Collected Short Stories

by Ruth Rendell

  Manuel had his car, though he lived only round the corner. Jeremy was asked back for coffee. He went to the bathroom and saw unmistakable signs of Lupe’s occupancy, a jar of skinfood, an eyeliner, a bottle of the cologne she used. It hadn’t taken long for Manuel’s principles to break down, Jeremy thought with a quiet laugh to himself.

  ‘Yes, I’ve moved in,’ she said to him.

  He looked at her hand and she saw him looking. Not even an engagement ring.

  Manuel drove him home. He had just taken delivery of this year’s new car. Jeremy often wondered where the money came from. You didn’t own a condominium at prestigious Hacienda Alameda and have a new car every year and fly home to see your family every couple of months out of painting ceilings. It was no business of his. He’d be moving on soon anyway. Maybe to California when he could raise the fare.

  The coconut palms round Josh’s Motel hummed with tree frogs as if they themselves were sensate things, an unbroken droning that twitched at the nerves. They kept Jeremy awake. He could go to New York instead and try out that key. There were two letters on that label after Ave. 11 and one of them could be a Y. Perhaps there were only two cities in the United States with numbered avenues – and perhaps there were dozens.

  A couple of days later he and Manuel moved on into the next apartment. It was the same as the one they had finished except that no one had left a key on the window sill. Manuel was whistling away in the next room, a song about the sunflowers of Kansas. He had taken off the fancy pale blue blouson he had been wearing and slung it down over the side of the bath. There was nowhere else to put it. Jeremy felt in the pockets. He had done this before when times were hard and hauled himself fifty bucks. Manuel was too careless about money to notice. The whistling continued, only the tune changing and going south to become ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. Jeremy pulled out a wad of notes, all of them twenties, a lot of money.

  He couldn’t just pocket it, that was no good. He looked about him, thinking quickly. The bath plug was the metal kind, operated by a lever underneath the taps but nevertheless removable. Jeremy removed it and carefully poked the roll of notes inside. The roll expanded a little to fit the hole as he had known it would. He put the plug back.

  Manuel or he usually went out at lunchtime and fetched back a couple of Whoppers, onion rings and two Cokes. It was Manuel who always paid. Cutting off the whistling, he went to the bathroom for his jacket and the six or seven dollars Jeremy would need at Burger King. This time he wasn’t quite so philosophical about the loss of his money.

  ‘I know you’re not accusing me,’ Jeremy said. ‘I know you wouldn’t do that, but for my own sake I’d like to show you.’

  He pulled the empty pockets out of his jeans, stripped off his shirt, kicked off his shoes, handed Manuel his own denim jacket with just $8 in the pocket.

  ‘I don’t know how much you had on you, Manuel, but you were swinging that thing around when we got in the car at my place. It’s a rough old area round Josh’s . . .’

  ‘And finding’s keepings, eh?’ Manuel used a lot of quaint old English expressions that sounded crazy uttered in his Spanish accent. ‘There’s worse things happen at sea,’ he said. ‘But you must pay for the lunch.’ He laughed and patted Jeremy on the back.

  Jeremy hooked the notes out of the plughole before he went home. There were sixteen of them, more than enough to get to New York on. But suppose the place the key opened wasn’t in New York? He’d have wasted all that money. It was an expensive looking key, a classy key, he thought, shinier, heavier, more trimly cut, than the keys that opened Hacienda Alameda . . .

  Manuel went off home the following week and Lupe was alone. There was no way Jeremy was going to get himself involved with her again. He intended to avoid Fort Cayne altogether for the four days Manuel was gone.

  She came to him. He was sitting out on the porch with Josh when she drove on to the parking lot in Manuel’s new car. There was something uncertain and vulnerable in the way she drove, the way she parked. She had the lowest self-image of anyone Jeremy knew. Because she thought of herself as dirt people treated her like it, though physically she was obsessively clean, had two showers or baths every day. It was Oriental not Latin girls that had been compared to little flowers but Lupe reminded one of a flower, a hibiscus maybe.

  ‘I should be so lucky,’ said Josh.

