The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

Hell for Hannah

Originally published in Dime Detective Magazine, August 1953.

Hannah and Ivan were dancing. The music was soft and sultry, the stuff of muted strings, and they moved to its Latin rhythms in a floating intimacy. Her head was back, her eyes were closed, and her lips stirred in a whisper of ecstasy. They were a beautiful pair.

When the music slopped, they returned to their table, and I got up and went over. I bowed to Ivan very politely and said, “May I have the next dance with my wife?” And he stood and returned the bow, also very politely, and said, “But of course, señor.” Then he turned and made another bow to Hannah, and she stood up with us, her face white and her eyes dark with sorrow. The sorrow was there because she didn’t like hurting her husband, but it would have been better for me if she had. It would have been better if she’d sneered nastily and spit in my eye.

The music started again, and she came into my arms, but not very far in. I tried my best, and I think she did, too, but it still wasn’t any good. It was like dancing with a wooden doll.

“I’m sorry, Carey,” she said.

I said, “Don’t be sorry. Be gay.”

“Please don’t be bitter. Don’t hate Ivan and me.”

“Who hates anyone? I love you, honey. I love Ivan, too. He’s a big, beautiful, Mexican god.”

“I tried to lick it, Carey. You know I tried. Remember how I asked you to take me away, back when it first started and there was still time? But you wouldn’t do it because you said there was no use running and you’d have to meet the competition where you found it.”

“Sure, I remember. Big, proud me.”

“I wanted our marriage to last. I wanted it to be forever.”

“Marriage!” I said brightly. A technicality, honey.”

Oh, yes, only a technicality. When the big passion comes, even though it’s late, all the intimate years and all the bright plans are reduced in an instant to the status of a dreary and bothersome technicality. Marriage, then, is a scrap of paper, the somewhat incredible ghost of a relationship that once existed.

We’d been on a kind of second honeymoon... Mexican honeymoon. It was something I’d promised her for a long time. After the novel’s published, I’d said. And now the novel was out, and quite a few people thought it was worth buying, and we had been on the second honeymoon. Everything had been wonderful and terribly intense, and then, all of a sudden, everything had been Ivan. The honeymoon was finished, I was finished, and there was no one but Ivan left in the world for Hannah. For me, there wasn’t even a world left. There was only sun and sand and a clutter of senseless stars.

I looked down at her now, and there was a kind of puzzled, rousing-from-a-dream look in her eyes, and I thought for a moment that the past was alive again and she was coming back my way. Then it was gone, and she was gone, and it was time to give up.

“I’ll go away tomorrow, Carey. Ivan and I. It’ll be easier then. You can forget all about me.”

“Sure,” I said, and it was like being knifed, hearing the way she said it. “Forgetting is an easy thing. Nothing to it. All these little synaptic connections and stuff that go to make up learning and remembering come equipped with little spigots. You want to quit thinking or remembering something, you just turn the right one off.”

“You’ll forget, after a while. I’ll get a divorce down here. Mexican divorces are quick. Maybe we’ll stay down, Ivan and I. Maybe we’ll go to Mexico City.”

The music picked that moment to stop, and we stood stiffly in the middle of the floor. I didn’t even have an excuse to keep my arm around her now.

“That’ll be nice and romantic,” I said. “I hope you’ll both be very happy. Which I don’t, of course. Really, I hope you’re very miserable and cry in your pillow every night remembering good old Carey.”

She looked up at me with fog in her eyes, and I knew I might as well have left the words unsaid. They never reached her.

“Tomorrow, Carey. We’ll leave in the morning. It was cruel of us to stay on so long. We’d have left sooner, but Ivan couldn’t leave. Some unfinished business, he said. Someone he must clear up something with. After tonight, it will be all right to go.”

“I’ve seen his unfinished business,” I said. “She’s got black hair and a body, and she deserves finishing. Maybe the two of us can get together. We could weep in each other’s gin.”

Then there was nothing else to say, so I took her back to the table. Ivan stood up and bowed to me and I bowed back at him, and we were so polite and civilized about it all that I felt like vomiting. I said goodbye. Hannah didn’t say anything because there was suddenly a catch in her throat, and Ivan looked sad in a way that made it plain he hated what he was doing to me.

