Gun for a Gringo

Chapter I The Gringo Gets a Job

I was sitting there sketching with a pencil — stub on the marble table-top and rubbing it out with my elbow, when he came over and took a gander across my shoulder. It’s a great habit I have of killing time when I can’t pay for a drink I’ve ordered, for instance, or I want to stay out of the hot sun like I did just then. That sun they have down there at Costamala is nothing for a white man to fool around with. But under the big stone arches of this sidewalk café, which they called Filthy Frank’s, it was nice and cool and shady. So all the dirty looks I was getting from the mozo for staying there all afternoon on a twenty-cent gin daisy (unpaid) just rolled off my thick skin.

This guy that had just come up looked like a big shot; he reminded me of some of my former side-kicks in Chi. He had a headlight on his little finger the size of a walnut, and after he’d been breathing down the back of my neck a couple of minutes he said in my own language, without much of an accent: “You do that very well.”

“You can’t eat it, though,” I said.

“You’re a gringo, aren’t you?” he said then.

“It’s a cinch I’m no Chinaman,” I let him know.

“What’re you doing down here?” he asked next.

“I’m taking a sun-bath on the beach,” I told him — and he knew exactly what I meant, all right. My shoes were in two parts, soles and uppers, I had a week’s back-shaving coming to me, and the sea was three hundred miles away, so I didn’t mean that kind of a beach.

“Why you not bring money with you from your own country?” he wanted to know.

“I left kinda quick,” I told him drily.

“Ah, I begin to understand!” He seemed to get strangely interested all at once. He sat down with me, flagged the mozo. “Let me buy you a drink,” he suggested affably.

“I never said no to that one yet.”

When the drinks showed and we’d each taken a muzzle at them, the next crack was: “So you are — shall we say, a fugitive?”

Seeing that he wanted it that bad, I paid it off to him for a come-on. Whether it was true or not was my own business. “Had a little accident,” I told him. “Just li’l accident with my trigger-finger. And it seemed there was a gun wrapped around it, and it seemed the gun went off, and it seemed there was a guy in front of the gun, and it seemed he lay down flat, and it seemed there’s a law against that up there, dunno why, so I came down here.”

He looked all around him, to make sure we weren’t being overheard. “Whatever the hell it’s all about, here it comes now,” I said to myself.

“I could use someone like you, a man who doesn’t let a little accident worry him,” he breathed. “What would you say to having another little accident — this time for five thousand pesos to repay you for your, ahem, carelessness?”

“So I had you spotted right along, did I?” I said to myself. I took my time about answering, to give the build-up the right look. “That’s eighteen C’s in our money,” I drawled. “Jack it up a little and I’m in. You gotta remember that I can’t lam out this time, there’s no place else to go from here.”

“Seven-fifty,” he said, as though we were talking about the price of neckties or something.

I gave him a sour grin. “For that ticket,” I said, “I’ll do you a catastrophe, let alone an accident. Now, who do I get careless with — and where do I make the mistake?”

“Not so fast,” he said cagily. “We have to know a little more about you first.”

We, meant it was a combine. “You can call me Steve Willoughby,” I said, “and I sleep on my right side. Now what else d’ye wanna know?”

“All right, Stiff.” Some of the velvet wore off and he started showing his claws from this point on. “Now there’s one thing you better get through your head. Once I tell you who this party is who has the accident happen to him, it’s too late for you to back out, you already know too much. So I’m going to give you until tonight to think it over, and you better make pretty damn sure you don’t change your mind after that — if you know what’s good for you.” He fooled around with his pongee vest, which had big pearl buttons, and managed to sell me an eyeful of a packed armpit holster. “Otherwise you li’able to have a little accident yourself.”

I went ahead drawing as though I hadn’t noticed it. “Pretty up-to-date down here yourselves, aren’t you?” I murmured. “I should try to back out — with an extradition rap hanging over my head and not even a passport to get out on? Get smart to yourself, señor, get smart to yourself. Why not spill it now, and get it over with. What’re you worried about? I told you I’m in.”

