Seven Lies South

10

The brown-eyed little maid who opened the door of Don Willie’s villa told Beecher that the Señorita was resting and had left orders not to be disturbed.

Beecher told her to tell the Señorita if she weren’t in evidence within sixty seconds that he would haul her from her bed by the hair of her head. He used harsh Andalusian accents, the verbal trumps of the market place and fishermen’s bars, and the maid backed off with a frightened smile. “Si, si,” she said placatingly and hurried away to the rear of the villa.

In the garden Don Willie’s German shepherd dogs had set up a snarling clamor. Stupid brutes, Beecher thought, and struck a match to his cigarette. Trained like goose-stepping soldiers by blows from an inch-thick riding crop.

The door to the living room opened and Ilse came in. She wore tightly pegged black slacks and a white shirt, with a wide leather belt about her thin waist. Her face was drawn and pale, and her long black hair was held back from her forehead with a silver barrette. Beecher saw a faint, rapid pulse fluttering in her temples, struggling for release like a bird in a net.

Some of his anger dissolved as he watched her attempt to light a cigarette. Finally she gave up and dropped the cigarette and book of matches on the hearthstone of the fireplace.

“You know why I’m here,” he said.

“I’m so ashamed,” she said, in a soft, breaking voice. She closed her eyes and ran both hands over her thick dark hair, pulling it tightly back from her forehead. “I don’t know what to say. Please do something, curse me, strike me, anything you like.”

Beecher sighed. All his anger was gone now. “Why did you do it?” he asked her.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Stop it! I want to know why.”

“I was furious with you and that American girl.” The words came in a trembling torrent. She held the tips of her fingers against her temples. “You are both so smug and cold, so full of your stupid American superiority. She treated me like a whore. Smiling at me, shocked of course, but very curious, like I was one of the sights of the town, the streetwalker the tourists take snapshots of to show their friends at home.”

“I’m sure that wasn’t her idea.”

“And is she any better?” Ilse cried bitterly. “Walking about your villa half-naked. Did she spend the night? And make nice antiseptic American love to you?”

“I’m not here to discuss her,” Beecher said.

She shook her head quickly, as if trying to escape her thoughts. “Forgive me, Mike, please. I shouldn’t say such things.” She turned away from him, a soft cry of pain sounding in her throat. “I was hurt. I was shamed. She made me feel like something evil and filthy. I wanted to hurt you for that. I don’t even remember going to Don Julio. It was like a nightmare. Can’t you understand?”

“You’ve got to phone him now,” Beecher said. “And tell him you were lying.”

“Yes, yes, I will do anything. But why are you so kind? Why don’t you shout at me? Tell me how stupid and wicked I’ve been.”

“Because I don’t feel that way,” Beecher said. “Make that call now. Then we’ll forget this business.”

“All right, Mike.”

Beecher stood beside her while she spoke to Don Julio. It wasn’t an easy matter, he could see; her words came slowly, halting with embarrassment and shame, and her free hand fluttered nervously at her throat. When she finished and Don Julio began to speak, she closed her eyes and squared her shoulders, as if she were expecting a blow. Don Julio was brief, but his words must have stung; Ilse’s cheeks became flushed and red, and her lips began to tremble. “Yes, yes, I know,” she said miserably. “I had no right — yes, yes!” The tone of her voice begged him to stop.

Finally she put the phone down and leaned against the back of a chair. Her eyes were still closed. “He despises me, I know,” she said.

“It’s over now,” Beecher said. He walked to the door, but hesitated with his hand on the knob. She hadn’t looked at him, and she still leaned wearily against the back of the chair.

“Ilse,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Well, look at me. I won’t bite.”

She turned to him and opened her eyes. “Yes?”

“I understand how you must have felt. And why you did what you did. Most of us don’t have our emotions completely under wraps.” He shrugged. “We get mad, do things we regret. It’s part of being human. Okay?”

She smiled wearily. “You’re very kind, Mike. I don’t know why.”

The police dogs were raising a clamor again, and the atmosphere of the shaded, cluttered room seemed grim and oppressive to Beecher.

“How about having a glass of wine with me in the village?” he asked her.

“I’m too ashamed to go out.”

“You did something foolish, but you admitted it and straightened it out. Now how about a glass of wine?”

She smiled at him, but it was still an empty and weary effort. “All right, Mike. Thank you.”

They drove up Calle San Miguel to the central plaza, moving slowly behind a donkey-drawn cart of olive logs. The shops on either side of them were crowded; this was the second shopping hour of the day, the late afternoon when the morning’s meats and vegetables might be had for a bargain. The noise was shrill and incessant, with lottery vendors screaming out their numbers, and the crunch of the iron-wheeled cart just ahead of them, and the swell of haggling voices from the shops.