I turned and walked back to my own table, feeling like the last act of Othello. There at the table was the black hair and body, with quite a bit of the body showing. The name, I’d heard, was Eva Trent.

“Mind if I join the discard?” she asked.

“Not at all. You may join me in a drink, too.”

“Thanks. Make it big and make it strong.”

I ordered two double shots. You can make them bigger than that, but you can’t make them stronger. Anyhow, I wasn’t ordering for the road. I intended to keep right on going for quite a while, and if she wanted to go along for the ride, she was welcome. I watched her down half the double and gave her extra points.

She was a lovely gal. Ordinarily, any guy in his right mind would have quit looking when he got to her, and it was a lousy piece of luck that she had to run up against Hannah. Just as lousy as it was for me that Ivan had to come along. She looked across the floor with eyes that were hooded and brooding, and she seemed to be in tune with my cerebral vibrations.

“We did each other a dirty trick, darling,” she said.

I shrugged and worked on my double. “An eye for an eye.”

“She’s something. It must jar a guy, losing that much prime stuff.”

“It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. That’s someone’s poetry.”

“Tennyson... and it’s a damned lie.”

“Isn’t it! You’re one who should know, sweetheart. That big hunk of male Latin. Ivan, yet. I wonder how the hell a Mexican ever came up with a name like that.”

“He’s only half Mexican. His mother was a White Russian. Once upon a time there were White Russians all over the place.”

“I had a feeling right along that the Commies were to blame.”

She emptied her glass and lifted one corner of her mouth in a sour grin. “Don’t work so hard at it, darling. Your heart’s showing.”

“The show goes on. Would you like to hear me sing something from Pagliacci?”

“Stop it!”

It was about time, so I did.

A waiter brought us two more doubles. She drank some of hers, leaving her mouth wet. There was a candle burning in a little glass chimney on the table, and the light flickered on her face, making her lips shine. They were full and soft and darkly sullen, dropping at the corners.”

“He’s a louse,” she said. “He’s a beautiful, greedy louse, and he isn’t even worth killing, but I want him back. I want him on any terms.”

“Big love and little pride.”

“To hell with pride. I want Ivan.”

“It seems to be a phobia with women... you and Hannah among others. The names are legion, no doubt.”

“I’m just a girlfriend. Hannah’s a wife... yours, in case you’ve forgotten. If you have, you might start remembering.”

“I just got through explaining to myself that marriage is just a technicality in these matters. A body is not a wife. At the moment, it’s all quite clear, and I’ll thank you not to confuse me.”

“If you want to lie down, little man, it’s your business.” She finished her second double and stood up. Her eyes were smoky with contempt, and the contempt was for me, the little man lying down. She moved away through candlelight and shadow, the body that deserved better than a jilting in a white gown that hung on for dear life. I thought to myself that competition was hot as hell when something like that finished second.

After a while I moved in to the bar to get closer to the bottle. I had two more quick ones, and they helped a little, but not much, so I had a third one. Next to the dull pain, the feeling of degradation was worst. Losing a wife in public is worse than a public flogging. A guy who loses his wife is a comic sort of character.

Why had I hung on? Why had I stayed around after Hannah moved out of our rooms, and was obviously Ivan’s future and my past? To show my independence, I told myself. To make it plain that Carey MacCauley was not a guy to run from a nasty situation. I lied to myself fluently, but I was never a guy who could distort the truth with much success, and I didn’t even believe me when I was drunk. I stayed because there was always a chance that Hannah would come back. I stayed for salvage.

The third drink at the bar made progress. I began to feel a little numb, and my mind developed a warm and comfortable furriness. It was like having my thought processes bundled up in a raccoon coat. I ordered number four and began to nurse it. That’s the trick. You reach a certain point in solution, then you start nursing. You nurse the alcohol just right, it keeps you preserved without getting you pickled. You can go on and on for hours and hours in a delightful fog.

