Johnny Goes West

by Desmond Cory

  “Haven’t you ever seen a carnotite specimen? Didn’t they show you one in London?” Hendricks seemed surprised.

  “Did they hell. We didn’t have time to blink.”

  “Well—if you come across a lump of carnotite, you’ll know it,” said Hendricks, and grinned. “It’ll be in a rock like this, and it’ll have stained the whole fragment yellow. It’s powdery. You can scratch it with your fingernail. If you find anything like that . . . just let me know.”

  He walked on again, whistling. Trout paused to wipe his brow with a handkerchief, then set off once more in his wake. The fragment of sandstone lay in the path behind them, glowing faintly in the sharply-angled light of the morning sun.

  Twenty minutes later, they left the last of the tall trees behind them and emerged on the bare uplands. To the right of the path was a spring and a shallow pool in the shade of an overhanging rock, and they stopped there to make coffee on a fire of dry wood splinters. Trout and Fedora would later take the path that circled the rock escarpment and then descended abruptly towards the river, fording it at a point well below the Salto del Gato and doubling back to the house; Hendricks would continue upwards, making a far wider sweep down both sides of the river and finally returning along the camino del sur. Now, they drank the coffee tranquilly and ate the slabs of cold tortilla that they had carried with them; resting their backs against the water-cooled rocks and gazing down across the valley beneath them. Already the heat haze was beginning to rise, but was not yet strong enough to obscure the view greatly; they could see to the west as far as the huddle of white houses that was Los Cielos and the whole of the road that curved and wound over the undulating country towards them. Two or three puffs of dust indicated the positions of laden mule-carts; and one, larger and moving very much faster, marked the trail of a motor-car. To their left, the water stippled quietly downwards into the brimming pool; Fedora laid his coffee mug aside and leaned over to dip his hands and wrists in it.

  “A pleasant, sylvan spot,” said Trout, watching the molten silver of reflected light on the dark water. “Do you think that this would have been a headquarters?”

  “For West?” Hendricks shook his head. “Nothing here for him to plot his grid on. He may have come here to fill his water-bottle, but that’s about all.”

  “Plenty comes here to drink,” said Fedora. “Goat. Buck. And plenty of smaller stuff. And the cats come here to kill. I can still smell them.”

  Trout sniffed inquiringly, but detected nothing. Fedora touched his shoulder and pointed to a neighbouring patch of scrub; Trout, narrowing his eyes, made out the pale curves of a pair of spreading horns, a mound of torn flesh and the gleam of white bones. “You’d smell them over there all right,” said Johnny.

  Hendricks was buckling his canvas knapsack, preparatory to moving off; but he, too, had followed the direction of Johnny’s finger. “You a hunter?” he inquired, almost respectfully.

  Johnny nodded. “I was a professional, once. And I still get a lot of kick out of it. I might take the rifle up here one of these days and see if I can’t. . . . I’ve never shot a puma. It might be interesting.”

  “They’re devils to hunt,” said Hendricks sombrely, “from what I understand.” He stood up, swinging the bag once more over his shoulder. “If I see one any place, I’ll let you know. See you this evening, then.”

  “Uh-huh. Good hunting, yourself,” said Fedora.

  They sat still for a while, watching the wide-shouldered figure with the springy step mounting the slopes to their right, diminishing steadily in the distance. They lit cigarettes, the smoke mounting straight upwards from their fingers in the bright and motionless air. . . . “A thing I often wonder,” said Trout, “about you, Johnny.”

  Fedora said, “What?”

  “What made you come back again? Back from Africa, I mean? Back to this bloody mess we seem to be making of things?”

  “I wouldn’t say things were so bad,” said Fedora.

  “No? Well, but one asks oneself, what the hell is one doing here? Looking for carnotite—now where the hell’s the sense in that? What are they going to do with it when we’ve found it? Now if we had a couple of rifles and there were a nice big cat in the neighbourhood . . . there’d be some point in that. That’s what the sociologists might call an essentially human activity. What they mean by that is that it’s something you can start and see the end of, all by yourself. You know what I mean to say?”

  “Sure,” said Fedora affectionately.

  “You do? Oh, well, that’s fine, then. I’m none too certain myself.”

  “Old Tiddler,” said Johnny. “You don’t have to worry. We live it up.”

  “Yes, we do, really. You remember Tibet? . . . Yes, but this job’s not quite the same. It’s not just us two on it, the same as usual. Hendricks is the bloke who’s doing all the work . . . and it makes me feel pretty useless, just watching him.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” said Johnny again. “There’ll be plenty of work for us before we’ve finished here. Maybe too much for a quiet fellow like me who doesn’t much care to stick his neck out.”

