by Desmond Cory
“Didn’t you see the way he was looking at her?”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “I did.”
“I think he’s fond of women, you know. He’s the type.”
“He can be fond of this one, if he wants to,” said Fedora shortly. “What’s it to us?”
Trout sat down on the bed. He sat there motionless for a moment, his hands on his knees, breathing rather carefully through his nose. Then, suddenly aware of the heavy, oddly bitter smell that hung over the mattress, he rose abruptly to his feet. “That girl knows a lot of things that we want to know, too. So we don’t want any complications.”
“Are you going to tell Hendricks that?”
“Yes,” said Trout. “If I have to.”
Fedora took a cigarette from the packet on top of the trunk, struck a match on the heel of his shoe. “Listen,” he said. “You’ve got this the wrong way round.”
“How d’you mean?”
“That girl doesn’t just play around with a knife, you know. She’d have had it stuck right in my guts if I hadn’t stopped her. Could be,” said Johnny, “that Hendricks isn’t quite as quick as I am. There are girls like that in every other house in the town . . . but he’s the only uranium prospector we’ve got.”
Trout considered this for a moment in silence. In the end, he said,
“You mean we ought to talk to her?”
“That’s right,” said Fedora.
Trout shook his head. “I doubt if it’ll do any good. But you can try it, if you like.”
She was sitting at the back of the house, where a tangle of leaves and arching branches afforded a vague green shade from the sun. She was chewing on a length of grass, and running her fingers absently through her hair. She looked up as Fedora descended the rickety steps to stand in front of her, but made no attempt to run away or even to prepare herself for flight. Instead, she twiddled her toes up and down in a mildly threatening way.
“We want some food,” said Fedora. “Is there any?”
She watched him cautiously, as a small animal might watch the movements of a very much larger one.
“There might be.”
“We’d pay for it,” said Fedora. “And we’d pay you for cooking it.”
“Pay me?” She considered the offer. “. . . All right.”
“Did you use to cook for Don Roberto?”
“I know how to cook,” she said; not answering the question adroitly enough—if the evasion were intentional. Fedora didn’t know whether it was or wasn’t. He sat on the wooden railing that ran round the back of the house, near her but not too near.
“How old are you?” he asked. Then, when she didn’t reply, “Have you been here long?”
“Too long,” said Maria. “Seven months.”
West couldn’t have been in Los Cielos much longer than that, Johnny reflected. “Were you with him before?”
“No.” She took the grass-stem from her mouth and tossed it petulantly towards the bushes. “They told me before he got here. They said he’d want company out here and they asked me if I’d like to go. I said I wouldn’t mind. So I came.”
“He’s been dead nearly a month,” said Fedora.
“It’s a place to live.”
“You want to stay here?”
She didn’t reply at once; she was watching him again, and even more cautiously now, from under her dark eyelids, assessing the offer. Then she looked down at the ground; slowly, secretively, began to smile. “All right,” she said.
Fedora trod out his cigarette underfoot. “You keep the room you’ve got,” he said. “We’ll all be sleeping in the long room outside. You do the cooking for us, and keep the place clean, and that’s all we ask. You can begin by getting all those bottles thrown out; they’re stinking up the house to all heaven. And if you’ve got anything else to wear, you’d better wear it.”
Her eyes were still turned downwards towards the dust-stained hands folded unmoving in her lap; there was something dangerous about her stillness; it was like that of a coiled snake. “I’m going to give you your knife back,” said Fedora, comfortably, conversationally, balancing the haft on his fingers. “You’ll probably want to use it in the kitchen.”
The knife hummed loudly in the woodwork three inches from Maria’s right ear. She jerked her head away, the tendons leaping to prominence in her throat; then went limp. She began to laugh. The laughter came up in deep rolling waves, like a man’s, and her shoulders shook with it. There was nothing hysterical about it; she thought that what Fedora had just done was funny.