The minute hand went around the face of the clock behind the bar several times. Time passed... a lot of time. At some point between earlier and later, a brown and white blur appeared at my shoulder. I saw it in the glass. The brown was face and the white was mess jacket. There was a soft, semi-tropical voice.

“It is requested, señor, that you come at once to room six-sixteen.”

I asked, politely, why the hell I should come to room six-sixteen. The white blur shifted. The brown blur bent a little closer.

“It is urgent, señor. Most urgent.”

I replied that I could think of nothing more urgent than what I was doing, which was to stay drunk.

The soft voice purred, “It concerns, I believe, the beautiful Señora MacCauley.”

Hannah? Hannah in distress? I fell off my stool and mounted my white charger. The damned beast was obstreperous, refusing to gallop in a straight line, and the trail we left across the lobby looked something like a graphic representation of the spelling scores in third grade. We made the elevator bank, however, and a small brown monkey in a bright red uniform grinned evilly and took us up to six.

The hall up there was dimly lighted. For a guy in my condition, it should have been equipped with fog lights. The numbers on the doors retreated into shadows, refusing to be recognized. I used the Braille system, working along the hall, and finally I came to it. Sweeping curve down and sharp curve up and over... straight line... repeat the first movement... six-sixteen. I knocked, and a voice that was not Hannah’s told me to come in.

The room was small. The man sitting in a chair facing me was also small. Short, that is, but plump. He had straw colored hair that stood erect at the crown of his head. His face was round, and his cheeks jiggled when he talked. There was a brown Mexican cigarette in his mouth that leaked smoke. He squinted at me through the smoke, and his lips moved in something that might have been a smile. Add up the parts, and he sounds like nothing. But, even drunk, I was conscious of the parts. Some guys, for some reason, just register.

“Good evening, Mr. MacCauley. Or morning, I should say. My name’s Smith. Perhaps you’d better sit down before you fall down.”

His voice sounded as if he’d make a good first tenor in close harmony, and I’d have bet a bottle of tequila that his name wasn’t Smith. I spread my feet and kept standing.

“Where’s Hannah?” I said.

A fat little chuckle crawled up out of his fat little belly. “Mrs. MacCauley? Asleep, I presume. At least, our friend Ivan left her at the door of her room an hour or so ago.”

“Ivan is not our friend. Maybe yours, but not mine. He’s my arch foe whom I have treated, nevertheless, like a gentleman.”

. “So I’ve noticed. Well, he’s no friend of mine, either, when you come right down to it. And I doubt very much, if I were in your shoes, if I’d treat him like a gentleman. At any rate, if I were you, I’d see my wife and tell her earnestly that she had better, for the good of her soul as well as her pretty skin, rid herself of Señor Ivan in a hurry.”

“No good, Mr. Smith. My wife’s in love. Unfortunately, not with me. Have you ever tried to tell a woman that the man she loves is a louse?”

“I see your point. Women are headstrong in such matters. Nevertheless, the situation is desperate. I suggest you use the opposite approach. See Ivan, I mean. He might be more amenable to reason.”

“You think so? I doubt it. At any rate, why should I see him? Are you trying to imply that Ivan is a sort of Latin Bluebeard? As far as I can tell, he seems to be a healthy and handsome Mexican cad.”

“Ivan is deceptive that way.”

“What way?”

“I don’t propose to go into details. I have no interest in this business other than a natural desire to save a very lovely woman from making a grave mistake. I repeat my suggestion that you see Ivan.”

“For what purpose? To ask him if he will, pretty please, not swipe my wife? No, thanks?”

“There are other methods.”

“Beat him up? Knock his teeth out? Hannah would just gather up the scraps and tie a ribbon around them.”

“You are being facetious, Mr. MacCauley. I assure you it’s not a matter for levity.”

“You’re telling me? Who’s losing his wife around here, anyhow?”

“Quite so. My apologies, Mr. MacCauley. A threat, I think, is the proper method. Nothing crude, of course. A very gentle kind of threat. Are you in condition to remember simple instruction?”

“I’m in excellent condition, thanks. I can remember the first canto of Paradise Lost”

“Very well. Go to Ivan’s room. It’s on this floor, around the corner, and the number is six-o-eight. Say to him: Señor, you are on the border of disaster. Emphasize the word border. It has special significance for him. Have you got that?”

