The Last One Left

Chapter Twenty

Leila did not know what had set the Sergeant off just when they were getting the noon meal on Saturday. It could have been the scene she had made the night before, crying and raving and cursing and carrying on until she had exhausted herself.

But he had not seemed angry about what she had done, or about the scene. He had seemed just — saddened, and disappointed in her. After she was certain he was asleep on Friday night, she had rubbed herself liberally with repellent, and had sneaked off the boat without a sound and up the stairs and into the shack and taken the big flashlight which had been aboard the Muñequita. Then, driven nearly out of her mind by those bugs which didn’t mind the repellent, in the windless night she had climbed the ladder to the platform high in the water oak, and had aimed the beam through an opening in the branches toward the houses on the mainland shore. It wasn’t too late. Many of them had lights on. She worked the switch until her thumb felt sprained. Dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. She had to stop to whack the insects on her face and arms and ankles.

“What are you trying to do?” the Sergeant had roared, so close at hand she had nearly leaped off the platform.

She had fought him on the way down and they had both nearly fallen. But she did not start the really large scene until he had strapped her into that impossible belt again and forced the link shut and said, sadly, “If’n you can’t be trusted at all, Missy, then I just have to do this ever’ time I have to leave you alone, and ever’ time I have to get some sleep. Don’t like it any better than you do. But you won’t pay attention to good sense!”

“Good sense!” she had yelled. “Good sense! You’re a crazy! Don’t you even know it? You got that great big dent in your head where they took your brains out. You’re kidnapping me! You know what they’ll do to you? They’ll take you away and they’ll lock you up forever in a big room full of other crazies!”

But he had just kept looking mournfully at her, shaking his head, and finally he had gone down and brought her bedding up and taken his own down and gone to sleep on the boat.

This morning he had seemed the same as usual. Perhaps a little quieter. He’d been opening a can of franks and beans when suddenly the can and the can opener fell from his hands. He stood there swaying from side to side in a strange way, and then she remembered what it reminded her of, a long time ago, stopping at that roadside place when she was little, and there was an elephant there chained in the sun, swaying just like that.

She watched him. She moistened her lips. She glanced at the belt and chain over by the post. The shorts and halter top she wore were good enough for swimming. Run and grab a cushion off the Muñequita. Jump in and swim his little channel through the mangroves and out into the open bay. A hundred yards of channel. Lots of boats on a Saturday.

He wasn’t looking at her, or at anything. Then she saw the water running out of his eyes. She had to tug and pull at him to get him turned around and, in his sticklike walk, over to his thinking place. She put his big hands on the greasy places on the peeled uprights. He moaned and gripped with such a terrible strength she heard little gratings and poppings of muscle and bone and gristle. He thunked his head against the beam so violently, she screamed and ran and got the thin faded cushion from the old wicker chair and folded it once and held it against the beam. He butted his head against it.

“You’re not crazy, Sarg,” she kept telling him in a pleading tone. “You’re not. I’m sorry.”

His hands fell to his sides. He looked at her, half frowning, and he walked over and sat on the bed, face in his hands.

“Missy?” he said at last.

“I’m right here, Sarg.”

“Things spin around and around and get sucked down, like they went down a drain.”

He shook himself like a big, tired hound and stood up. “Takes it out of me,” he said.

“That lump on your head is getting huge.”

He felt of it with cautious fingertips. “Whomped me a good one that time.”

He started toward the kerosene stove then stopped and looked at her. “I wouldn’t have knowed you’d left, Miss Leila. Why didn’t you?”

“It never entered my mind.”

He picked up the can and the opener. “Lost my hunger, but you could eat some I expect. If you’d eat real good — and sleep as much as you can...”

“Yes?”

“And if you could run that nice boat down to the city all by yourself and promise word of honor you wouldn’t remember a thing about where you were or who doctored you...”

“I promise, Sarg. Honest. Cross my heart.”

“Three or four days more, I could let you go.”

“Do you mean it?”

“It’s a promise for sure. Can you wait just that little bitty time more, Missy?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Then I don’t have to put that danged chain on you. I sure to God hate to see you fastened up that way. In the night I decided I just couldn’t do it one more time, no matter what.”