  ‘Help yourself.’ Jeremy shrugged. Lupe had opened the screen door and was coming hesitantly up the steps. ‘There’s a new rule here,’ he said to her. ‘No members of the opposite sex in guests’ rooms after sunset,’ and he laughed at his own wit.

  Her face grew hot. Josh who usually had a great sense of humour didn’t laugh for some reason but asked her to sit down and how about a drink on the house? Lupe said quietly that she’d have a Coke if there was one. Josh brought the Coke and asked where Manuel was. He had once or twice met Manuel.

  ‘San José,’ said Lupe.

  That did surprise Jeremy. ‘His mum lives in California? I never knew that.’

  ‘Not California, Costa Rica,’ Josh said. ‘Isn’t that right? The capital of Costa Rica?’

  She nodded. Jeremy barely knew where Costa Rica was and cared less. Josh said he’d never been there but he’d heard it didn’t have an army and it was the only real democracy in Central America. Lupe hadn’t been there either. Nicaragua was where she came from. They were actually having a conversation. Let’s keep it that way, Jeremy thought.

  He didn’t know if she was devoted to Manuel or only to his money and his citizenship. Whichever it was, she talked about him all the time. He was a devoted son to his mother, he’d bought her a house in the best residential suburb of San José. Lupe had photographs which she proceeded to show them of a bungalow covered in bougainvillea with gilded bars on its windows.

  Jeremy looked at the photographs which had been done by a professional whose address was stamped on the back. Ave. 2, it said, San José, Costa Rica.

  From a bookshop in downtown Miami he managed to get a street plan of San José. It was a city in which the streets or calles were numbered and so were the avenues or avenidas. ‘Ave.’, of course, could be short for avenida as well as avenue. A grid-plan city more or less, with the avenues running east to west and the calles north to south. At Juanillo Beach Properties they told him that one of the apartments had last been occupied by a couple from Costa Rica. A lot of Costa Ricans came to Florida for a week or a few days. Shopping was cheaper and better here. Electrical goods, for instance, were half the price they were in San José. But no, they couldn’t give him the address. If he had found something in the flat let them have it and they’d send it on. Jeremy handed over a couple of rolls of film he’d bought just now at Gray Drug. The Juanillo Beach Properties girl looked at him as if he was out of his mind.

  The travel agent he went to could get him a three-day package to San José for a lot less than he’d nicked off Manuel. Manuel was back by now and they were on the last apartment in the block. When Jeremy said he’d like next week off Manuel didn’t put up any objections and seemed interested when he said he was going to New York. He smiled and patted Jeremy’s shoulder and said something about the Big Apple and in a funny old-fashioned phrase, not to do anything he, Manuel, wouldn’t do. Then he took a clean brush and the bucket of emulsion and went off into the bedroom whistling that song about a boy called Sue.

  Jeremy got there in the late afternoon. There were more Costa Ricans than Americans on the flight and when the captain announced they were beginning their descent for San José they all clapped and cheered and drummed their feet. Evidently they were a patriotic lot. A bus the tour company had laid on took him into the city. It was four thousand feet up and cooler than Florida though a lot nearer the equator. There was a view of blue mountains behind coffee plantations and banana groves and the whole was dotted with flame-of-the-forest trees like points of fire. Jeremy had seen a bit of the Third World one way and another and immediately outside the city he expected to see the
shantytowns of poverty, the huts made of tin and sacks and plastic bags, the rubbish tips and flies. Poverty didn’t bother him, he never thought about it, but here in a kind of subconscious way he expected to see it just as in his native land he expected rain and Tudor mansions, but there was none to be seen. Only neat stucco bungalows and little houses like on an English council estate.

  In case the plan had lied it was a comfort to see the avenidas. The Hotel Latinoamericana was on Avenida Central and if it wasn’t exactly the Hilton it was the best hotel Jeremy had ever stayed in and about five stars up on Josh’s. The dark came down at six o’clock. Carmen the tour guide had warned them about pickpockets in the city where thieves abounded. Jeremy thought he would have an early night. San José did anyway, the hotel bar closing at ten sharp.