Johnny smiled sympathetically. Essentially a simple person himself, he was used to dealing with simple people and had come across this reaction many times before. “I don’t have to say it, do I? Never again, Maria. Not on anybody.”
She reached up and tugged the knife free of the wood that held it; her fingers and wrists were amazingly strong, Fedora noticed, strong enough to do so almost without an effort. “What do I do,” she asked, pushing her hair back from her forehead once more, “if anyone . . .?”
“What do you usually do, if anyone?”
“That’s what I have the knife for. But you just said I mustn’t.”
“You can yell for help,” said Fedora.
She curled her lip contemptuously. “Yes? And what cood does that do me? Who’s going to take any notice?”
“Yell for me,” said Johnny. “My name’s Fedora.”
“Fedora? That’s a pretty name for a man.” She looked down at her bare feet, at her ankles, again with that secretive and annoyingly knowledgeable smile. “And who do I yell for if it’s you that does it?”
“It won’t be me,” said Fedora. “And it won’t be the big man, either. It’s the other one who may try something.”
“Muy interesante” said Maria, uncoiling herself. “And what’s the matter with you, guapísimo? . . . What happens if I try something?”
She put her arms round Fedora’s neck and rubbed her body, like a cat, against his side. Her flesh through the thin dress was warm and of an unexpected firmness; Fedora, suddenly and unreasonably furious, slapped her face hard, rather harder than he had intended. She stepped back, eyes open wide and lips drawn back, then went for him in a smooth, pantherine spring; Johnny caught the swirl of movement in time to sway back dextrously and tilt her plunging body over his hip. She half-somersaulted past him and landed heavily on her back in the soft grass at the foot of the steps: “This is getting monotonous,” said Trout, emerging from the back door. And, addressing Maria directly, “You can’t do anything about Fedora, you know. He’s too damned quick. Of course, you could try shooting him in the back.”
“I’d love to shoot the bastard in the back,” said Maria venomously, scrabbling herself to her feet. “Give me a gun. Give me a gun and I’ll shoot the bastard dead.”
“She says she’ll do the cooking,” said Johnny, “and keep the house clean and throw away the bottles and love us dearly one by one, and all we’ve got to do is pay her for it. I’d say we have a bargain.”
“Cooking, eh?” said Trout. “I suppose she wouldn’t like to get started in on that? It seems a long time since we had lunch.”
“If he thinks I’m going to do the cooking after that,” said Maria—very much to their surprise, since they had been talking in English—“if he thinks I’m going to cook for him after treating me like that, he’s got another think coming, that’s all. I’ll cook him, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll fry him in dripping.” Big, liquid tears traced a path down the perfect contours of her cheeks. “There, there, there,” said Trout comfortingly. “Don’t take it so much to heart. He didn’t mean to—”
He stopped, withered by a blast of concentrated vitriol from Maria’s eyes. Still mouthing horrible Spanish imprecations under her breath, she waggled her way up the steps and disappeared through the door, shutting it behind her with a furious slam.
“Maybe you were right,” said Fedora sadly. “It didn’t do much good, after all.”
&nb
sp; “Never mind. She’ll cool off soon enough. And then we can eat.”
Johnny hadn’t really believed that Maria knew how to cook. It seemed most improbable to him that a girl should have received such staggeringly munificent gifts from nature and also be an adept in the civilised arts. But he was wrong. She could. An hour and a half later she was serving up as excellent a tortilla de jamort as any he had ever tasted; and, what was more, seemed to be in a very good temper. It was even possible that she actually liked cooking. To celebrate the occasion, she had put on another dress similar to the other but very much less revealing, and a hideously greasy apron on top of it. So they sat now in the long room at a rather good table that West had probably brought from Caracas, eating avidly; Maria a little apart from them, frowning slightly from time to time but not as though she meant it. She ate with a singular rapidity and managed to finish a shade ahead of the others— even ahead of Trout, whose prowess at the platter was legendary. “You want coffee?” she said.