  He dipped his hands once more in the pool, cupped them, tossed water over his face and hair. Drops fell on the shoulders of his shirt and trickled down his back, darkening those few patches that were not already black with perspiration. Trout watched him curiously. “Why do you say that, Johnny? Can you . . . smell the cats?”

  “That character Galdos,” Johnny said. “Anybody could smell that cat.”

  Trout said, “It might have been anyone else.” Johnny said, “If anyone else did it, Galdos did it.

  There doesn’t seem to be anyone in these parts he doesn’t own.”

  “Except for us three.”

  “That’s right. That’s why you don’t have to worry.”

  “Hell,” said Trout. “I don’t want trouble.”

  He went on smoking in silence for a while. Then he tossed the cigarette-end into the pool, got to his feet.

  “We’d better be getting back,” he said. “Whatever work we’ve got to do, we’d better get on with it.”

  There are, of course, any number of ways of going to work. The method preferred by Fedora to any other ,and brought by him to something approaching a fine art was to lie on a sofa with his head pillowed on a cushion, to close his eyes in profound thought and, from time to time, to elucidate to an obsequious assistant those things that prolonged contemplation had revealed as worthy of further and immediate attention. Back again at the Venta de los Pajaros, he lost little time in putting this method into practice. “I think,” he said, pushing his head a little deeper into the comfortable recesses of the cushion, “that perhaps we should make some effort to get in touch with the Merry Widow. Don’t you agree?”

  “I suppose you allude to Mrs. Robert West.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “It’s always a surprise to hear you recommend effort of any description,” said Trout acidly. He was seated a couple of yards to Johnny’s right, going through the contents of a large and ramshackle desk; so far he had uncovered nothing of more than very general interest, other than three or four highly pornographic little volumes, profusely illustrated and printed in French. “Why, do you suppose these are hers?”

  “I incline to think so,” said Johnny.

  “You’re probably right. She must have one of those unsullied and beautiful minds one reads about from time to time. Here,” said Trout, leafing through the topmost selection, “listen. This is rather gracefully put. Elle se glissajusqu’aufond du lit, sa langue léchant au passage le corps duveteux qui s’éveillait au désir. Isn’t that the cutest way of putting it? I wonder if she. . . . Wait just a moment. . . .”

  “For Pete’s sake,” said Johnny, irritated, and going so far in his irritation as to open one eye. “My suggestion was that we would meet this woman on a purely businesslike basis—not to discuss her taste or lack of it in literature.”

  “Urn?” said Trout, immersed. �
�Ah. Oh. Yes, I follow. Of course, the Chief of Police didn’t seem very anxious to lend his support to that project.”

  “He’s scared of Galdos,” said Johnny. “We’re not scared of Galdos.”

  “We might be if we’d met him,” said Trout. He dog-eared the page tenderly and put the book away;

  jerked open a drawer, closed it; opened another. “Aha.”

  “What d’you mean, aha?”

  “Here’s something. Here’s his passport.”

  Fedora evinced mild interest.

  “And his chequebook.”

  “. . . Examine them,” said Fedora, coming to a decision. Fatigued, he closed his eye again.

  Trout clicked his tongue. “The passport’s Argentine. Naturally. It would be. Issued in 1950. Practically unused. Caracas entry stamp for November, 1955 . . . but no exit stamp from Argentina.”

  “Does that surprise you?” asked Johnny.

  “Not in view of the circumstances. He made rather a hurried exit, didn’t he? Now here’s the chequebook. Oh, this is excellent,” said Trout, opening it. “There are notes of the deposits as well as of the withdrawals. And there ought to be . . . yes, yes.” He began to mumble excitedly away to himself, making quick, jerky notes with a pencil on the back of the passport. Johnny opened one eye again.

  Eventually, Trout sat back with a rather perplexed expression on his face.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s all quite clear. He came here with exactly a hundred and forty-eight thousand bolivares standing in his account, which comes as near as dammit to forty-five thousand U.S. dollars. And in twenty months or so he went through the bloody lot and a fattish salary from the combine as well. He died broke. In fact, he died a debtor. There’s no reference to any salary having come through from the combine for the last three months.”

  “How are they drawn?” asked Fedora.

  “Nearly all to portador. There’s a big one of thirty thousand bolivares made out to the combine in August of ‘56; that would have been when he bought his directorship. But most of them are for anything from five to fifteen thousand . . . drawn pretty regularly, but they step up a bit after November last.”

  “That was when he came to Los Cielos.”

  “It was.” Trout pushed the chequebook away from him and rolled his pencil idly to and fro on the smooth surface of the desk. “And the combine cheques stopped coming through a short while before he sent that sample to England. That gives one to think.”