Gordon Dale liked to work in the silence and emptiness of the law offices on Saturday morning. He solved the problems of the brief, and when he was ready to leave he remembered he hadn’t heard from Detective Sergeant Dickerson. He was told that Dickerson should just about be arriving at his home. He phoned the home number. Dickerson had just walked in. His voice was weary.

“Who? Oh, Mr. Dale. To tell you the truth, I forgot all about it. Just when I was ready to go off at midnight, we had a real dandy. I wish to God they’d been one motel further away. That would have taken it over the city line. Fellow on vacation got slopped and beat his little kid to death. His wife put the body in the car and tried to be an ambulance, and took out two palm trees and a light post. So I worked on through. The post showed the kid had a lot of old breaks, green stick fractures that had healed without attention. A lousy night, Mr. Dale. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to...”

“That’s all right. No rush. Get some sleep, Dave.”

“Soon as I can get anything, I’ll get back to you, Mr. Dale.”

Sam Boylston lay propped up on two pillows on one of the Bahama beds in the motel cabana. He wore blue swim trunks he had purchased at a dime store in the shopping center a block away. He talked on the phone to Corpus Christi. He was listening for the third time to the kid’s excited tale of danger and injury. He made the right sounds in the right places. He could look out through the window wall and see the three girls horsing around, taking turns off the low board — the fat girl with the red sunburn, the skinny dark one with a loud laugh, and the little chunky one with the deep tan and the straight hair bleached egg white.

“Well,” he said, “you sure had yourself a time, Boy-Sam. Want to put your mom back on?”

Lydia Jean came back on the line. “That was a long talk,” she said. “Oh, just a minute.” In the background he heard her shouting something to Boy-Sam. “Sorry. He was going to go running out without his sweater. There’s an edge in the wind for this time of year. Out of the north.”

“Was it a bad break?”

“A very clean simple fracture, and he really didn’t cry very much. He turned white as ghosts. You were very very patient with him, dear. He’s being a terrible bore about it. He can make a description of falling out of a tree last practically forever. He had to be so sure you found out he didn’t cry very much. Sam, all the time he was talking to you, I kept thinking of what you told me about Jonathan. How long is he going to — keep doing that, keep looking for her?”

“Until he accepts the fact she’s dead.”

“With Leila, that isn’t easy. She was so much more alive than — most of the rest of us.”

“I know.”

“Are you going back to Harlingen now?”

“Pretty soon, I guess. Why don’t you go down and open the house and wait for me there?”

“I thought of it.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Sam, dear, my heart bleeds for you in this whole thing. I know how you felt about your sister. I loved her too. You know that. And I should be with you. Time of need and all that. I don’t want to be cold and hard, but it would be coming back for the wrong reason. I’ve invested — too much heartache in this to come back for anything but the right reason. You’ll have to understand why I had to leave. And when you do understand, I can come back to you.”

“Same old paradox. Try this for a partial answer. Remember Rosalie’s brother?”

“Of course.”

“I was wrong.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said I was wrong. Dead wrong. Does that mean anything?”

After a long pause she said, “It’s interesting. I think I would like to know why you think you were wrong, Sam.”

“I know now that I let Rosalie down and I let you down.”

“Indeed! I see. You did not live up to what we expected of you.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“But you were perfectly content with yourself, of course. You knew it would be stupid and out of character for Sam Boylston to go down there and defend that fellow. But because I wanted it, you should have gritted your teeth and — humored me.”

“What the hell do you want of me!”

Her voice sounded far away. “A little more than that, I’m afraid. A little more than that. Take care of yourself, Sam.”

She was gone. He rolled onto his shoulder and slammed the phone back onto the cradle. The chunky young girl appeared just outside his window wall, shading her eyes, peering in at him. She grinned, made a beckoning gesture, pointed toward the pool and made swimming motions. He shook his head no, and she made a pouting face and shrugged and went away.

He could not stop asking himself what Lyd wanted of him. Talking with Theyma Chappie in her little apartment, when, to his confusion and dismay the tears had begun without warning, he had felt close to an understanding, as though suddenly it would be revealed to him, the way a light bulb appears over the head of the comic strip character, and he could say: Of course! Now I know.

