yanking at the rope, making little yelping sounds of panic.

I went to the line and hauled it tighter than before, bringing her up onto tiptoe. Again I felt that urge to howl with sour laughter. Melodrama made me self-conscious. But I thought of what she had talked Sam into doing, and I wanted to make a lasting impression on her. I wanted her to feel death so close she could smell the shroud and the dank earth.

I took the pocket knife out and opened the ridiculously small blade. I walked up to her. Her eyes showed white all the way around the lavender irises. She had bitten into her underlip. There was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth. She made a maddened humming sound, and her body spasmed and snapped and contorted in the animal effort to run.

She looked at the knife, and the ultimate terror of it loosened her control over her bodily functions. Now she was beyond all pretense, perhaps for the first time since childhood. Sam’s last duchess. Menterez’s last blonde slut. As I raised the blade, she opened her jaws wide in a final yawning caw of despair, and I lifted it above her hands and cut the line.

She fell in a sprawling soiled heap, sobbing and shuddering, rolling her face against the earth. I looked down at her for a moment, pocketed the knife and walked out to the car.

Nora started to say something, and looked at my face and stopped abruptly. She slid over and I got behind the wheel. I drove in silence to the hotel. Nora got out there.

She said, “Are we going to leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

“AIl right, dear.”

“I think I’ll go back and pick her up.”

“Yes, dear.”

Fourteen

ALMAH HICHIN had taken a long time to free her hands and pull herself together enough to start walking west, toward the village. Felicia had walked it.

She was only about a hundred yards from the obscure entrance to the isolated clearing. She stopped when she saw the car coming. She looked small, lost, displaced in time and space. I went on by her, turned around in the road and came back through my own drift of dust. I stopped beside her. She leaned on the closed door and gave a gagging cough.

Then she looked at me with a hideous remnant of flirtatiousness, like the grin on a cholera victim, and said in a trembling voice, “Did you… want to give me a ride?” Her glance met mine and slid away, utterly humble.

“Get in.”

She slid in, wary and apologetic and self-effacing. As I started up I told myself that something would have broken her sooner or later. She would have come up against something that couldn’t be teased, cajoled or seduced. The ones with no give, the ones with the clear little porcelain hearts shatter. And in the shattering, some chips and splinters are lost, so that when, with great care, they are mended, the little fracture lines show.

Did she, for God’s sake, think she was going to be immune forever? The blackness is always a half step behind you, hand raised to touch you on the shoulder. Sam learned that. Carlos learned it. Nora learned it. Little golden girls cannot stay ignorant forever. But when you break a pretty thing, even if it is a cheap pretty thing, something does go out of the world. Something died in that clearing. And she would never fit together as well again.

I pulled over and stopped abruptly, short of the ridge where the village would be in view. She had ridden with her head bowed, her small fist and marked wrists cradled in her lap.

I got out and said, “You can take it from here.”

She raised her head slowly and looked at me through the sheaf of spilled blonde hair, her face crinkled and puzzled, like a child wondering whether to cry.

“Why?” she said. Here lip was badly swollen where she had gnawed it in her terror.

“Because you have to play these games with real blood and real people.”

“Who are you?”

“Sam was my friend a long time ago,” I said. “The woman on the boat was real. The knife was real. The blood was real. Sam died on that boat. It was just your turn to die a little.”

“I’m just sick now. I’m just terribly terribly sick.”

“So is Carlos.”

She coughed into her fist. “You say crazy things. I don’t mean to hurt anybody. You want to hurt people. You wanted to hurt me. God, I feel destroyed! What does that make you? Does that make you so great, scaring the wits out of me?”

There was no real defiance. It was just a reflex, an habitual attitude, accompanied by that horrid little smirk I had seen before. Her glance moved swiftly away again, reminding me of the way a spiritless dog cringes when inviting a caress. She would have to learn how to imitate defiance. There wasn’t any of the genuine article left. It had crawled off into the brush behind the clearing to die and rot. I wondered if she could sense how it was all going to be for her from now on. The jackals can always sense that kind of vulnerability. Imitations of defiance amuse them. They travel in packs. They would hand her around. She wouldn’t last very well.

There was no answer I could give her. I began walking toward the village. After fifty feet I looked back. She was still on the passenger side. At the top of the ridge I looked back again. She was behind the wheel. A little later I heard the car start and come toward me. I played a little game, with a flavor of penance. As the car came up behind me, I listened for a sudden change in the motor noise, and I was poised to dive clear. If there was that much spirit left, maybe she wouldn’t be jackal meat after all. Maybe there was a toughness I hadn’t reached. The red car went by me, slowly, as far over on the other side as she could get it. She gave me a single empty look and went on, clutching the wheel at ten after ten, the blonde hair blowing in the dusty wind.

