Gun for a Gringo

Chapter IV Death Joins the Party

It was the wisest thing I could have done, it did away with the scrape of shoe leather on stone, silenced my tread, although I hadn’t been thinking about that when I did it. At the foot of the stairs there was another passageway, wider than the one above. At the end of that, in full sight of me, a guard was dozing on a chair tilted back against the wall. If I’d kept my shoes on, he surely would have heard me. This one was armed, too; a Mauser rifle leaned back against the wall, cradled in the crook of his arm. Two cartridge belts full of steel shells criss-crossed his chest. But the big double door just beyond him, with a chain at the bottom and a chain at the top, was the door to the outside world.

Between him and me, though, a brightly lighted side door yawned wide open, splashing yellow on the mouldy wall opposite it. This one I remembered from the night before: the director’s office. And from within came a very faint sound, the scratch of a pen on paper, but enough of a give-away to show that it was occupied. A minute later there was the sound of some one clearing his throat

I could have tried squirming past the opening flat on my stomach, hoping his desk would hide me. But I figured he had the keys, not that fellow at the door. And I figured he had a car too, even if it was only a model-T. So I lounged around the comer of the doorway and sighted my gun at the middle of his face. He looked up and turned from coffee color to green.

“Come here,” I said. “The keys!”

He could hardly make the distance between us, he was wobbling like jelly. He had the keys in a big ring fastened at his wrist, I could hear them jangle.

I got him out into the passageway after me, where I could keep an eye on both of them at once. Then I warily closed in edgewise on the sleeping guard, keeping my gun on the director. The guard gave a sudden sigh that told me he was waking up.

I gauged the distance I had drawn the director away from the sheltering doorway of his office. Eight, ten yards. He couldn’t get back in again in time, if he bolted. So I swung the gun backhand, and brought it down violently on the guard’s bare head. He reared and I struck a second time, then he slumped, fell off the chair with a thud. I stopped the flying director right at the office threshold, drew him back toward me with the gun for a magnet.

“Open!” I ordered. He stepped over the prostrate guard, got a key out, fumbled at the ponderous lock with hands that waved like ribbons. I closed in behind him and bored the gun into his spine.

The chains clanged like tocsins when he swung them back out of the way, and the door itself squalled loud enough to wake the dead. But if there were any other guards besides the three I had eliminated, they were off duty, sound asleep somewhere. “You first,” I ordered, and I closed the door after us.

I gave a sudden sharp intake of breath as I came out. A crescent moon was riding the sky. There wasn’t even any afterglow left from the sun any more. The banquet must have been in full swing long ago!

“Quick, your car,” I said, prodding him. “Where do you keep it? Don’t stall now, or—”

Garages weren’t very common down there; it was under an open shed around from the main entrance. “You are at the wheel,” I said, and got in after him. It wasn’t quite a T-model, but it wasn’t much newer, a ’26 Chevvy or something. It ran, that was all that mattered.

“The Villa Rosa,” I said; “make it pronto!” If he’d had any doubts before, I could see now that he was sure that I was crazy; why, all he’d have to do there would be to turn me in again as an escaped inmate — or so he thought. He stepped on the gas almost willingly, and we tore away from that accursed place that I was never again to forget as long as I lived.

It was further out than I thought — everything seemed to be against me — all I kept gritting was “Faster! Faster!” while the damned thing rocked from side to side over the dirt road. But finally after about twenty minutes or so, the lights of the town began to show ahead of us, in a big semicircle. I didn’t need him any more after that.

“Open the door,” I said, and I took the wheel over with one hand, motioned him out with the gun. “Jump — and go to hell!” I slowed just enough so he couldn’t be killed, then sped on again, leaving him back there on his face. A minute later the lights of Costamala had blossomed all around me.

The Villa Rosa was blazing with them when I finally braked outside the grounds, vaulted out and tore for the entrance. It took the fact a minute to sink in — the fact that this meant I was in time and not too late. The pistol shot, they’d told me, was to be the signal for plunging the place in darkness; this meant it hadn’t been fired yet. I didn’t even take time off to be thankful, just kept going.

There were plenty of horse-drawn carriages lined up, and even decrepit taxis, but only a few private cars, and the Bugatti stood out from these like the Normandie from a crowd of tugs. It was off by itself to one side, and I could make out the outline of someone sitting waiting in the front seat. So he was in there already, whoever he was!

Somebody had been passing out champagne to the sentinels at the main entrance, that was all that saved me — rushing at them the way I did, out of the dark, with a bared revolver in my hand. Their rifles had been laid aside and they were too slow on the uptake; by the time they were rushing for them and yelling at me to stand and deliver, I was halfway up the marble staircase already.

The hum of dozens of voices was coming from the big banqueting hall on the second floor. There were no soldiers on guard there, only a couple of plainclothes men. I knocked them both apart before they even saw me coming, and looked in and saw what was going on.

It hadn’t happened yet, but it was going to in about a second more. A long table loaded with flowers, wines, and dishes ran the entire length of the room, from where I was to the opposite side. Halfway down it sat Savinas, and directly in front of him, facing him across the table, stood a man busily sketching on a drawing-board. I couldn’t make out who he was at that distance, and I didn’t give a rap. All I saw was that he had on a thick pair of glasses, to partly conceal his identity. I glimpsed the old man’s face — yellow with fear, glistening with sweat; he was edged as far back in the chair as he could get, unable to save himself. He knew what was coming, knew something had happened, knew they had sent someone else in my place — and yet couldn’t lift a finger in his own defense, surrounded on all sides by men he couldn’t trust.