“I’ve got it for what it’s worth.”

“It may be worth more than you think. It may, indeed, save your wife.”

That struck the note for departure, so I departed. Outside in the hall, leaning against the wall, I tried to make sense out of it. It seemed, at best, a bit queer. And, incidentally, somewhat humiliating. A plump, little stranger who called himself Smith trying to save Carey MacCauley’s wife from a fate worse than death. Why? The question wandered around, crying plaintively, in the fog inside my skull.

Border? Let’s see, where was I? Mexico, as I recalled. North of Mexico is the United States of America. There’s a border between them... mostly a river designed for wading. Things get run across borders sometimes: Narcotics... aliens...

There was within me a guy who can be called Schizo Number One. His immediate reaction was to render a loud and raucous raspberry. But there was also another guy who can be called Schizo Number Two. He was a guy who always wanted to climb on a white horse. When he was drunk, he was a very dominating personality. Almost before I knew it, he had me galloping around the corner to six-o-eight.

The door was open, which was another queer bird in a nest of them; not far open... just cracked a little. Inside, it was pitch black. It was also silent.

I’m not one, ordinarily, to walk uninvited into another person’s hotel room at night. Now, however, double shots and odd events had made me a new man. Pushing the door inward, I crossed the threshold. The feeble light of the hall showed me nothing but a small area of carpet. The room retained its impenetrable blackness and silence... and its heat, a close, cloying stuffiness left over from the day. The heat and the extraordinary darkness obviously existed for the same reason. The large glass doors across the room, attributes of all outside rooms in this hotel, were still closed and draped against a midday heat that had long ceased to exist. They had never been opened to the air and celestial flickerings of the Mexican night.

There is a convenient orthodoxy about hotel rooms. Fumbling in the accepted area for a light switch, I found it. Might as well make it good, I thought. If I was going to practice intimidation by some esoteric mumbo-jumbo about borders, I might as well make it effective by appearing in the night like a descendent of Dracula... sudden attack... confusion and terror, the old element of surprise.

But Ivan wasn’t surprised. He displayed total indifference. If I had been the original Dracula, he would still have been indifferent. The dead just don’t give a damn.

He lay on his face on the floor. His arms were flung wide, fingers clawing at the rug. Even in that sprawled position, he looked impeccable. His white dinner jacket fitted beautifully to his broad shoulders, almost as beautifully as the blade of the knife that had killed him was fitted between his ribs. The knife had a pretty little bone handle, the color of ivory. Around the handle, like a red pupil in the great white iris of the jacket, there was a wet stain. It was an eye, and it was looking at me. The stale, hot air of the room pressed in upon me like a fetid cloud, and everything went round and round.

With sickness churning my insides, I lurched across the room beyond the body and fumbled for the opening in the drapes. The tall glass doors swung open to the night, and I stood there in the opening to the small balcony outside, my back against the jamb, and gulped greedily of the cool air blowing in from the high region of bright stars. I noticed that there was also a moon, so big and near and fantastically bright that it was most certainly a phony trumped up for the deception of romantic tourists. Then I slipped gently down against the jamb to a sitting position and forgot all about lost loves... and death... and stars... and moons... and all odd things whatever.

A long time later, I opened my eyes to the vision of a face the color of an olive just beginning to ripen. The face had large, liquid eyes filled with regret. They were nice eyes and appeared friendly, but I wasn’t in the mood for them. Avoiding their swimming inspection, I saw that the stars were still in the sky where I had left them, but some clever devil had moved the phony moon up the arc in imitation of a real one. For the tourists, Mexicans will do anything.

My head rang like a gong with rhythmic regularity. For a minute, I couldn’t understand the reason for it, and then I realized that the olive complexioned guy with liquid eyes was slapping hell out of me methodically.

“Cut it out,” I said.

He was all apologies. “My most abject regrets, señor, but it is essential that you rouse yourself immediately.”