I went right to the Tres Panchos. It was a little after five. There were a half dozen fishermen in there, smelling of their trade. The juke was playing the bass pasodoble of the bull ring. I leaned into a corner of the bar, and made Mustache understand with bad Spanish and gestures that I wanted a glass of ice and a bottle of tequila anejo.

“Botella?” he asked. “La Botella?”

I reached and took it out of his hand. Twenty pesos. He shrugged and watched me pour the glasses and shrugged again and walked away.

I motioned him back and had him get himself a shot glass. I filled it from my bottle. I held my glass up and said, “Drink to me, my friend. Drink to this poisonous bag of meat named McGee. And drink to little broken blondes, and a dead black dog, and a knife in the back of a woman, and a knife in the throat of a friend. Drink to a burned foot, and death at sea, and stinking prisons and obscene gold idols. Drink to loveless love, stolen money and a power of attorney, mi amigo. Drink to lust and crime and terror, the three unholy ultimates, and drink to all the problems which have no solution in this world, and at best a dubious one in the next.”

He beamed without comprehension, and said, “Salud!” We drank and bowed and I filled the glasses again.

I know that for a long time there was a respectful area of emptiness around me, even when the place had filled up. The Mexicans respect the solemn, dedicated, brooding borracho, and have an almost racial empathy for the motives which can send the soul of a man crawling down the neck of a bottle to drown. I know there was a purchase of another bottle. But from there on, memory is fragmented by a vast paralysis of the cerebral cortex.

Chopped bright fragments of memory endure. McGee dancing-the feet very deft very tricky, so that I could look down with awe and watch them perform on their own. McGee, the soul of generosity, buying drinks for multitudes of friends. McGee leading a choral group in a song so heartbreaking it made him weep-Somewhere Over the Rainbowwwwwww…

And then a hilarious and giggling and cooperative process of getting the unwieldy bulk of McGee up a narrow staircase, some of the sweet gigglers pushing from behind, and some ahead pulling him by the hands. Light of two yellow flames. Great blundering sprawl into a rickety clatter of bed, huge McGee guffaws-McGaw guffees?-mingling with the soprano jabbering, laugh-squeals, clothes-tugging. Later, in a heavy sweet humid blackness, awakening to incomprehensible effort, a half-dream of holding someone, of trying to overcome, together, a great steady remorseless beating, of trying to still and silence something as implacable as the sea itself. Texture of dense hair, not clovery, thick with perfume, taint of kerosene. A sticky chomping next to my ear. Thin smell of spearmint mingling with the rest. Guilt. Then a strange awareness of a sour justice in it. This will cure that… This will end that. This will atone for that…

I awoke into suffocating heat, to barbed needles of light which went through my eyes and into my brain, to a mouth dry as sand, clotted teeth, and a headache that seemed to expand and contract my forehead with each heartbeat as though it were a red balloon a child was trying to inflate. Tequila hangover, in a gagging density of perfume, under a tin roof, on the sweat-damp sheets of a village whore. She stood naked beside the bed, bending over me, looking at me with melting concern, the heat in the room making her look as if she had been greased.

“Leedle seek?” she said.

“Oh God. Oh God.”

She nodded and shouldered into something pink and went out the door. When she came back she had a tin pitcher of ice water, a jelly glass, and some ice wrapped in a towel. I drank water until my belly felt tight as a drum. Then I lay back and chewed ice, with the chilly towel across my forehead and eyes, wondering where she had gone. She came back and took the towel off my face and handed me a half glass of reddish brown liquid.

“Drink fast,” she said, making the gesture of tossing it off.

I did so. I think one could achieve the same result by drinking four ounces of boiling tabasco sauce. I sprang up. I roared and paced and wept. I sweated and gasped and wept and held my throat. I ran back to the bed and opened the towel and stuffed my mouth with ice and chomped it up like Christmas candy.

When the worst of it was over, I subsided weakly on the bed. Felicia had watched the whole performance calmly, standing leaning against the door frame, her arms folded. As I became aware of my headache again, I realized it was not quite as bad. I mopped my face with the cool towel.