But if he could never understand, and could not alter some inner perfectionistic coolness, some chronic insistence upon a world of reasonable cause and effect, why could she not accept the flaw for the sake of the rest of it? A presentable man, of scrupulous marital fidelity, fair in his dealings, achieving through all the long shrewd hours of work a position of status, social and professional, and the income to give her a life without want or drudgery. Father of her healthy son. Would she prefer a sickly romanticism, a variant of a Jonathan, baying his lover way across the Grand Bahama Bank? She could not seem to understand that it was a world wherein, if you faltered, They ripped you down quite casually and went on Their way.

Yet Lydia Jean was not a dreamer. She had that practical streak, that capacity for acceptance of the things she could not change. If he was forever incapable of change, she would not be so merciless. It meant she believed in something within him which he could not identify. And it meant that she believed that if he could grasp it, use it, the benefit would be as much his as hers.

It was paradox, and as so many times before during the months of their separation, it seemed to spin faster and faster in his mind until a kind of centrifugal force flung it out and away.

He looked out at the pool. The other two had left. The brown chunk solemnly practiced dives from the low board. He had bought the trunks and gone swimming because his body had begun to feel stale. He was accustomed to exercise. The chunk had challenged him to a race. He had heard her friends call her Toby. The races had given him the excuse to extend himself, the challenge to stretch the long muscles, empty the bottoms of the lungs. When it was just two lengths, she could beat him in free style, most of her advantage coming from the quick racing turn she knew. Three lengths was the best for them, a tossup. When they had tried four lengths, he had won as decisively as she won in the two-length competition.

Then he had gone in and phoned Lyd. Optimism born of exertion. But it hadn’t worked out.

He watched the Toby girl. She was trying swans, and getting good elevation off the low board. She would eel out of the pool, climb up onto the board, stand at a measured distance from the end, use both thumbs to hook her pale wet hair away from her eyes, stand very still, then take her steps, land at the very end, and take a maximum spring from the fiberglass board. In the sealed room with the air conditioning humming, it was a silent performance out there.

Her suit was black and white, formed of two panels, front and back, with red lacing up the sides across the two inch gap between the panels, brown healthy young flesh bulging in diamond patterns against the tension of the lacing. Her thighs were too heavy. Her hips and breasts were hearty, shoulders broad, waist narrow and limber. The muscles of her back, contours softened by the little layer of woman-fat under the wet brown hide, moved smoothly and with precision.

Drowsy from exertion, depressed by Lydia Jean’s response, he drifted into erotic fantasy. He brought the brown girl into the room, drew the transparent blue draperies across the window wall, pressed the night-lock button on the door. He would take her gently out of the suit. Her body would be wet, scented with soap, chlorine, and the healthiness of flesh. Tremblingly apprehensive, goose-pimpled, pleading softly while he pressed her gently down and...

Outside, as if on cue, the Toby girl went halfway out the board, turned around, sat and stretched out, face turned toward the sun. A great grinding spasm of lust catapulted him up out of drowsiness, a wanting that was as vivid as great pain, obliterating everything but itself, as pain does. In the constraint of the built-in support of the cheap swim trunks, he bulged hard as marble. Shocked by the intensity, he sat up and caught his breath and took a derisive look at the lonely man far from home. The chunk could not be more than sixteen years old. Under the ragged edge of the bangs which half concealed her eyebrows was the round uncommitted face of childhood. A real conquest, fella. They’d come after you with a net.

But as the hotness of immediate and overwhelming need faded he was uncomfortably aware of the residue it left in the back of his mind, an urge to pull down all the walls, tumble them in upon himself, go plunging out into the streets and commit acts of such vileness and terror and pointlessness that when at last they brought him down, all his chances would be gone forever, all careful things undone, all accomplishment forgotten. And then, because it would be past rebuilding, no one would ever expect him to even try. And he would be free. There were other ways to be free. To disappear so cleverly he could never be found. Or to find that hiding place, where they had hid from you long ago, and looked as if they were inwardly smiling at how easy it had been. They were like tinted wax. Scent of a thousand blossoms. Dark wood and silver handles, organ playing as the people came in, making little rustling and creaking sounds as they sat down. They coughed. And then the man came out from the side with the book, and put it down, opened it, looked out at all of them and cleared his throat...