“Yes,” said Trout. “We’d like some coffee.”
“It’s on.”
“Good.”
“But there’s hardly any left. You’d better ask Don Tomas to send some more.”
A pause. “Don Tomas?” said Fedora. Pensively.
“Yes. But don’t you know him? You must know him.”
“Well, we don’t,” said. Fedora. He made it his custom only to tell lies when he could see the point of it, and right now he couldn’t. “Who’s Don Tomas when he’s at home?”
“Everybody knows Don Tomas,” said Maria with finality. “He’s the big pot. The head of the combine. Roberto used to work for him.”
“Ah,” said Johnny. “Señor Galdos.”
“Señor Galdos, yes. Don Tomas. Don’t you know him?” She looked at each one of them in turn, and for the first time there was a shade of genuine fright in her eyes. “If you don’t know him, then what are you doing here?”
“I suppose,” said Trout, glancing sideways at Johnny, “we ought to have explained that before. There’s no great mystery. We’re just three friends of Roberto’s, that’s all. And as we were down this way on business, we thought we’d drop in and see him for a few days. Down in the Argentine—”
“But Roberto’s dead.”
“Yes. But we didn’t find that out until we got to Los Cielos. And then we thought—”
“When you got here, you knew my name.” Maria was sitting back in her chair, breathing a little more quickly than usual. “How did you know my name without my telling you?”
“Somebody told us you were here, of course,” said Trout, with a touch of impatience. “When we found that Roberto was dead—”
“Who was it? Who? Who told you?”
Trout hesitated, his mouth half open. “What about that coffee?” said Fedora instantly. “It’ll be boiling over, Maria, if you don’t watch out.”
“Yes, but who was it who—”
“We’ll have some whisky with it. Bring in one of those bottles from the bedroom, will you?”
Maria looked for a moment at Fedora’s relaxed and deceptively melancholy countenance, then got up, abruptly, and went out. Hendricks chuckled to himself as the door swung shut behind her. “You were getting the worst of it there, Trout. Why the hell put up with all those questions? You don’t have to tell her anything.”
“We do,” said Trout, rather forlornly, “if we want to get anything out of her in return. Which we do. Badly. After all, if she was living with West all the time he was here, she must have been around when . . .” His voice tailed off significantly.
“You better let Fedora handle it. He seems to have a way with the girls.”
“It’s my winning personality,” said Fedora.
Hendricks pulled down the corners of his mouth unpleasantly. “You got the right idea,” he said. “All women talk. That’s no problem. Get into bed with her tonight, and the only thing you’ll be asking me in the morning is how to make her shut up. H’mmph.”
“Why should I ask you?” demanded Fedora. And the extra blandness of his tone carried a warning to Trout; the tension was coming back again, and perhaps even Hendricks sensed it. He took a loose cigarette from his shirt pocket and lighted it slowly, with unnecessary caution. Then he blew out smoke and said evenly,
“Anything in what I said to make a fuss about?”
“No,” said Fedora. “No one’s made a fuss.”
“We can get girls in, if we want them,” said Hendricks. “No need for any bloody silliness because there’s only one of them.” He stuthed the glowing end of his cigarette carefully. “I know these parts rather better than you two do. A man gets kind of touchy in this sort of heat; you want to watch out for that. Things get sort of twisted up inside you when it never gets much below the eighties. And we don’t want to fight over nothing at all—do we?”
Fedora wiped his throat with the palm of his hand, which came away wet. “We don’t,” he said. “We’ve got too damned much to do.”
“That’s right. We’ve got plenty to do. That’s not to say we can’t relax. And we ought to be able to relax without getting in each other’s hair, see what I mean? . . . because if we don’t. . . .”
“., . Then we start talking to each other like this.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Hendricks. The door opened. Maria came in with the coffee. Three pairs of eyes turned instantly towards her; then, rapidly, down towards the table.