The cure reminded me of an ancient joke. A man has all his teeth pulled and new plates put in immediately. The dentist tells him they’ll be uncomfortable for a while. Two weeks later he runs into the dentist. He is hobbling along on two canes. The dentist asks him what happened. He explains that he had gone fishing with his wife and she had fallen out of the rowboat. In diving overboard to rescue her, he had misjudged distance, and caught himself in the groin with an oarlock. He says, “You know, for about forty seconds there, Doc, my teeth didn’t bother me a damn bit.”

She went over to her dressing table, opened a box, and came back with my watch and wallet. It was five of eleven by my watch.

She said, “Every goddam peso is there, Trrav. ”

She went over and filled the wash basin, laid out soap and towel and comb. She tossed her pink wrapper aside, searched one of the cardboard wardrobes and pulled out that orange shift I had seen her in before and pulled it on. She gave a couple of casual swipes at her hair with a brush, painted her mouth, yawned and said, “I am downstairs, okay?”

“Okay. I guess I was a damn fool.”

She shrugged. “Pretty dronk, Trrav.” She gave me a broad merry smile. “Almost too dronk for the love.” She went out and closed the door.

Getting dressed was sad and enormous labor. A man in the grip of the remorses is a pitiable thing. You think of all the promise you once had, and what has become of you. A hundred different versions of yourself sit in the audience and applaud ironically. Your own body disgusts you. Alcohol is a depressant-physically and emotionally. And that final fermentation of the maguey seems to uncork the bottom-most cask, where you have been hiding the black despairs of all the years.

When I found the inside staircase and went down, I was glad to see that only Mustache and Felicia were there. As I trudged toward the bar, Mustache uncapped a bottle of beer and set it on the bar with a flourish. He knew a glass would be superfluous. I held the bar with one hand and tilted it up with the other, and set it down when it was empty. I stopped him from opening another one.

Felicia took me by the wrist and tugged me over to a table. I told her I had to get back to the hotel. She said we had to talk first.

She sat opposite me and looked at me with a certain somber speculation. “One man from Garcia loves a hotel girl. I hear a thing. I wonder something. You go in there? Kill a dog? Almost kill some man too?”

“Me? No.”

“Yesterday your skinny woman is in the red car with the Heechin rubia. Then you are alone in the red car. And one time you are in the car with your skinny one. And one time Heechin is alone, eh?”

“So?”

She slitted the anthracite eyes. “Felicia is not stupid. It is about Sam, eh? These things?”

“Felicia, those men who hurt you, they had a white car?”

“Ah, such a beautiful car, si.”

“How was Sam going to get to the States from Los Mochis?”

“He gets to Ensenada by little airplane, it is easy from there, Trrav. Many ways.”

“Where no one will look in that heavy case he had?”

“Many ways. For a man who has some Spanish and some money.” She closed her strong coppery fingers around my wrist. “The hotel girl says one thing. There is one bad man at Garcia. One killer, eh? Miguel, I think. You are trouble to Garcia, maybe they send him. Cuidado, hombre.”

“Why would they think I’m trouble?”

“The rubia could think so, eh? Too many questions, maybe? One thing. You have trouble, Trrav, you have friends here. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Miguel is most sad of the dog. His dog, Brujo.”

“What does Miguel look like?”

“Tiny small skinny man with a sad face. Maybe forty years. Very quick.”

“And he worked with Sam on the Garcia boat?”

“Ah, you know it too! On that boat, La Chispa Very pretty. But not using it now a long time. Months, maybe. Garcia use it every day almost, long ago, many people, fishing, drinking, music. Nobody to run it now, unless Miguel.” She patted my hand. “Have care, amador. Come back to Felicia.”

“I think we are leaving soon.”

She concealed a sharp look of disappointment with an almost immediate impassivity. She nodded. “Maybe this is not a good place for you.”

I trudged the seven hundred miles to the Casa in my dirty shirt, feeling unwell. I had the cold sweats, and the residual twitches of alcoholic poisoning. And I had the guilts. You think that you have laboriously achieved adult status. Then you prove there must be an incurable streak of adolescence. I knew that Nora would be wild with worry. When I went to the desk for my key I had the impression everybody knew exactly where I had been all night. Arista seemed blandly contemptuous.

He said, “At the lady’s request, sir, I made flight arrangements for you. But you would have had to leave here at ten-thirty by bus. It is now too late. Please let me know if you want this arranged again for tomorrow. It is a considerable inconvenience to me when such plans are changed.”

“Aren’t you being paid to be inconvenienced, Arista?”

“In the case of valued guests, I would say yes.” For a moment I debated pulling him over the counter by the front of his spotless jacket, and running him down his front steps. But the effort would joggle my head.