“I am going away from Mirimar,” Ilse said.

“Tired of it?”

She sighed. “I’m tired of everything. I’m going back to Austria for a while.”

“To your home?”

“It is not really a home. My parents are dead. I stay with my sister, who is married to a doctor. They live in a village near the one I was raised up in, but village life is the same everywhere.” She was looking down at her hands. “We have our supper, and sit before the fire until it is dark. My sister’s husband goes to bed early, because he never knows when he will be needed, and he must have his rest. On Sunday we go to Mass, and after dinner my sister and her husband take the children to the cinema, or to visit friends. They have two boys and two girls now.”

“It sounds peaceful enough,” Beecher said.

“Yes, it is very peaceful.”

Beecher glanced at her and noticed the hollows under her eyes, soft and dark against her white skin. “And will you come back here?”

“Oh, yes.” She sighed faintly. “I will always come back here.”

The terrace of the Bar Central was crowded, and Beecher took her inside. They found an empty table in the corner and sat with their backs to the wall facing the bar. A waiter brought them white wine and slivers of sausage and bread skewered together with toothpicks.

She looked at him gravely. “And you are going to Rabat?”

“That’s right.”

“Last night you weren’t sure.”

“Now I am.”

“I am hoping it will go well,” she said. “I will pray for you. I can do nothing else.”

The moment seemed incongruously solemn, Beecher thought, and rather ridiculous considering that she had denounced him as a smuggler to the police just a few hours before; but her offer was obviously earnest and serious, and he accepted it on those terms.

“Thank you,” he said, and lifted his glass in a small salute. “And when are you leaving?”

“Tonight. I am driving to Madrid. I will leave the car at Don Willie’s office and go on by plane to Austria.”

Beecher drained his glass. “I think we’d better go,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” she said quickly.

Beecher had seen the Frenchman, Maurice, come in the door. Maurice looked very drunk, with a lock of black hair hanging down between his milky eyes, and a muscle which twitched convulsively at the corner of his mouth and jerked his lips into the travesty of a smile. He wore a yellow sweater with a shawl collar, and the knees of his tight black slacks were stained and caked with mud.

“You have been very good about—” Ilse stopped and wet her lips. “About this thing. Please forgive me. I have caused much trouble.”

She had obviously misunderstood his reasons for wanting to leave. “I’m not rushing you,” Beecher said and put down money for the drinks. “We’ll go somewhere else. You see the Frenchman at the bar?”

“Is he the one who made trouble at the party?”

Beecher nodded. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

But the Frenchman had seen them by then. He had turned from the bar and was staring at Beecher, hands hanging motionless at his sides and the pointless smile flickering rhythmically and uncontrollably across his lips. He started toward their table with careful, deliberate strides, maintaining his balance and direction with painful concentration. And his milky eyes blazed in his cold narrow face.

“The American,” he said thickly. He stood swaying in front of them. “Looking and watching as always. And who is with him now?” He turned toward Ilse, lurching with the effort to keep his balance. “Ah!” he said with a deep sigh. “It is the little whore. The pig German’s little whore.”

Beecher came to his feet then, but not quickly enough; for the Frenchman wheeled and lunged across the table at him, hands clawing for his throat, and his face twisting and working with rage. His weight knocked Beecher back against the wall, and as he struggled to tear the Frenchman’s hands from his throat, he felt a hideous moment of revulsion and panic; the fingernails clawed and scratched at his skin like those of a maddened rodent, and the reek of the man’s breath and body, the mixings of heavy cologne and sour sweat and wine, sent a shudder of fear and disgust through him.

Beecher caught hold of the Frenchman’s wrists and pulled the trembling fingers from his throat. Then he heaved himself to his feet and slammed the heel of his hand into the man’s jaw. The blow jarred them apart, and when Maurice tried to close in again Beecher held him off with a hand against his chest.

The café was boiling with excitement by then: all were on their feet shouting injunctions and exhortations, and a woman screamed as a table tipped over with a crash of glass. The dogs that had been begging scraps of food scrambled for the doorways and windows, ears flattened back, and wild yelps tearing from their throats. A waiter pulled the Frenchman away from Beecher, and two others helped to push him back to the bar. Two uniformed police ran in from the terrace with leather truncheons in their hands.

The Frenchman was gasping for breath, but his strange white eyes sought Beecher’s entreatingly. He was trying to smile. “A joke, nothing else, non? We play at the judo. If I am making trouble, I apologize.”