Chapter Three
THE SUN came up through a gap in the hills before they were clear of the forest; they stopped, and turned, and looked towards it. The valley beneath them was suddenly clearly visible, though the sunlight as yet had not reached it; that great flaming intensity of light seemed to be reflected downwards from the mirroring sky to pick out all that lay on the ground with a supernatural clarity. In twenty minutes’ time, as they knew, the heat haze would commence to rise, and the pencil-clear outlines of hills and trees and rocks would be swayed and distorted by the quivering waves rising from the hard-baked ground. But now, at this moment, all was still and definite: though they had not yet left the grass and cane scrub for the bare austerity of the upper heights, the view to their right was wide open and they could see the river, a blue-grey thread far beneath them moving without motion through the cracked and fissured rocks, the river Aracena, the river in which Robert West’s body had been swirled and battered for four full days . . . or so they said. They could see the green luxuriant valley, and the narrow track down which they had motored the day before; they could even make out—though it was almost indistinguishable from the dull foliage that surrounded it—the sagging banana-leaf roof of the Venta de los Pajaros. Just beyond it were the rocks, through which the river gathered strength to force itself and where the steely blue of its surface was flecked with white at the edges. . . . “Why do they call it the Salto del Gato?” asked Fedora, resting his forearm on his raised knee and breathing deeply. The climb had been a stiff one.
“I don’t know,” said Hendricks. “But there’s one in Bolivia, too. They say that an old lion jumped it and escaped from the hunters that way. I’ve seen it, and it looks impossible—but it’s amazing the distance a big Hon can jump. I expect this one has the same name for the same reason.” He turned away, swinging the canvas bag he carried over his left shoulder.
“You mean there are cats in these hills?”
“Oh, yes. Quite a few. They stay clear of men, though; except when they’ve got kittens. They’re dangerous then.”
“I should have brought the rifle,” said Fedora.
They began to plod on upwards again, over the hard, unyielding soil. Already, and before it had as yet levered itself fully clear of the hills it sprang from, the sun’s impact could be clearly felt. If Hendricks was going to spend the whole day on the open furnaces of the rock heights—and he was going to—Fedora could not help but extend to him a certain admiration. He was used to it, of course; this was his job; but only a man of extraordinary physical tou
ghness could have endured it. And Hendricks was a good deal older than either himself or Trout.
“How are you planning to do it?” he asked. “What’s the usual routine for this kind of thing?”
“Depends on the kind of country I’m dealing with,” said Hendricks. He glanced from side to side as he strode along, his long rather aquiline nose lifted as though to test the air for the taint of suspicious minerals. “In this case, though, I’m going to do just exactly what I guess Robert West would have done. That’s no special problem. Most prospectors who know their stuff treat the same job in just the same way.”
“And what’s that?” asked Trout, who also was interested.
“Smell out four or five likely-looking stretches and mark ‘em on the map. Pick out in each stretch a landmark you can triangulate from and make it headquarters for the day. From then on, the rest is legwork. All I’m going to do today,” said Hendricks, “is see if I can’t pick up the stretches West was working and the places he decided to plot from. That shouldn’t be too hard. After that, the sweat may begin to flow.”
“And is this a likely-looking stretch?”
“No,” said Hendricks.” . . . At least, it’s possible. I don’t say it isn’t possible. But you get to back your instinct all the time in this game, and right here my instinct says no. If the evidence didn’t suggest that he found the dirt on Colonial territory, I’d have started off on the other side of the river. Still, I’ll have got round to that side by this evening.”
He stopped a moment, stooped, swung the hammer that dangled from a short loop round his wrist. Then he picked up the fragment of sandstone that the blow had kicked loose. “You see?” he said. “Sandstone. Mesa Verde sandstone. Well, that’s all right. That’s the sort of formation that carnotite seems to like. A nice medium grain, too . . . If I found a patch like this with a nice thick green mudstone below it, I’d be interested. Very interested.”
“Is there anything,” said Trout slowly, “that amateurs like us might be able to spot? Something that sticks out a mile?”