  In the morning he swam in the hotel pool. The water was icy. Outside in the Avenida Central the atmosphere was thick and stinking with petrol fumes. He walked downtown a bit but the pollution which hung as blue smog and obscured the mountains made him cough. Another thing Carmen had said was that if you took a taxi you should settle the fare with the driver first. Jeremy found a taxi and haggled a bit but he had no Spanish and the driver hardly any English and when he had seated himself in the back he was fairly certain he’d be ripped off. The driver was going to take him on a city tour.

  First they went to that suburb on the road to Irazu where the finest houses were and the foreign embassies. It wasn’t Avenida 11 nor was Manuel’s mother’s house to be seen. The driver pointed out places of interest that Jeremy wasn’t interested in. He showed him the university and the museum of art and then, not far from the children’s hospital, Jeremy did see a bungalow very like Manuel’s mother’s, perhaps indeed the very one, with orange bougainvillea swarming all over it, a golden grille to keep out the burglars and a little white dog peering out of one of the windows. At one point they actually drove along Avenida 11 but nowhere near number 1562. It wasn’t far from the Latinoamericana though, he could easily walk there.

  After dark? That might be best. Or should he watch the house or flat or whatever it was for the occupants to go out? He remembered that after all he had only two days. He paid the taxi driver – twice, it seemed to him, what they had fixed on – and walked up the Calle Central to Avenida 11. There were two branches of it, the street being broken rather ominously by the Central Prison.

  When he found the house he was deeply disappointed. It wasn’t even up to the standard of Manuel’s mother’s place, far below it in fact. He thought of where his parents lived in London, in North Finchley. This bungalow, standing alone on the side of the road, might itself have been in North Finchley but for the two palm trees in front of it and the thorn hedge with red flowers which divided it from the abandoned lot stacked with empty oil drums next door.

  Lace curtains, none too clean, hung at all the windows. The paint was faded. It looked unoccupied but he didn’t dare try the key. He walked across the oil drum lot and looked round the back. Everything shut up. An empty dog kennel and a broken rusty dog chain.

  He found a McDonald’s and lunched there. The unaccustomed high altitude was tiring and after a few drinks in the hotel bar he slept. By six-thirty it was quite dark. He walked up the Calle Central on to Avenida 11 and back to the bungalow. It was in darkness, not a light on in the place. The traffic was beginning to thin and with it the smog so that it was possible now to see the stars and a wire-thin curve of moon. He stood on the opposite side of the street and watched the house. For a quarter of an hour he did that. He went round the back across the oil drum lot and looked round the rear. Nothing. No one. Darkness. There were fewer people on the street now. He walked away, as far as the zoo, back again along a nearly deserted street, breathing clean fresh air. The house looked just the same. He took the key out of his pocket, walked up to the front door and inserted it in the lock. The door opened easily.

  He closed it behind him and stood in the small square hall. The place smelt dusty, stuffy, breath-catching as places do that have been shut up a long time in a warm dry climate. Not only was it unoccupied now, it had been unoccupied for months. A little light came in from the street but not enough. Jeremy switched on his torch. He pushed open a door and found himself in a bedroom, insufferably stuffy, smelling of camphor. By the marks on the walls he could see that pieces of furniture had been removed from it and only the big bed with carved mahogany headboard and white lace cover remained. The bungalow was a sizable house, much bigger than it seemed from outside. There were two more bedrooms, one empty of furniture. Either the traffic on Avenida 11 had ceased or you couldn’t hear it in here. He moved through the rooms in dim musty silence, directing the torch beam across walls and floors.

  The front room or parlour was also half-furnished. There had been a piano or chest of drawers up against one wall. Shabby wooden-armed chairs stood around. The wallpaper was stained and yellow, imprinted with small paler rectangles where framed photographs had once hung. One still remained, hanging crookedly, a family group.

  There was nothing worth taking. The most valuable thing was probably the hand-crocheted lace bed cover which, when he looked at it again, turned out to be scored by the depredations of moths. He returned to the living room. There was a drawer in the table which he didn’t expect to contain the family silver or wads of whatever they called their currency, colones, but he might as well look. It didn’t. He was right. The drawer had two paper table napkins in it and a United States ten cent piece, a dime. Closing the drawer, he raised the beam of the torch and it fell on the single framed photograph. Something made Jeremy look more closely, bringing the light right up to the glass.

