by Desmond Cory
“No,” said Fedora. “Not much.”
“It’s not like the Congo. It’s not like Cannes. The damned place must be unique.”
“I’m coming round to that way of thought,” said Fedora.
Hendricks, the ex-professional gunman, his brief career of glory ended, sat in the corner with his arms folded over his chest and with his eyes tightly closed. He said nothing. Fedora batted a mosquito off the bridge of his nose and lit a cigarette; previous experience had only gone to show that the local brand of mosquitoes enjoyed a Philip Morris as much as anybody, but Fedora was an optimist. Behind him, Hendricks opened his eyes: “I’ll have one, too,” he said.
Fedora gave him one. “Why,” he asked, “do the gunmen out here wear black?”
“No idea,” said Hendricks, inhaling smoke. “Could be the way that copper pointed out. They kill without hard feelings here, and go to the funeral afterwards. . . . A full-time gunman goes to an awful lot of funerals. That’s how it may have started, anyway.” He leaned momentarily out of the side window, wrinkling up his eyes into the wave of heat that washed over his face. “Shan’t wear that outfit any more, though. I carry a gun all right, but I don’t go round looking for trouble.”
“Nobody’s looking for trouble,” said Trout shortly. “That’s not to say we’re not going to run into a packet of it, though.”
The Land Rover rocked lazily from side to side as it rounded a corner; there came into view, at perhaps a kilometre’s distance, an unexpected tangle of red and grey rocks, curiously weathered shapes fronded with twisted palms. The road led over flat ground straight towards it. “That’s where we’re going,” said Trout, who was not a man to fear the obvious. “Let’s hope for better luck when we get there.”
Dilapidated; that would be the, obvious word to describe the Venta de los Pajaros. The road petered out directly in front of it, in an open space where grass and bushes grew waist-high and rife; then there was the building, long and low and palm-thatched, with a verandah on which the paint had long since cracked open under the hammer-blows of the sun, while the woodwork beneath was dark and rotten. Fat green creeping plants clambered up the walls as though seeking to strangle the house, or to bury it under their weight; the windows were narrow and lacked glass, seeming no more than thin gaps with yellow cane shutters behind them. Nothing moved in or outside the house; until a parrakeet, startled perhaps by the deep feline purring of the car’s engine, swooped away over the ramshackle roof with quick flirts of its bright blue wings, chattering angrily to itself as it fled. Trout turned off the ignition, tilted back his hat, stared up past the mouldering wooden steps of the verandah to the front door, which stood half open and could not, probably, be closed. “Looks like there’s nobody home,” he said. “I’ll try the hooter.”
He did. But still nothing moved.
He got out; Fedora slithered after him, to stand at his side in the rank grass. There was a high buzzing of insects in the bushes; another bird bickering softly somewhere a long way away; the earth itself seemed to be stirring faintly in the heat. But there was no noise at all from the house. Trout began to walk with slow, swinging strides towards the verandah steps; Fedora followed. Hendricks stayed in the car, finishing off his cigarette; watching them incuriously as they mounted the steps and went in through the front door.
The main room, directly inside, was very long and very narrow and very dim indeed. Trout and Fedora Stood for perhaps thirty seconds on the threshold, striving to accustom their eyes to the gloom; gradually, they began to make out certain outlines within the room . . . a wooden table, a pile of wooden boxes, chairs, what looked like a chest of drawers, a wooden bench . . . all in disarray, as though thrown together at random. . . . “Come over here,” said Trout gently. “We’re not going to hurt you. Are you the Señorita Gonzales?”
Fedora turned his head a fraction to the left, trying to see whatever it was that Trout had already seen. At last it moved, and he saw it; a faint white blur, an oval blur, the blur of a human face. Whoever it was was standing against the wall, in the darkest part of the room . . . no, was moving, was stepping silently backwards, towards another door some fifteen feet away from them. “Stay where you are,” said Trout a little more sharply. “Nobody’s going to hurt—”
The door opened and shut: she (for at that last moment, Johnny had been sure that it was a woman) had disappeared without saying a word. “Oh, no” said Trout. “No more of this catch-me-if-you-can stuff, for heaven’s sake; we’ve had enough of that to last us a lifetime. Come on—let’s go and root her out.”