Remembering, I roused. Twisting from my sitting position, I looked back into the room. Just inside the hall door Eva Trent, my companion in discard, stood wrapped in an ice blue robe. Farther in was Hannah. She was still wearing the gown she had worn in the lounge downstairs. He face seemed all eyes. They were wide and dry and hot, and they looked at me with an expression that was neither hate nor grief, but a kind of dumb incapacity for any emotion at all.

The apologetic slapper said, “I am Ramon Tellez of the police, señor. I implore you to rise.”

With an effort, I rose, closing my eyes on a tilting sky and a shower of spilled stars.

“Quite a gathering,” I said, opening my eyes again.

Tellez looked as if he were tempted to resume his slapping. “One must not be hysterical,” he said. “My associates will be here shortly to perform the necessary duties in this room. As for us, I think it would be beneficial to utilize another place for our business. Señorita Trent has graciously offered the use of her room, which is near. If you will please precede me.”

Ivan wasn’t going, and Hannah stood very still, as if she hadn’t heard, caught fast in her emotional paralysis. By the hall door, Eva Trent stirred, light shifting fluidly on the ice blue robe. Her voice achieved by softness an accentuation of bitter venom.

“You’ve had a busy night, haven’t you, little man? Get tired of lying down? Pretty soon you can lie down forever. After the cops get through with you. What is it down here, hanging or firing squad?”

Hannah jerked around. “No,” she said.

Tellez repeated quickly, “If you will please precede me.”

Eva Trent turned and went through the door into the hall. Hannah followed. There was a somnambulistic quality in the way she walked. Her eyes still had that wide, hot look of blindness, and her movements seemed directed by some kind of extra-sensory perception.

In the hall, two Mexican cops stood at tropical semi-attention. One of them was big, almost a giant, with a dark, pocked face. The other was short and slender, girlish-looking beside his overgrown companion. The slender one, apparently in response to a signal from Tellez, fell in behind the group and followed along. In Eva Trent’s room, he took a notebook and mechanical pencil from his pocket, and looked efficient. Probably a college boy on his way up.

Tellez cleared his throat musically and permitted his big, liquid eyes to encounter mine. They looked sad enough to break your heart.

“Now, señor, it is necessary that you talk. Circumstances, you will admit, do not appear favorable for you. Reflect, if you please. Señora MacCauley, with whom you have become estranged over the handsome. Ivan, rouses in the night, for reasons which she declines to divulge, and makes her way to Ivan’s room. The door is open. Very strange. She looks into the room and beholds Ivan on the floor, as we all have seen him. Beyond Ivan, slumped in the open doorway to the terrace, she sees her husband... you, señor. You are sitting there — how shall I say, Señor?”

“You can say drunk. Passed out.”

He smiled gratefully and bobbed his head. “Thank you, señor. Passed out. Señora MacCauley, a lady with a sense of duty, contacts the hotel authorities, who in turn contact the police. So, señor, I arrive. While I speak with Señora MacCauley, Señorita Trent arrives. She arrives, as she confesses with charming frankness, to make a last effort to regain the affection of that Ivan. A most popular fellow, Ivan.”

He paused, wagging his head from side to side in admiration and staring at me with swimming regret and sadness.

“And now, señor, since you are almost certainly guilty of murder, it is time for you to try to convince me otherwise.”

I tried until it hurt, but all the time I had a feeling that I wasn’t doing much good. My head swelled and contracted like a frog’s throat, and my tongue was as thick as a catcher’s mitt. Everything was distorted inside my skull and came out worse. Tellez listened in silence, his placid, olive face assuming an intensifying expression of pain, as if it grieved him sorely to see such a fine, young Americano come to such an evil and floundering end.

“This man you mention... this Señor Smith... although your story sounds incredible, it will do much to give it another face if he corroborates it.” He turned to the slender Mexican with the notebook. “Manuel, you will go at once to room six-sixteen and request Señor Smith’s presence here.”

Manuel went, and we waited. Tellez hummed softly a gay, incongruous air of fiesta. Hannah stood very still by the door. Once her eyes met mine, and the blindness was gone for a second, and there was for that second an expression I had once known well and hadn’t thought to see again. It looked like love.