  He gasped as if a hand had fallen on his shoulder. The picture was of an old wrinkle-faced man and a stout old woman with three young men standing behind them, one of them spidery thin, very dark, sharp-featured. Jeremy looked and shut his eyes and looked again. He thought, I have to get out of here and fast. It may be too late. There may be someone in the house now, he may have been here all the time, one of those brothers . . .

  He put out the torch. He listened. There was only the dark dusty silence. He went out into the hall, his heart beating quickly, sweat standing on his forehead. When he opened the front door . . . But he dared not open it. A window? The back way was obviously the worst idea. It was dark, desolate, empty at the rear. Though Avenida II seemed deserted the front door was still his best bet. He ought to have a weapon. A poker? It was never cold enough in this country to have a fire. He groped his way into the kitchen, opened the door and yelled aloud, clamping his hand too late over his mouth.

  Something tall and thin was standing in an embrasure of the wall between sink and cupboard. He didn’t know what he’d imagined but when he shone the torch on it he saw it was a six-foot-tall houseplant in a tub, dried-up, brown, dead. There was a piece of iron pipe with a tap on it lying on the draining board. Jeremy took it with him.

  Gripping his weapon in his right hand, he opened the front door with his left. There was no one there, no sound, no still or moving shadow. A car with only side lights on cruised slowly down Avenida 11 and turned into a side street. The ten minutes it took Jeremy to get out of the neighbourhood and find a taxi were some of the worst he had ever spent. He knew one of Manuel’s brothers had to be lying in wait for him in a doorway or else following him until he reached a totally dark and secluded part of the road.

  The house he had been in had obviously once been the home of Manuel’s parents. It was probably now up for sale. Manuel had of course moved his mother somewhere more plush. Jeremy could see it all, how he had been led here, but he didn’t let himself think too much about the ins and outs of it until at last a taxi came and he was safely in it. No haggling about fares this time.

  Why had Manuel done it? Because Jeremy had stolen $320 from him, no doubt. Anyway, it hadn’t come off. Perhaps he had gone to the house in Avenida 11 earlier or later than they’d expected or one of those brothers had got the date wrong. Or it migh
t even be that Manuel’s desire to get his own back would be satisfied by Jeremy’s disappointment at finding nothing to steal in the house. For Manuel might only be hoaxing him, merely playing a joke.

  Jeremy felt relieved at this idea. If Manuel’s aim had simply been to teach him a lesson – well, that was OK with him. He’d been taught a lesson. If he ever saw another key lying about he’d leave it where it was. But his fear was ebbing with every turn the taxi took to bring him nearer the Latinoamericana. It was all right, he was safe now, he could even see the funny side of it – the irony of getting nothing out of the burgled house but an old iron tap.

  At the desk he asked for his key. The reception clerk said Jeremy hadn’t handed it in, so Jeremy felt in his pockets but it wasn’t there. He had a hollow feeling first that he had had the key and his pocket had been picked, then that someone must have come into the hotel while he was out and taken the key from the pigeon-hole. It could very easily be done by reaching across the end of the counter while the clerk had his back turned or was attending to another guest.

  The clerk found a second key to his room and sent the wizened old bellboy up with him. The door was locked. The bellboy bent over and picked something up from the floor, something that had been half-hidden by the bottom of the door.

  ‘Here is your key, señor.’

  Jeremy was beginning to hate the sight of keys. He sent the man away. Was it possible he had dropped the key there himself? As soon as he was inside he knew there was no question of that. The room had been turned upside down. What he had planned to do, he thought, they had done to him. He sat down in the wicker chair and surveyed the mess. His bedding was in a heap, the mattress doubled over and half on the floor. All the drawers in the dressing table-cum-writing desk had been pulled out. He hadn’t brought much luggage with him, a zipper bag only, but they had taken everything out of it and strewn the contents, spare pair of jeans, sweat shirt, sponge bag, half-bottle of duty-free Kahlua, across the floor. But nothing had been damaged or destroyed. There was nothing missing – or was there?