“What kind of guest am I, Arista?”

He smiled. “We have discovered a small difficulty in the reservations. We shall require that your rooms be vacated by tomorrow, sir. I trust you will be able to settle your account in cash?”

“Or you will call the village cop?”

“I would not imagine you are entirely unacquainted with the police, sir.”

I had difficulty in thinking clearly. I could not imagine what had so abruptly changed his attitude. Could Almah Hichin have made some kind of complaint? Had I been seen going in or out of my room window? Could he really be so prim about a night on the town?

“That’s a dangerous smile, Arista. It tempts me to see if I can knock it off.”

He took a hasty step back. “If you and… the lady leave quietly tomorrow, sir, I will not cause you any trouble. As you leave I shall turn over to you an object I now have in my office safe. It is not customary for tourists to bring such things into Mexico. The room maid reported that a toilet was not flushing properly. The maintenance man discovered… the hidden weapon and turned it over to me. I will give it back to you when you leave. I wish to operate… a quiet and respectable resort, sir.”

I stood for a few minutes in thought. “I suppose your whole staff knows about this by now.”

“It is the sort of thing that would entertain them.”

“When was it found?”

“Yesterday, in the early afternoon. I expected you to deny any knowledge of it, sir.”

“Why.

“Possession of a weapon can be an awkwardness for a tourist, I would think.”

I smiled at him. “Arista, it just grieves me that I can’t ever tell you how stupid you’re being. I might be able to tell the owners, but I can’t ever tell you.”

It was a childish counterattack, but it knifed him neatly. I saw his face go blank as he began to think of certain legitimate reasons why I might have a gun in the room.

“But, sir, I can only go by what…”

“Forget it, Arista.”

“But… it could be possible that reservations might be rearranged so that…”

“Forget that too. Set us up to get out of here tomorrow morning.”

“Operating a place such as this is often a very… ”

“You have lots of problems,” I said and walked away.

It was after twelve. The interconnecting door was closed. It was locked on her side. There was no answer to my knock. I took a tub, hot as I could stand it, and topped it off with a cold shower. I pared the sandpaper stubble from my jaws. All the thorn gashes were cleanly scabbed, and I got rid of the last of the little bandages. The gnawed place on my arm was healing well too, and did not look too much like toothmarks, so I left the bandage off also. I dressed in fresh clothing, and looked at my face in the mirror. Eyes sunken and slightly bloodshot. Slight tendency toward cold sweat. A faint beginning of hunger. Small motor tremor of the hands.

Just as I was about to leave the room, I heard Nora stirring around on the other side of the door. I knocked and heard her call, “Just a minute!”

In a little while she unlocked the door and opened it and said, “Yes?” She wore a robe and a small and rather formal smile.

“I thought you might have wondered about me.”

“Not particularly, Trav.”

“Oh.”

“I wandered out to the road and I saw Miss Hichin go by, alone, heading up toward the house, driving quite slowly. I thought you would come back and tell me what she had told you. I thought you might realize I was quite anxious to know. Then it got to be dark, I sent Jose down to the vilIage to find you, on his scooter. He said you were singing and dancing. I hope you had a jolly time. I made reservations but…”

“I know, I talked to Arista. He’s making them for tomorrow.”

“I’ve been at the pool. I’ll be going down to lunch in a little while.”

“I don’t think that would be a good place to talk to you.”

“Why not?”

“It’s public. You might be upset.”

“I don’t imagine anything can get me that upset.”

“It upset me, Nora. I got pretty drunk.”

“Evidently. You look it.”

“I stayed there.”

“More research, no doubt.”

“You can’t do much research after you pass out.”

“Let me explain something to you. You don’t have to justify yourself to me. I haven’t put any strings on anything. You’re a free agent, Trav. I expected a little more consideration. Not on the basis of anything between us, but just because… you know I was anxious to know what you found out.”

“When you get dressed, come in here and I’ll tell you.”

She came in when she was ready. I told her. Long after she kept denying that Sam could have done that, tears running down her face, I knew that she had begun to accept it. And I was certain when she began to blame Almah. I tried to explain to her how I had felt about the little broken blonde, but she could not comprehend that, because hers was a different kind of toughness. It wasn’t the hard and fragile kind. Then I told her about Arista and the gun. She understood then why Arista had been rude and impertinent to her.