“You could on sudden impulse harm yourself,” Theyma Chappie said, as clearly as if she sat there beside him.

Again, on cue, he saw one of the motel maids, in white uniform, a Negro, walk across his line of vision on the far side of the pool, passing in front of the cabana directly across from him. She was much darker than Theyma, but he saw, perhaps made more evident to him by the uniform, the same slenderness, the same high-hipped, gliding walk, saucy bulge of rump.

He reached for the nearest reality and had the operator make the call person-to-person to Mr. Taylor Worth, Boylston and Worth, Harlingen.

“Things are beginning to pile up, Sam,” said Worth. “I got a postponement on the Gianetti thing, but hizzoner was a little puckered. How long do I have to stall?”

“I don’t know. Not much longer, maybe. I can’t say for sure. I appreciate your holding the fort by yourself.”

“People are wondering about some kind of ceremony for Leila. You know how many friends she had. Sorry to bring it up, but there’s a big memorial service for the Kayds tomorrow. People keep phoning up. Anything you want me to tell them?”

“Just that it will have to wait until Jonathan and I get back, and that’s indefinite at the moment. Tay, have you heard any locker-room gossip about Bix?”

“Well, there was a hell of a lot in the beginning. You know how it would be. A pretty shifty type. Then when they finally got the whole story and that captain was cleared, it all died down. Now it’s beginning to pick up again.”

“Why?”

“You should be able to figure that out, Sam. Because you’re still hanging around that area. Why? As a special personal favor tell me why.”

Sam Boylston reached quickly and found a plausible answer before the silence lasted too long. “I was checking around when I first got to Nassau, before we found out what happened. I came across the bits and pieces of a deal Bix was putting together. Of course the structure fell apart, but the pieces are still lying around.”

Taylor Worth chuckled. “And that offends the Boylston sense of order?”

“And greed.”

“The ultimate motivation.”

“Keep it quiet. Later if I can find a way to put the pieces together, we can pick up some blocks of that Sunshine thing of his, then let the news leak out a little.”

“You awe me, Samuel. Keep me posted. I’ll keep stalling. Right now I’ve got to run.”

As he was taking his shower, Sam found himself thinking that it could be done without any deal. Just quietly pick up Sunshine Management at depressed prices over-the-counter, then leak word that Sam Boylston was getting into the act. The golden touch should be good enough to average out maybe three points if the holdings were unloaded again carefully enough. It would make the shareholders feel right at home, he thought. The same kind of a deal Bix would have rigged — and Sam couldn’t stomach.

Oliver Akard was in the empty house of his parents in the empty afternoon. Dust motes winked in the shafts of sunshine. His father was working overtime at the shop. His mother was at a Saturday afternoon benefit bridge.

He had slept so late she was gone by the time he got up. It had been a relief not to have to face that martyred, wounded look, the audible signs of affliction. It had been almost dawn when he had come home, and on an impulse to challenge them, instead of turning off the engine and coasting into the driveway, he had driven in, parked in his usual place beyond the carport, revved the engine three times, the holes rusted through the muffler adding a snare-drum resonance to the insult to the neighborhood peace.

An hour after his late breakfast he was hungry again, made two thick sandwiches of peanut butter and drank most of a quart of milk, drinking it from the cardboard package as he watched television baseball. The game seemed meaningless, and he could find nothing on the other channels to hold his interest. He left it turned on, and soon the sour soundtrack and dramatic voices of an old movie eased the silence of the house.

He had packed a dufflebag with most of what he would need, and put it in the back of his closet behind his winter coat. He could put the toilet articles in at the last moment. He had composed the note he would leave and had hidden it in his desk. Crissy had helped him with it:

Crissy was certainly fussy about having things exactly right. She thought one word ought to be changed and she wouldn’t let him cross it out. He had to write the whole thing out again.

He felt irritated with her, the way she had acted as if he wouldn’t be able to remember things from one minute to the next. She had made him draw the floor plan from memory, even to putting in the street and the little box to indicate where he would park, and a dotted line to the bungalow door. Number 10. Mooney Bungalow Courts. And he had to write out that little list of what to bring with him.