They crossed the room to the door, the rough planks on the floor creaking noisily under their footfalls; Johnny kicked it open, stepped inside. He caught the hand with the knife in it some nine inches from his belly, twisted, wrenched, heard the knife rattle on the floor; another hand came up at his face in the near-darkness, clawing for his eyes with sharp and pointed fingernails. He jerked his head back, again just in time, and swung a hard backhanded blow at the flitting pale shape a foot away from him and just a little lower than his chin; his fist connected with a fierce little jolt that jarred his wrist and forearm; there was a choked-off gasp, something heavy hit the floor, something scrabbled there. Fedora stood with his back to the wall, every muscle tensed; but there was no sound in the room, no other sound, until, some five seconds later, there came the noise of a harsh and strangely satisfied sobbing. “Get those bloody shutters open,” said Fedora.
He heard Trout go past him, feeling his way along the walls towards the window. Then the whacking thump of a violent kick, and then another; the heavy bamboo shutters guarding the french windows split and, at the third kick, were shattered wide open; light came flooding into the room like a tidal wave. Johnny, his hands still pressed against the wall and bis body lowered to spring, stared at what lay curled up on the floor in front of him.
“My God,” he said. “Take a look it this.”
They looked for a moment in silence. Then Trout, always the soul of chivalry, moved across to help her to her feet. He stooped over her, reached for her shoulders—
“Oww” he said, looking in amazement at the four angry weals running down his forearm. “Now there’s ingratitude for you. I was only trying to help you up, ducky.”
“You leave me alone,” said ducky between her teeth. “Don’t you dare to touch me, don’t you dare. You just keep away.”
“All right,” said Trout, taking a pace back. “If that’s the way you want it, well-all-right-then. Nobody wants to touch you, don’t you worry.”
“You speak for yourself,” said Fedora. He went over to where the knife lay on the indescribably filthy floor, kicked it moodily over into the corner. “She nearly had my tripes out with that, the little tiger.”
“Just listen to her now,” said Trout with awe.
Ducky, still sitting on the floor and propped up on one elbow, was now obliging the company with a few selected items from what seemed likely to be an extensive and varied repertoire. There were a number of words in it that Fedora—whose vocabulary was confined to the four or five hundred good old-fashioned swearwords in classical Castilian—had never heard before, but in every case they were so admirably related to their context that he had no difficulty in guessing their precise significance. “Listen,” he said, looking down at her with disfavour qualified only with admiration for her exuberant physique, “there’s no need to go on like that. This is a purely amicable call, that’s what it is. We’re friends of the late lamented Don Roberto.”
She looked up at him, raised a hand to push a lock of long, black, and greasy hair away from her eyes. “Don Roberto? He’s dead.”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “We know.”
“Then what are you doing here? And what do you want?”
“Are you Maria Gonzales?”
“What if I am?”
Johnny straightened up, looked at Trout, shrugged. “You do this sort of thing better than me,” he said. “I just seem to get another q
uestion back. I must study your technique.”
“You shouldn’t have swiped her down like that, you silly ass. Naturally, the poor girl’s startled.”
“Startled?” said Fedora. “She’s scared stiff. You’d think we wanted to rape her, or something.”
“That’s probably exactly what she does think.”
“Oh,” said Johnny. “The local sport, is it? I didn’t know.”
The floorboards creaked again behind him, and Hendricks came in through the door, wiping his palms thoughtfully on the sides of his trousers. “Well,” he said. “What goes on?”
“This,” said Fedora, “is Maria Gonzales.”
Hendricks looked at her for quite a while with his pale blue eyes, then moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “What’s,” he asked, “she doing on the floor?”
“She tried to stick Johnny with a knife. So he batted her one.”
“Yes,” said Fedora irritably. “But she doesn’t have to go on sitting there, giving us a free leg show. Vamonos, señorita. Up you get.”