“There’s something else about the gun,” I said. “All the hotel servants know about it. They lost a gun up there the other night. It makes a pretty easy two plus-two. But I don’t think anybody will make a move. Menterez is helpless. The girl is demoralized. I don’t think any of them want any police problems. Some girl that works in the hotel sees one of those Cubans. Word would get back that way, probably last night. Probably water swirling out of the tank moved the gun and it got in the way of the mechanism. One of those things.”

“If those guards decide it was you, Trav, what would they think you were trying to do?”

“Friend of Mineros, maybe, coming to take another crack at Menterez. If they know about the gun, let’s assume they know we’re leaving. There’s nothing more here, Nora. We go and try it from the other direction. Tomberlin and Mineros, the friends of Mineros.”

“Why haven’t those friends come after Carlos Menterez before now?”

“Maybe they have been around. Killing a man in that shape would be doing him a favor. And it would have to be a personal thing. Mineros could blame Carlos for the death of his brother, his brother’s wife, his nephew. Maybe the people who knew what Mineros was trying to do, maybe they don’t have strong reasons. This is remote. It’s hard to get at him. And it’s obviously dangerous. Maybe the two younger men who were killed along with Mineros are the only ones who would have had the push to make another try. Hell, maybe somebody is setting it up more carefully for the next attempt. We’re in the dark, Nora.”

“And the girl and that lawyer will get the money?”

“If she can get him to sign. If the bank accepts it. If somebody isn’t waiting for her to walk out with it. If the cash isn’t found at the border and impounded. Carlos Menterez must know exactly what she is. And he knows that’s all he has left. Money he can’t get to, and a girl who doesn’t give a damn about him. A big house and a crazy wife and not much more time left. And a stranger’s face at his window. Nora?”

“Yes?”

“Does it do any good to tell you I’m sorry?”

“It was probably a good thing, Trav. Maybe I was getting emotionally dependent. Maybe… things were getting too important.” She tried to smile. “I guess it’s a little bit like waking up.”

I checked my watch. It was two-thirty. “Do you want lunch?”

“I guess not. Not now.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Lie down for a little while, I guess.” She went into her room. In a few moments she rapped and came back in and handed me the garish little bedroom gun.

“By the way, you handled that well,” I told her. She made a sour mouth. “I imagined her with Sam. I guess it made me pretty convincing. That plus a natural antagonism toward pretty blondes.” The door closed.

I was able to get a sandwich at the hotel bar. Afterwards I wandered down to the boat basin and walked around to the other side reserved for resident boats. There were four tied up there. I would have expected La Chispa to have been one of the two bigger ones. But it was a flush deck cruiser, about 42 feet, twin screw, doubtless gas fueled. It was custom, with a big bow flare, outriggers, too much chrome for my taste. It had that look of neglect which a boat can acquire quicker than any other gadget known to man. The varnish was turning milky. The chrome was pitted. The white hull was black-ringed like a boardinghouse bathtub. Birds had left their tokens topsides. The mooring lines were chafed and bearded, and she looked a little low in the water, as if the pumps would have a long chore when somebody turned her on. The dinghy was upside down topsides, and named the Chispita. Sam’s assault craft. The stupid son of a bitch.

I went back past the sign which said Owners and Guests Only, and hunted for Heintz and found him in the shed behind the dock office putting a new diaphragm in a complex-looking fuel pump. I made some small talk, and when I thought I could do it casually enough, I said, “it looks like one of those over there is going to sink at the dock one of these days.”

“Oh. La Chispa? The owner is sick.”

“Doesn’t he have anyone to look after it?”

“The man left when he got sick.”

“I hate to see that happen to a boat.”

“I know. One of these days, maybe, I’ll see if I can get permission to fix it up.”

“Pretty small to go anywhere from here, isn’t it?”

“Just a local boat. He had it freightered to Mazatlan and brought up here. A long run for that boat, Mazatlan to here. You have to wait for good weather. If he wanted, he could run it over to La Paz, but nowhere from there except back. Not enough range. A damn fool maybe could get it up to Guaymas, or maybe even down to Manzanillo, but that’s the end of the line. The big motor sailers are what you have to have on this coast.”

“I understand some pretty good sized yachts get lost in these waters. I read about one a couple of months ago.”

He tightened up the last bolts on the housing of the fuel pump before answering. “The Columbine. She was in here. She anchored off. A good sea boat. I would guess an eight hundred mile range at low cruising. Things can happen. It was chartered. Maybe bad maintenance. Dry rot. Bottled gas explosion in the galley. Maybe they set course for Cabo San Lucas and the compensation chart was wrong and they made a bad estimate of speed and passed it too far to the south. It’s a damn big ocean out there.”