When he had tried to protest, she had leaned her face into his, her eyes startlingly round and bright. Her voice had been very slow and distinct, her mouth shaping each word as though for a deaf person, and she had put in some words which had shocked him. He had not known she could come on so heavy.

She had told him not to come by until dusk. He planned to leave the house well before that, so he would be gone before either of them came home. The hands of the house clocks moved with a terrible slowness. Yet when he would realize that another hour had gone by, and he was an hour closer to what they were going to do, the bottom seemed to fall out of his stomach. It was better to think beyond that part of it, and think about going away with her. Perhaps in a week, she said. That’s why the note said he was going alone. So they wouldn’t come after him to get him away from this terrible, terrible woman.

Going away with her would be the reward for doing what he had to do tomorrow night. She wouldn’t tell him where. She said it had to be a surprise. He would adore it. A lovely, lovely place. Long, lazy days and nights of love.

He went back to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, and as he reached to get the milk carton and finish it, he caught a faint scent of fresh limes, and it made his heart stand still. The shampoo she used had that lime scent, familiar now from all the times of breathing her in, face in that softness and crispness of her hair. There was one perfume she wore only for bed, a strange heavy bitter-sweet muskiness that seemed to put a sharper and more desperate edge on his need. And there was often the faint odor of rum and oranges in the hot gasping moisture of her breath against his face, and under these mingled smells, another one, the elusive, distinctive scent of herself, of her flesh and of the using of the flesh. Sometimes when it had just ended and she rested in his arms, these richnesses seemed almost unpleasant, and would remind him of the times when he was tiring and she was still demanding, how fleshy and vast she would seem to become in the bed’s darknesses, something so remorseless and devouring it would seem to him, in that half delirium of fading response, that some animal thing was after him, grasping, straining, grunting, churning at his helplessness.

He could look at her later at a distance, dressed, so slender and tidy and graceful, and marvel that the night-thing could be so completely hidden away, all the soft machinery dismantled and dispersed.

He walked through the house, touching things. This table. This hassock. These white bricks in the fireplace wall.

Raoul had taken Francisca to the beach Saturday afternoon, all the way up to North Miami Beach. Commitment had created small tensions between them. They talked too rapidly and gayly about nothing, and lapsed often into silences which were not comfortable. He had the curious sensation that he was taking pictures of her, a mechanism in the back of his mind clicking, filing a color print away. When she swam alone and then came smiling up the little slope of beach toward him, yanking the swim cap off, shaking out her dark hair, pelvis tilting in her slightly self-conscious stride in her brief, one-piece, candy-striped suit, scissoring thighs in the flawless even dusky gold of ancient ivory, the camera clicked again and again.

When she lowered herself to the big beach towel beside him, the camera in his mind backed away from the two of them and took the incongruity of that lithe elegance in the gross company of such a squat broad hairy fellow with a pocked peasant face, hair thinning. Then the camera took closeups of her beside him, droplets of sea water on her bare shoulder, and an oblique glance of her dark eyes before she looked toward the sea, her profile perfect as new coins against the beach glare, against the background of all the beach people stretching into the distance along the broad band of whiteness bordering the cobalt blue water with its dancing mirror glints.

It disturbed him to have the camera-feeling, as if he were storing up the memories of her for the empty years ahead. He and Sam Boylston had debated how much danger she might be in. It had to be weighed against the danger of destroying the adjustment she had achieved. It was her hiding place, and were it destroyed, she might seek that other hiding place again, the withdrawal, the meek, passive, unresponsive silence he had seen when he had visited her with her brother.

With time and love and understanding, he felt there was a good chance of slowly merging the ’Cisca of now with the Francisca who once had been. And then, little by little, the housemaid would disappear, along with the shop-girl mannerisms, the saucy walk, the shallow pleasures.

But will she then settle for a Raoul Kelly, he thought. It would be a bitter irony to discover that her acceptance of him as a “boyfran” would be outgrown, along with her delight in soap opera, her collection of movie magazines, her taste for bright, tight clothing and semi-theatrical makeup.