Right while I stood looking on, the man finished the sketch with a flourish, turned it around and offered it to Savinas. I saw his other hand reach toward his coat, as though to put the pencil away — there was no time to get over there, to call out, to do anything. I simply aimed at the broad part of his skull, above the ear, and fired. I saw him jolt upward, rise about an inch on his toes, and then the whole room plunged into darkness around me, before I even saw him fall. The bribed electrician had simply mistaken the signal, that was all.

Instantly there were two other shots just behind me, from the plainclothes men on door duty, and I dropped, unhit, and swerved to one side. The table was the only thing that showed faintly in the pitch-blackness. I found the edge with my hand, kept my palm on it for a guide, and ran down the length of it, bent double. The body of the would-be assassin, lying in my path, which tripped me and sent me sprawling on my face, showed me where Savinas was — otherwise I might have run too far past him to the lower end.

I picked myself up, reached across the table, and grabbed someone’s shoulder — the stump of someone’s shoulder. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t even had time to get out of his chair yet.

“Boss!” I breathed in his face, “It’s Stiff! Duck underneath to this side. I’ll get you out of here!”

His shoulder sank from reach, not an instant too soon. “Death to the tyrant!” a voice bellowed beside the chair, and there was the hiss of a saber cleaving the air and a splitting of wood. I fired, once, at where the voice had come from, and heard a groan and — crazy sound — the tinkling of a lot of medals and decorations as they swept the table-top.

A moment later a hand gripped my leg, and the game old man had crawled through unhurt to where I was. I hoisted him to his feet. “Keep your head down!” I cautioned, and began zig-zagging toward the door, towing him after me by one hand — the only hand he had.

The big banquet-hall was a pandemonium, chairs going over, glasses breaking, cries of “Lights! Por Dios, give us lights!” Pin-points of light flickered fitfully here and there, but not the kind that did any good — cigarette lighters, matches, stabs of orange gunfire from the door, where the two plainclothes men seemed to be firing just on general principle.

I swept him after me over to the other side of the room, in a big arc, then went at the door obliquely from that direction, sort of offside and out of range. They hadn’t had presence of mind enough to close the door yet, but just as we got to it a match flared in Savinas’ face, and a shot went off so close to him I expected to see him fold up at the end of my outstretched arm. I fired at the face behind the match and it went out. The old man was still on his feet as we got out on the stair-landing. “Thank God you wore that vest,” I panted.

We went down the stairs hugging the wall. Forms brushed by us rushing upward, never guessing who we were. The last hurdle was the pair of sentries at the main entrance, who rushed together with crossed rifles to bar the way as we showed up. They saw his face, and hesitated. “In the name of the President of the Republic, stand aside!” I thundered. It worked. He was still alive, so he was still on top, and the winning side was always their side. They stiffened to attention, but with their mouths still open.

I let go of him and headed for the Bugatti on my own, to get there quicker. It was lighter out here, there were street-lights beyond the grounds shining in, and Torres’ driver must have seen me coming. He had the car-door open and was out on the running-board firing away before I could close in. I didn’t feel anything, and thought I was crazy for a minute, I wasn’t wearing any bullet-proof vest. Then I remembered the blanks I’d put in his gun the night before; they’d seen me do it, but maybe they’d forgotten in their excitement to tell him; and he’d been drugged at the time.

I held my fire and closed in on him. By that time he was down on both knees already and his gun had gone over his shoulder. “Señor, señor, you must be the Devil! The bullets won’t go near you—!”

“I am the Devil!” I told him. “In! You’re driving us to Santa Marta!”

Savinas came tottering up, at his last gasp by now, and got in the back seat. “Stay down on the floor,” I warned him. I crowded in next to the palsied driver. “Now aim at that front gate, and never mind waiting for them to open it — this thing has steel fenders!”

The gate burst in two with a terrific clang just as a crowd came spilling out the front steps, peppering away at us and yelling, “He got away! Stop him!”

There wasn’t any chase; nothing in the country could have even kept that Bugatti in sight once it got going.

I turned around after a while and said, “You’re alive, anyway. Why don’t you chuck it all and come back to the States with me?”

He was a game old man, all right. “President I am!” he said, “And President I stay! It will all be over before the sun comes up.”

We got to Santa Marta an hour before midnight, and routed the loyal regiment out of its barracks. I hung around just long enough to make sure what kind of a reception he’d get, and hear him give his orders. I needn’t have worried. They yelled their heads off for him, and started back at a double-quick trot then and there, breathing smoke and flame.

“Get in, Stiff,” the old fellow beamed, his good arm around my shoulder. “We go back now and watch the — how you say — mopping up.”

“You can drop me off at the airfield on the way,” I said. “I got a seat coming to me on the Pan-American, may as well use it now as any other time.”

“But Stiff,” he argued, “I will make you my chief of police, I will name streets after you and put up statues of you — the country is yours!”

“You don’t need me any more,” I said. “You’ll be all right now. I’m homesick, I guess. I’m going back to Chicago, where it’s peaceful.”