This account was violently contradicted by the waiters. The crowds surged about, noisy with conflicting opinions. One of the policemen blew his whistle. The other shouted hoarsely for silence.

Beecher hesitated; the man was drunk and belligerent, and a goddamned nuisance, but he was reluctant to make charges against him. He knew the local jail from personal experience; he had bailed Trumbull out one night, and he vividly remembered the airless cells, the stench of vomit and urine, and the muddy floors and trickling stone walls. He also knew that Spanish justice could be a terrifyingly whimsical business — prolonged and attenuated by the casual Moorish notion that to hasten the trial of a condemned man would be pointlessly cruel, but stiffened dreadfully by the Inquisitor’s conviction that the greater the punishment the greater the kindness. The Frenchman might be allowed to sleep it off and go on his way. Or he might be in jail for months with a battery of zealous bureaucrats adding new charges to the indictment every day.

The policemen were looking at Beecher.

“I think he was just trying to have some fun,” Beecher said. “A little too much wine, that’s all.”

“You were not seriously disturbed?”

“No, of course not.”

They released the Frenchman, with a cold injunction to go to bed and keep off the streets until he was sober.

The excitement was over. The waiters moved about sweeping up broken glass and taking orders for drinks. A dog looked in cautiously from the terrace doors, then slunk along the bar to snap up a piece of shrimp.

Beecher took Ilse outside to his car.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said.

“He is crazy.”

Beecher started the motor and pulled out slowly from the curb. “I’d like to know what he’s got against me,” he said.

“He should be locked up.” There was a tremor of desperate futile anger in her voice. He glanced at her and saw that her hands were locked tightly together in her lap. She seemed close to exhaustion, he thought, strained to the point of hysteria.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

Instead of turning into Calle San Miguel, Beecher drove out of the village on the coastal road. The sun was setting, and the mountains looked like massive slopes of dark gold. Everything was quiet and still.

“Let’s relax a bit,” he said, as she glanced at him questioningly. “I’ll drive out a few miles, then take you home. Okay?”

“All right,” she said quietly.

Beecher smoked a cigarette and savored the cool salty breeze on his face. It was almost dark when he returned to the Black Dove. Ilse climbed quickly from the car and closed the door. “Thank you for everything, Mike,” she said, then turned and hurried through the tall iron gates of the villa.

Beecher drove back through the village of Mirimar, and up the winding road which led to his villa. He turned on his headlights. The darkness was settling swiftly; where the mountains had been golden they were now purple and black, and the shadows were spreading out across the quiet sea, pushing the last diffused rays of light over the horizon. He would have time for a cup of tea and a shower and change of clothes before leaving to pick up Laura. The thought was pleasant and exciting.

As he swung into the entrance of his villa, the headlights of his car swept over the front gardens, and across the narrow graveled lane which ran into his garage.

Beecher swore suddenly and hit the brakes with his full strength. His car lurched and skidded to a stop. The body of a man lay in the road. He turned off the motor with one hand, and opened his door with the other, feeling nothing but the after-effects of a shock; the cold weakness in his stomach, the abrupt and violent stroke of his heart.

Beecher stepped into the glare of his headlights and knelt beside the body. He knew who it was before he turned the head to look at the bloody wound behind the left ear; he had seen the yellow sweater and slim black slacks in the glare of the car’s lights.

The Frenchman was dead, a theatrical amount of blood staining his face and throat, his streaked milky eyes staring sightlessly into the night. He had been struck a heavy blow from behind, and the fetal position of his body, crumpled and languorous, suggested that he hadn’t moved after hitting the ground.

Beecher knelt beside him unable to think for a moment. But eventually his thoughts stopped their giddy whirling. First of all, he must call Don Julio. And secondly, Ilse. She could tell the police they had been together for the last half hour. Unless she did, his position might be awkward; he had fought with the Frenchman twice in the presence of witnesses, and now the man lay bludgeoned to death at his feet. With no witnesses around... He recalled with the irrelevance of panic that he had been thinking earlier of the whimsical nature of Spanish justice in relationship to the Frenchman. Now it might be necessary to consider that fact in relation to himself...

A footstep crunched on the gravel behind him; Beecher started violently, his nerves straining under the impact of shock and fear.

“Don’t turn around,” a familiar voice said quietly. “There’s a good chap.” There was a sound in the soft cool air, a sense of motion more felt than heard, and all of Beecher’s thoughts and fears suddenly fused themselves together in a blinding, painshot darkness. After that, there was nothing at all.