As the afternoon did not seem to be going well, he decided to take the risk he had weighed and wondered about. He went up to the big parking lot and came back with the folder from his files. It contained a selection of the articles he had done in Spanish-language newspapers, cut to size and Xeroxed on the newspaper machine on 8½-inch by 14-inch sheets, and fastened into a clasp binder. He had made the selection with great care, leaving out those things which might trigger too many memories for her.

“ ’Cisca, I want to show you why I am unpopular with certain people.”

She opened the folder, read a few lines and closed it. “You said you are. That is enough for me.”

“There is something else.”

“Indeed?”

“Boys climb to the very tops of the tallest trees. They do very dangerous things upon their bicycles. If the girl is watching. This is my work. It is what I do. I would wish you to admire how I balance in my tree tops.”

She shrugged almost imperceptibly and opened the folder again. After a few moments she said, “But I do not have the political mind, Raoul.”

“For much of that it is not necessary.”

“But such difficult writing, and on the beach?”

“I am without mercy. Read, woman!”

She made a face at him and sighed and continued reading. He watched her, and he saw her change. By leaning a little bit he saw which one she was reading. It was the appraisal of the policies of the Twelve Families of the Republic of Panama, and some intimate biographies of those individuals most active in blocking the reforms of the judicial system. She was frowning as she read, her lips compressed. It surprised him that her submerged intelligence should have been awakened by that article. It was one of the more complex ones, and it led with a documented care to the thesis he reiterated in article after article: In countries where men of good will work to achieve honesty and equality under the law, education, literacy, good health standards, the opportunity to lead a better life than one’s forefathers, Communist subversion becomes futile.

“Shall we swim now?” he asked.

“Not now. You go if you wish,” she said absently.

He swam. When he came back, she had rolled onto her stomach and was propped up on her elbows, reading the pages in the shade of her body. He toweled himself, popped open a fresh can of beer from the cooler.

Finally she was done. She closed the folder and put it aside. She was lost in thought for a long time.

“How do you learn these things?” she asked abruptly.

“Research, study, interviews. There is always a pattern, always a slow movement in one direction or another.”

“This is a very very important thing you do, Señor.”

“One would like to believe so.”

“Does anyone listen?”

“Fewer than one would hope.”

It was the steady, thoughtful look of Francisca Torcedo y Sarmantar which met his gaze. “One cannot doubt that they would relish silencing such a man. One man who so carefully stabs at the tenderest parts. I could not know, Raoul. I think it is very possible that you are a great man.”

“Perhaps you have been too long in the hot sun, querida.”

“Greatness is to use the quality of the mind to change these slow directions of history, no?”

“But I am merely...”

She rapped the cover of the folder with her knuckles. “Tell me. This work in California, will it give you a way to make more men listen?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should permit nothing to interfere. Nothing!”

“I have accepted. You will come with me.”

And he saw the little signs of change again, as she edged back into the role more comfortable for her. Small changes in posture, in expression. She laughed, brash and merry, signaling the English that put his teeth on edge. “Crazy sumbitch, you! Eh? Get turned on by sotch a estupid little broad. Looking at your head, I think. So I go with. Okay. Because you crazy as hell, man! Swimming now? Can’t catch.” She hopped up and ran fleetingly toward the gentle surf line.

He left her at the Harkinson house at quarter to five. He had an article to finish and turn in, and he said he thought he could be back by eight. She had told him that Crissy Harkinson had said she wouldn’t need her that evening.

Raoul did not return until eight thirty. He went up the stairs carrying the two warm cartons of Chinese food he had promised to bring. The plan was to heat it up on her little stove and eat there and make the ten o’clock feature three miles away wherein James Bond would cavort his way through windrows of women to be beaten sodden by the minions of some chap of incredible rascality before, at last, outwitting him, slaying him in horrible detail in wide-screen color, with gadgetry devised by M.I.T. dropouts, and then at the fade-out, taking his bemused ease betwixt perfumed breasts of such astonishing pneumatic dimension he would have a slightly exasperated and apologetic look, like that of a man trying to take his bass drum into a phone booth.

The servant quarters were dark and silent. He had noticed that Crissy Harkinson’s little white convertible was gone. The Akard boy’s car was in the parking area, a clumsy, underprivileged shadow.

