“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 wa
s 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.
The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack Page 7