“Careful,” said Trout anxiously, as the whites of the girl’s eyes suddenly glinted. Her bare feet wriggled protestingly against the floor, and then she stood upright, Fedora’s fingers still resting very firmly against her shoulders. “There,” he said, releasing her. “That’s better. It’s like we said—nobody has to get hurt. Nobody at all.”
A muscle twitched involuntarily at the side of the girl’s mouth, but her eyes remained fixed on Fedora’s. “Blimey,” said Trout, impressed. “I may as well study your technique while I’m about it.” Then the girl made an unladylike spitting noise in her throat, and walked away.
Trout watched her reflectively for a few moments, then turned to look slowly round the room; which was small, dark in the corners and filthy rather than dirty. Directly before the french window was an enormous bed under a yellowing mosquito net; an up-ended trunk stood beside it, serving as a bedside table; on it stood a small red alarm clock, not going, an opened packet of Chesterfield and an empty glass. The bed hadn’t been made, not for some weeks by the look of it. Behind it was an enormous wardrobe of local workmanship and a shelf, hammered roughly to the wall, on which stood a few books and four or five bottles. Another huge pile of bottles, thirty or forty of them, all empty, lay in the corner as though they had been thrown or had rolled there; they contributed considerably to the unaired, unhealthy, slightly animal smell of the room. Maria, calmer now and meditatively scratching her ankle, sat on a low cane chair by the door and watched the three men. Hendricks was still looking at her. She took no special notice.
Fedora walked round the bed and opened the wardrobe. It was almost empty. A grey suit and a bush shirt dangled from home-made wooden hangers; three or four more shirts, dirty and tangled together, lay on the wardrobe floor. There was a crumpled pair of khaki shorts on the bottom shelf, half concealing a pair of white canvas shoes. That was all. One doesn’t need much in the way of clothing, of course, in Venezuela, but even so, West’s wardrobe seemed to have been surprisingly limited. Maria kept her clothes somewhere else, and probably had even less.
Fedora tapped the pockets of the grey suit lightly, closed the wardrobe door. It had no lock, not even a handle. He turned to face Trout, who was riffling practisedly through the books on the shelf. “Nothing here,” he said.
“No,” said Trout. “Nothing here, either.”
Fedora ran his eye over the forbidding-looking titles as Trout flicked them one by one back into place on the shelf. There was J. G. Young on The Elements of Mining: McKinstry on Mining Geology: Mineralogy by Kraus, Hunt and Ramsdel: copies of Economic Geology for the years 1948, 1950 and 1951: Radioactive Mineral Deposits and Notes for Uranium Prospectors. . . . Fedora left Trout to it and began to wander round the room, idly testing the floorboards with his foot. Every other one seemed to be hollow, and one of them he incautiously put his foot clean through.
“Nothing else,” said Trout. “He didn’t go in much for light reading, as it seems.”
Fedora nodded towards the girl. “No doubt-he had Other amusements.”
“What, young Bitter-Rice in the corner? Yes,” said Trout, kicking one of the bottles over the floor. “No doubt he had.”
There was a brief silence. They looked at each other with a where-do-we-go-from-for expression. The heat came in at them through the broken shutters as though escaping from a cage, savage and intense. With an air of having come to a mutual decision, they sat down heavily on the bed.
“We’re here, anyway,” said Trout.
“Yes. And what do we do now we are?”
Again as though by common consent, they both looked up towards the girl. Who stared, rather crossly, back at them. A dispassionate observer would probably have held that theirs was the more reasonable attitude; both Fedora and Trout were pleasant-looking enough characters in their humble way, but they could have walked past all the film producers in Hollywood without collecting so much as a lift of the eyebrow. Maria, on the contrary, would have excited an interested “Aha/” from any connoisseur of the mean, moody and magnificent, or indeed from practically anything that wore trousers as opposed to slacks. She had been laid down (probably more than once) at that immediately post-war period when freeboard was being sacrificed to overall beam, and to specifications which artists such as Inurria or de Chavannes would have held to combine both plastic and erotic values in a highly elemental pattern: the end result being—as the vulgarian Fedora would have phrased it—just as sexy as you want it. The dress she wore—simple, black, and quite as dirty as everything else in the house—fastened down the centre with eight round buttons, two of the more essential of which were missing while the uppermost, apparently, was never used. AH in all, it was hardly surprising—
“Ssssssptt!” said Maria, leaping to her feet. “Do you all have to look at me like that? Why doesn’t one of you say something . . , instead of just sitting there staring . . .?”