Eva Trent sat on the arm of a chair. She leaned back in a posture that should have been relaxed, one arm flung out along the top of the back, but the effect was not one of relaxation at all. There was about her an atmosphere of passionate tenseness, and I remembered that she had loved Ivan beyond pride, and that Ivan was dead. She had wanted him back, she said, on any terms, and now there were no terms left by which she or anyone else could ever have him.

My head expanded and shrank again and again, and Manuel appeared quietly in the room.

“Pardon, señor,” he said. “There is no response.

Tellez faced him, tapping his white teeth with a polished fingernail.

“The number was six-sixteen?”

“Most certainly!”

“You made the big effort?”

“Enough to wake the dead!”

“Not Señor Ivan, I hope.” Tellez chuckled at his little joke. Then, as if conceding and regretting its poor taste, bit the chuckle off with a snap of the white teeth. “Go at once to the desk and consult the register.”

But by then I knew. I knew even before Manuel returned that Señor Smith was not on the register. Señor Smith had ceased to exist. It was apparent from his attitude as he listened to Manuel’s report that Tellez was convinced that Señor Smith had never existed at all.

“You are sure?” he asked. “He is not registered?”

Manuel shrugged. “The clerk was positive. No one is registered for room six-sixteen. It is empty.”

Tellez turned on me like a sleek cat, purring. “Ah,” he said.

I put the heel of a hand against my forehead and pressed hard, but the throbbing kept right on. My brain still refused to cooperate. I thought of the man I had taken for a waiter at the bar downstairs, the one who had requested most urgently that I come to room six-sixteen. But I didn’t even bother to mention him, because I knew that there would be no such waiter. Only one person would remember my ascent to six, the elevator operator. He would remember, and he would tell, and it would place me very patly at the right place at the right time.

“It happened like I told you,” I said. “I can’t prove it, but that’s the way it happened.”

Tellez looked pained at my foolish tenacity. He lifted his plump arms with a sigh. “Señor, there is much to be said for confession. It cleanses the soul, it predisposes the authorities to leniency.”

“To hell with the authorities,” I said.

His eyes rolled up whitely. After all, what could one do but one’s best? One could do nothing more, obviously, except consign the Americano to the inevitable consequences of his own idiocy.

“Very well, señor. It becomes necessary for me to tell you that you are not to leave the hotel. It is possible, after reflection, that you will arrive at a more sensible attitude.”

On the arm of her chair, Eva Trent moved. Her body came up slowly from its half-reclining position, her dark eyes feverish, bright spots the size of silver dollars burning on the high bones of her cheeks. The feverish eyes were on me, but her voice, an incredulous whisper, was directed to Tellez. “You’re letting him go?”

“No, señorita. I am letting him retire to his room.”

“He’s guilty. He’s guilty as hell.”

“Very possible, señorita. Even very likely. But the case lacks completion. There are the loose ends to gather. In the meantime, he is secure. Believe me, the police of my country are not the children playing a man’s game. It is better that you leave these things in my hands.”

A deep breath fluttered her lips. The whisper came straight my way now, skipping Tellez. “You killed Ivan, and you’ll die for it. Tonight you stood in that hot room and stabbed him from behind because you’re a lousy little man who can’t even hang on to a wife, and if it’s the last thing I do on earth, I’ll see you as dead as he is.”

I looked at her for a moment, feeling sick, and it seemed impossible that anyone could feel like that about a harmless sort of guy who had done nothing worse than write a best-seller.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks very much.”

Then, not looking at anyone, I turned and went out and back to my own room. I walked over to the glass doors which were open onto the balcony, and I stood there for a long time, maybe half an hour, feeling the cool air on my face and looking at the improbable stars. They were so close that it seemed I could reach up and rake them down with my fingers. I thought that it would be a satisfactory conclusion to everything if I could reach beyond them to the black velvet sky and pull the whole works down upon a world that had gone both barren and mad. I didn’t even hear Hannah come into the room behind me. I didn’t know she was there until she spoke.

“Carey,” she said.

I turned. Her eyes were no longer blind. They were filled now with a kind of general sorrow for the things that happened and the people they happened to. People like her and me and maybe Ivan.