He opened the screen door and went inside. “ ’Cisca?” he called. “ ’Cisca?”

Fright and apprehension seemed to bulge his heart. He put the food aside hastily and began putting lights on, expecting that it would be one of those plausible domestic accidents. But the small rooms were empty. The candy-striped suit hung from the shower rail.

She came pattering up the outside stairs, calling, “Raoul? Raoul?” His heart lurched and his knees turned watery, and he knew that he could take no chance with her, not from now on, not ever.

She had on sleek white slacks and a fussy little red blouse and far too much lipstick. She gave him a quick little hug and kiss, and then laughed at him and said she had given him a clown face. She hurried and got a kleenex and dabbed the red from his mouth. As she busied herself with reheating the food and laying out the dishes and silverware, he said, “The boy is at the house waiting for her?”

“Oh no. She is there too. Why would you— Of course, her little car is gone. She took it in this morning to be fixed. But by noon it was not done, and they stop work at noon. They will finish it on Monday. A garage man drove her back here. They will deliver the car on Monday. She was very angry. She called me over to speak with her. We talked for a long time. I have good news.”

“What?”

“When we are eating. Then I will tell you.”

They sat down at the small table she had set by the window, and she got up almost immediately and dug into the pocket of her slacks and took out folded bills and sat down again.

She held the money up and said, “This is until the end of this month of June. She talked to the one you found, that Amparo, on the telephone. Amparo will come here on Wednesday and after I show her where everything is kept and explain how things must be done, then I may go. And she will give me a letter. I think I can find work in California. Maybe I will work for an important actress. Mmmmm. This is very good food, Mister Kellee!”

“What else did she talk about?”

“Oh, one minute. Something else to show.” She hurried into her bedroom and returned with a savings account book, handed it to him gravely. “Inspect it, please.”

The total, deposited in small amounts over two years was just over eleven hundred dollars.

“Obviously you could have no idea you were associating with such a rich girl,” she said loftily. “I shall pay my share of the expenses of the trip. I would like to know what it is they do to these very small shrimp.”

“I am honored to have the attentions of such a rich lady. What else did Missy Crissy have on her buzzard’s mind?”

“She is not so bad as all that! She asked that I do a special favor for her tomorrow night. She is upset. She confided in me. She had tears in her eyes. Sometimes it is possible to feel sorry for her.”

“What about?”

“She and the Captain Staniker had a great quarrel before he went away to the Bahamas. That is something I did not know. She told him she never wanted to see him again. She said she was tired of his coming over and complaining about all his troubles, and drinking her whisky and getting ugly and mean. She ended the affair. Now the Captain has returned. He had telephoned her. He insists on seeing her. She begged him not to come here. When he telephoned the second time last evening, the boy was with her. She said the boy became very agitated. She says the boy has an infatuation for her. She admits there was an affair with the Captain, but she looked into my eyes and said there had been no relationship with the boy. That is the kind of lie one cannot expect a housemaid to believe. But I suppose it is a matter of her pride. Even though she knows I know, she cannot say it. It would make her appear foolish, this seduction of a silly boy who could be her son. She said the boy is acting strange and violent, and thinks to protect her from the evil Captain. She cannot make the boy understand that she can protect herself without help.”

“Where was the boy while all this was going on?”

“We spoke in the kitchen, sitting with cups of coffee, like old friends. Perhaps in a way we are. She said that all of this has exhausted her. Perhaps the boy was asleep in her bed while we spoke. I could not say. She said that tonight she is going to be very firm with the boy and send him away forever. Doubtless he will make a great scene. She says she cannot endure such nonsense any longer. She says the Captain is a bore and the boy is a fool. She does not want any ugliness here which will bring the police. Tonight she will finish it with the boy and that will be the end of it. And so tomorrow she asks that I remain here all day and all evening. We shall close the big gates. Lock them with the chain and the padlock as when no one is here. She will turn the switch which silences the phone. Should either one arrive, the Captain or the boy, I can go onto my porch and shout to them that she has gone away, and they can see from the gate her car is gone, an accident of some convenience. She explained she wishes to have a very quiet day alone. I shall fix lunch for her, fix an early dinner, and she will take sleeping pills and go to bed early and see if she can sleep the clock around, or longer, to restore herself. She says she will lock the doors to her bedroom to avoid any chance of the boy bothering her when he comes to remove his sailboat. She said he has promised to come by, in the boat of a friend, at dusk tomorrow and take it away from here. She suggests that I might go around to the bay side of the house at nine o’clock to look and see if the boat is gone, and look in at her to see that she is not being bothered by the boy. She has engaged herself in crude behavior I think, and now wishes to escape, and rest, and perhaps find someone more agreeable.” She gave him a wicked wink. “It is possible of course that she is no longer young enough to accommodate such a hearty young man without finally becoming exhausted, even such a type as she is.”