“Tonight will be time enough,” he smiled sleepily. So I knew by that what he wanted the delay for, to check on me and find out if I was all I seemed to be — and I didn’t like the idea much, in fact hardly at all. “You be here tonight at this same table,” he went on, “and you order a big glass of ice’ coffee, and you lay the straw across the top like this, flat — see? And after that, everything takes care of itself. But I advise you to be here, otherwise—” He snapped his fingers. “I wouldn’t give that for your chances of seeing the night through.”

“And what do I use for money to order this coffee on?” I said surlily, to stay in character.

“Use this for a retainer,” he said, and contemptuously tossed down a crumpled bill. I pounced on it like I’d never seen one before, then after he’d gotten up and strolled off I calmly thumbed the waiter over and handed it to him. “Leave this table just the way it is and don’t get itchy with that wet cloth of yours until I come back, get me?” I said in Spanish.

“I understand,” he said.

I saw my late table-mate cross the sun-baked plaza and get into a whopping Bugatti parked across on the other side. I waited until the man at the wheel had checked out with him, then I went inside. The back room at Filthy Frank’s had one of the few telephones there are in Costamala. I kept my eye on the table from where I was, while I was getting a connection. I could see it through the tall, arched doorway. I made a funnel of my hand, for a silencer. “This is the gringo. Send one of your agentes around to Frank’s. Now, get this. Tell him to sit down at the third table from the end, on the outside row, and take a good look at the sketch of a man’s head he’ll find pencilled on the table-top. I want to know who it is. In case he has a little trouble with it, tell him to add a pongee vest, a big rock on the little finger, and a Bugatti — that ought to help it come clear. I think I’m watched, so he shouldn’t give me away.”

I hung up and gave the swinging door next to me a jab with my heel so it flapped in and out a couple of times. Then I showed up outside again as though I’d just come out from the verminous wash-room. I sat down at a different table and ordered another daisy.

In about ten minutes a government man I knew by sight showed up and sat down where I had been first. He wouldn’t have fooled anyone back home for a minute, but they’re slower on the pick-up down there. His technique was punk and I kept cursing under my breath. He ordered some kind of bilge, and then he kept staring straight down at the table. I expected him to come smack over to me after that, but at least he had sense enough not to. He got up and went inside, and we hooked up in there, on different sides of the swinging door.

“That’s Torres, the son of the former minister of war,” he said.

“I wonder who he wants rubbed?” I thought to myself. This was getting into the upper register now. “What else?” I asked.

“The old man is supposed to have had his father shot during the last revolution.”

I didn’t have to wonder any more, after hearing that. “Just forget about it,” I told him. It was a job up my own private alley, I could see that now — one of the very kind I’d been hired for and brought down here from three thousand miles away to handle — and I wasn’t splitting it with anyone. The poor “old man” couldn’t trust anyone in his own country I had a belly-laugh over it without letting it show on my face. They pick his own bodyguard to be their trigger man! Was that punch-drunk or was it punch-drunk? In one way, of course, they had the right angle: a foreigner was their best means of getting at him for the simple reason that he didn’t trust his own countrymen, and they knew it.

The Costamalan dick mooched off one way, looking furtively all around him — he might as well have had a sandwich-board on his shoulders labeled “I am Operative Number 5” — and I ambled off in the other. I thought it over this way: since Torres wasn’t alone in this, and I had no proof so far whom he was out to get, the only thing for me to do was pull my punches until after tonight when I’d made sure. If it was somebody else he was putting the finger on, it was none of my business, I wasn’t a commissioned member of the secret police force; if it was my employer, that was different. I had to be sure, because their idea of a trial down there is to stand the guy up against a wall and bang, bang, bang! — a mouthpiece was never heard of in that country. A spring just meant a season of the year.

I was probably being watched right now, but the thing was — by who? The plaza was dead, too hot for any of the regular bench-lizards to be out yet. There was, however, a guy standing on the opposite corner running through the winning lottery-numbers pasted up on the wall to see if he’d clicked. He’d been there a little too long, though, he should have found out by now. “So it’s you, is it?” I said to myself, “Well, watch me give you a run for your money!”