“Did you kill him, Carey?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t kill him.”

It must have been the answer she expected, for she accepted it.

“I came to ask you that question, and one other. This is the other one: Do you believe something that seemed bigger than the world, bigger than you or anything that ever happened to you before, could end utterly and finally without warning or reason? No, don’t answer. I only want to tell you that it can. Tonight, when Ivan took me to my room, I thought I would love him forever, and there was no question in my mind, but then, all at once I didn’t love him at all. I stood there on my balcony, and I only knew that I was terribly lonely and needed someone very much, and it was you I needed. It was like waking suddenly from an impossible dream. I kept thinking about things that happened to us, little things and big things, and I knew that I would have to have you back or die. That’s the reason I went to Ivan’s room, to tell him this.”

So the world wasn’t ending, and I wasn’t dying. In that instant, with everything coming alive inside me with the wonderful organic pain of birth, I knew who had killed Ivan. The realization was almost parenthetical, a sudden aside of small recollection tucked into the principal clause of Hannah’s homecoming. I went over to her and put my arms around her, and it was as if she’d never been away.

“Ivan?” I asked. “Who the hell is Ivan?”

It was fine then, there in the room with the cool air coming through the open doors from the Mexican night, and after a while she went to sleep. I waited a little, and then I went out and back up to Eva Trent’s room. I knocked and kept knocking until she opened the door, still in the ice blue robe, and stood looking out at me. I heard her breath catch sharply in her throat.

“You’re good,” I said. “You ought to be on the stage. All that love... all that hate. But now I know you killed Ivan yourself. I know because I remember what you said, and I’d have caught it at the time if I hadn’t been stupid with alcohol. In that hot room, you said, and it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t hot because I opened the windows and let the night air in. But it was hot earlier, when I found him dead. And even earlier than that, when you killed him. Have you decided as yet whether it’s hanging or shooting?”

Then, without sound, the plump little man named Smith was behind her with a gun in his hand.

“Come in, Mr. MacCauley,” he said.

There was no sensible alternative, so I went.

“So that’s how you vanished so easily,” I said. “A simple matter of moving from one room to another.”

He chuckled pleasantly. “These things can always be arranged, just as Ivan’s death was arranged... just as yours will be.” His eyes flicked over to Eva Trent. “I hardly know why I bother, really. Such a stupid mistake, my dear. I’ll have to think of an appropriate penalty.”

I shifted weight, and the gun jerked significantly in his hand.

“You mentioned the border,” I said. “That much, I think, was real. You ought to know, because you direct the operations that run across it, whatever they are. It must be quite an organization, and Ivan wanted out. The poor guy was really gone on Hannah, and he wanted out. So you put him out, very permanently. With me around, a guy discarded, a perfect patsy, the setup was perfect. Just get me in the right area at the right time, and the whole thing took care of itself. With Eva’s help, of course.”

He shrugged. “It’s dangerous to have apostates in an organization like mine. The risk is too great. Ivan understood that. He has only himself to blame.”

It was late. For me, almost too late. Even as he spoke, my muscles were drawing tight, and I drove toward him, clutching for the wrist above the gun. He skipped back and tripped. The blast of the gun was hot on my neck as I fell sprawling. Rolling over, I looked across into the mouth of the gun barrel, and it looked as big as a manhole, and I thought that it was rotten luck to die with Hannah just back. Then there was another blast, but it seemed to come from behind me, from the vicinity of the door. The plump little man who called himself Smith, kneeling on one knee, coughed softly and folded over, settling himself on the floor as if he were trying to find a comfortable position.

From the door, the sonorous voice of Ramon Tellez, Mexican cop, had a tone of gentle reproof. “You should have consulted the authorities, señor. As I said, the police of my country are not children. Did you think we would leave you unobserved?”

After that, there was little or nothing I could do, and pretty soon Tellez shook my hand and said everything would of a certainty be alright, and I went back to my room... mine and Hannah’s. She was still asleep, with her hair spread on the pillow, and there was a warm and aching happiness inside my ribs as I stood for a while looking out at the paling stars.

It’s time to head north, I thought. It’s time to go home.