“So we do not go back to the beach tomorrow?”

“It is a pity. When you leave me tonight, you can help me close the gates. They are heavy.” She looked at the clock. “Look! The time! Oh, we will miss the beginning! Hurry!”

As she sat beside him in the new hard-top movie house at the shopping plaza, gasping and squirming at the magic excitements of Bond, digging her nails into his hand and wrist at the moments of deadliest danger, he followed the plot with a portion of his attention, and at last devised a plausible way to handle the situation.

The boy’s car was gone when they returned. When they were in the little apartment she chattered about the movie until he said, “Lovely lady, I, Señor Jaime Bond, must ask your assistance in helping me elude the deadly agents of Schmaltz.”

“Ah!” she said, eyes sparkling. “I am service you, hah?”

“I think your native tongue might be more accurate, Señorita, even though the English version has a certain unique charm.”

“So. How may I be of service?”

“I shall leave now, but I shall only appear to leave. In truth I shall drive away, conceal my car in a small wooded place not far from the entrance to the road which leads here. We shall have left the gate ajar. I will steal back on foot, slip inside, close it the rest of the way and fasten the padlock. I will then creep quietly up to these quarters which by then will be dark, and here I shall hide all night, all day tomorrow, and all of tomorrow night until the deadly agents start seeking me elsewhere.”

The sparkle of fun faded to dubiousness. “You are serious?”

“Of course. I shall take great care not to risk showing myself to your employer, Señorita. She too is an agent of Schmaltz. A very clever one. And I shall have much needed rest and recuperation. We shall be very sly. We shall speak in whispers. And you shall take comfort in knowing you have served The Cause.”

“She would be very angry if...” She paused and shrugged. “But she never comes up here. Anyway, the job is nearly at an end.” Her frown disappeared, and her eyes shone with mischief again. “You ask a great sacrifice of me, Señor. I shall force myself to endure it and help you outwit the forces of evil.” She moved closer. “I shall even share my toothbrush!”

“No one could ask more.”

As he went quietly up her outside stairway after hiding the car, walking back and chaining and locking the gates, he felt the small weight of the revolver against the side of his right thigh as he climbed each step. He opened the screen door and locked it behind him with hook and eye. When she did not answer his whisper, he knew she was in the bedroom. He wedged the revolver down, out of sight, between the cushions of the couch.

As he entered the dark bedroom she said, softly, “Could you be Señor Jaime, sir, who outwits everyone?”

“You have made a correct identification.”

She giggled. He undressed in darkness. He slid into her bed, took her into his arms, feeling the vital warmth of her under the sheerness of fabric. He was prepared for all her cheery, greedy acceptances, her happy little love games and chortlings. But she was strangely rigid in his arms, fists against his chest. Her body was trembling and he heard a little catch of her breath in her throat.

“What is wrong, querida?”

“I... I don’t know. I feel very shy. Very strange. Why should I be frightened of you?”

“Just rest in my arms. Let me hold you.”

He held her quietly until her body relaxed. But then, at his slightest caress, she would give a little start, a little gasp. Tenderly, gently, carefully he brought her along until all at once she wrapped her slender arms around him with a desperate strength and with her breath fast and hot against his throat, she said, in a voice an octave lower than he had ever heard her speak, and in that special accent of the best blood of the tropic city of his birth, “You are my life. You are my heart. You are my love. You are my soul.”

With stinging eyes he knew that he, Raoul Kelly, had at last wooed and won the lovely daughter of Don Estebán, to have, to hold, to cherish for as long as he might live.