I took the Reforma, the main lane, nice and slow, and he stayed about a block and a half behind me. Which is too much leeway, anyway you look at it. So I just turned a corner all of a sudden, popped into a prewar cab ricketing my way, and got down flat on the floor. “Keep going aimless like you were, and leave your pennant up,” I told the driver, “only don’t take on anybody else.” So a minute later an empty hack passed my tail, going in the opposite direction, and he never even gave it a second look.

Still, a guy with white skin was bound to stick out like a sore thumb in that town, so I knew I’d be picked up again in no time, maybe by someone else, and this was only a breathing spell. The place was stool-riddled. They wanted to check on me, and the idea was not to make it tough for them, but easy. So I used the breathing-spell to give up my own half-way decent quarters, which a beachcomber wouldn’t rate, brought away my razor in my pocket and my differential in a leg holster, like a garter around the calf of my leg. Then I found a mangy, run-down rat-hole in an alley called “La Libertad”; it smelled of stale chili and mouldy plaster, but it was just what I was looking for.

I bought a fifty-centavo room for five pesos. “I’ve been here five days,” I told the guy that ran it.

He didn’t think I had. “This four-fifty extra says I have,” I snapped, so then he agreed I had and probably blamed it on marihuana. “Somebody’s going to stop in between now and evening and ask you,” I told him. “What’s more, I haven’t paid a cent; you don’t know whether to kick me out or turn me over to the police. Comprende?” After I’d repeated it five times it finally sank in, but if he’d had scissors and a paper-pattern he’d have handed them to me. I went up and took a look. The mattress had a lot of black specks and they didn’t stay still.

They traced me in less than an hour. I could hear the voices down in the flea-bitten patio, and tuned in through the crack of the door. “Si, a gringo,” the owner was saying, “we have one here. For five days now, and he hasn’t paid a cent! Mother of the angels, am I running a charity ward?”

“Not bad, greaseball,” I grinned. I got a look at them over the railing. One was the same guy I’d ditched in the cab, the other one was new to me. Well, I had three of them rogues-galleried now — and Torres’ driver made a possible fourth — but I knew there must be more of them than that in the daisy-chain.

I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning my little buddy from Chicago with the tail of my shirt, and then I went back to Filthy’s in time for what they called the “refresco-hour,” which was when everyone in town showed up there to get tanked. The place was blazing with lights and they were packing them in, but I got my same table back and bought a coffee. They bring it in a glass down there and you could spot what it was all the way across the room. I laid the straw flat across the top of the glass, and then I sat back and waited for the pay-off.

You saw everything there but ladies and gentlemen, the place is known from Nome to Cape Horn and back again; half-breed generals with swords and cocked hats, little man-eaters with tall combs in their hair, Chinese cocottes drinking absinthe, Indian girls with bleached blond hair, the dregs of the earth. Then into this mess, like an angel from another world, stepped a white woman, a lady, and they all soft-pedaled their noise for a minute. She was more than that, she had on the flowing black garb of a religious order, a nursing sister of charity, and a market-basket hung on one arm. In the other hand she held a small receptacle, and went around from table to table asking for contributions for some hospital or something, like the Salvation Army used to do in our saloons in the old days.

They all loosened up, their kind always do, and she got around to where I was sitting last of all. It was a beautifully-timed performance but I didn’t tumble for a minute. I’m no piker, but I was supposed to be a derelict and I wasn’t shelling out and giving myself away that easy. I shook my head uncomfortably while she stood there whining something about the House of the Good Shepherd, with her eyes on my coffee-glass and the transverse straw. Then suddenly at the tag end of her spiel, in the same sing-song voice, she murmured under her breath: “Go to 14 Reforma, they are waiting for you there.” It was fitted in so slickly with the rest of it that it took a minute to register on me, and by that time she’d slipped silently out again and was gone. Not even a mind-reader could have suspected that a signal had been exchanged between us.

I waited long enough to make it look right, then I blew. Outside, just beyond the radius of the bright lights at Filthy’s, the same Bugatti as earlier in the day was standing. The driver furtively unlatched the rear door, backhand, and jerked his head at it. I got in and we slipped away smooth as oil and headed up the Reforma.