She spat elegantly a clear nine feet across the room, turned and dived for the door. Hendricks stepped across to bar the way, and she instantly crouched as though to hurl herself upon him; Trout could have sworn that her hair bristled like a fox-terrier’s. “It’s all right,” he said. “Let her go.”
Hendricks didn’t move. “What for 2 We’ve got questions to ask her.”
“No hurry,” said Trout. “Let her go.”
Hendricks stepped aside, rather reluctantly; she tore the door open and was gone like a devouring flame. “Steady the Buffs,” said Trout. “This won’t do at all. She makes me feel like the famous German officer.”
“What German officer?” asked Fedora, puzzled.
“The one whose activities aroused so much admiration in the popular ballad.”
“You mean the fellow who crossed the Rhine—”
“Precisely,” said Trout. “And incidentally to drink the wine, if my memory serves me rightly. There doesn’t seem to be any wine here, unfortunately. However,” he said, getting to his feet, “these bottles over here would appear to contain a brand of whisky markedly superior to that hideous concoction they served us with yesterday. I think we could all of us do with a snort.”
His big hands moved jerkily over the bottle, withdrawing the cork. “I suppose, strictly speaking, this isn’t ours. But since we’re here, we may as well make ourselves at home.”
“We’re going to stay here, then?” asked Johnny.
“I don’t suppose anyone’s going to raise any objection.”
“Well, but what about her?”
Trout shrugged, raised the bottle to his lips and tilted it. His expression showed that the quality of the hellbrew was up to standard. “We’ll give her some money,” he said, “and she can move off some place else.”
“It’s not likely she has any place to go, or she’d have gone already.”
“H’m.” Trout lowered the bottle again, handed it on to Fedora. “Well, she can stay on here if she likes. But if she does, she’ll have to get a prop
er dress from somewhere. She can’t go round the place like a . . . a walking invitation to rape.”
“She’s got on a damned sight more than that little blonde piece you used to swim with at San Maurizio.”
“Maybe.” Trout took a turn or two round the room, his lower lip pushed out forbiddingly. “Maybe she has. It’s the way she sort of moves about inside it. . . . Anyway, I was wrong about that. This place is different to the Cote d’Azur; very different.”
“I don’t see it,” said Johnny, who was feeling rather more cheerful after his second life-giving swig. “Here, they scream and nobody takes any notice. There, they just don’t scream. It works out much the same, either way.”
Trout paused in his pacings to look out of the splintered french window. His short-sleeved bush shirt seemed to give out smoke in the full driving rays of the sun; outside, the hills and the forest sweltered together under a metallic sky. The birds were still calling to each other in the bushes, but companionably now, without alarm. “I’d like to know who this place belongs to, now,” he said. “Mrs. West, I suppose. We’ll have to get to see her, you know, whether this Galdos geezer likes it or not.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Maria couldn’t tell us quite a bit about her” said Fedora. “We might start her off on that. She’ll warm up better if we let her loose on a congenial subject.”
“Quite the little student of human nature, aren’t you?” Trout turned back into the room, blinking from the sudden loss of glare. “That girl’s quite warm enough already. Hullo. Where’s Hendricks gone?”
“He went out a moment or so ago.”
“I didn’t hear him.” Trout walked over to the door, pulled it open; leaned anxiously forward to stare outside. “No, it’s all right. He’s gone out to the car to get his pack.”
“. . . Where did you think he’d gone?” said Johnny.
Trout closed the door. They looked at each other; and each was aware of a certain mild tension in the other’s attitude.