  “It does. I’ll take that as the theme for my next spiritual exercise.”

  Trout, aggravated, turned sharply with the idea of hurling the passport at Fedora’s nose; but the door opened at the crucial moment, and he checked himself. It was Maria. “. . . Maria,” he said. “Come here a moment, would you?”

  She was eating a banana, and went on eating it. “What is it?” she said suspiciously.

  “No, come on over here. I won’t bite you.”

  She dropped the banana-skin on the floor and walked over to the desk, finally planting the extravagant contours of her buttocks on the arm of the sofa some nine inches from Fedora’s chin. “I washed your shirt,” she said, looking down at him.

  “What shirt?” said Fedora.

  “The one you were wearing yesterday.”

  “Very kind of you,” said Trout patiently. “And tonight I’ll give you a pair of my cotton socks, which you can wash or wear as a fetish, whichever you prefer. What I wanted to ask you, though, was where Don Roberto kept his correspondence.”

  “His . . .?”

  “His letters.”

  “He never used to get any letters.”

  “What, none at all?”

  “He never used to write any, either.”

  “But that’s very odd,” said Trout.

  “He was afraid the Jefe de Correos would take his letters to Don Tomas. He didn’t want that.”

  “But why would the Jefe do that?”

  “He’d do it if Don Tomas told him to. Of course he would.”

  Trout gave his pencil a final twiddle and put it away in his pocket; adding, as an afterthought, West’s passport and chequebook. “Is there anyone or anything in this town,” he asked, “that Galdos doesn’t have under his thumb?”

  “No,” said Maria simply.

  Trout sighed. Then he stooped down to slide open the bottom drawer of the desk. Moving slowly and carefully, he took out and placed on the table a hypodermic syringe.

  The sun came slanting down the length of the gully, glinting off the rough quartz of the exposed rocks, burnishing the leaves and torn bark of the tall and solitary pine. It was four o’clock by Hendricks’ wrist-watch. He sat on a flat boulder in the shade of the pine tree’s trunk, his notepad on his knees, adding the final touches to the rough sketch-map he had made of the day’s journey. He himself would have called it a rough sketch-map; but it was, in actual fact, a remarkably clear and accurate document criss-crossed with compass bearings and annotated with careful topographical notes in Hendricks’ small, neat handwriting. It was, in its way, the work of an expert; Hendricks, surveying it with his head on one side, felt perfectly satisfied, both with the map and with the results of his explorations. He had discovered three of the key points from which West must have made his own examination of the land, and he was now on his way to what he confidently expected to prove a fourth; naturally, he had made no attempt to indicate these sites on the map—he was no fool—but he knew exactly where they were in relation to his grid and he could, in any case, almost certainly have returned to each one of them in turn without consulting the map at all. . . . All the same, Hendricks liked to be sure; and now he was sure. He made a final correction to a guiding contour line, gave the final satisfied little grunt of a Rembrandt laying aside the brushes for the lunch hour, and then looked up.

  And then sat very still.

  The puma came quickly down the gully, its huge feet padding noiselessly over the hot rocks, the corpse of the slaughtered fawn dangling from its bloodstained jaws. It went past Hendricks, passing not thirty feet away from him but with no sign of having noticed him; scaled the rocks on the far side of the gorge with two or three slow and superbly graceful bounds; disappeared at last into a patch of shadow larger and darker than any of the others. From within that shadow sounded a faint mewing yowl of greeting; then there was silence.

  Hendricks slipped the notebook into his pocket, reached for his knapsack and began to walk, as quickly and silently as he could, away from the pine tree. His face was considerably paler than usual under its veneer of tan. Not until he had covered some three hundred yards did his colour begin to return; not until then did he finally sacrifice silence to speed and commence to run at an awkward, shambling jog-trot down the scree. He was having to make a lengthy detour to circumnavigate that gorge .. . but it was worth it.

  Chapter Four

  MARIA BROUGHT in the plates, set the table. The long room lay stretched out in the light of the oil lamp, pale, as though bled of its colour; Trout held his glass up to the light and tilted it, watching the brown flecks moving in the liquid before he carried it to his lips and swallowed it. “I suppose,” he said, “there’s no point in waiting any longer.”

  “None at all,” said Johnny.

  “I wonder what the hell’s happened to him?”

  “He’ll get here,” said Johnny.

  They went over to the table and sat down there, Trout’s face glistening in the lamplight from the aftereffects of the whisky. Maria hadn’t moved the little white packets of heroin, and they still stood on the table beside the big dish of chicken fried in rice. Trout picked one up and weighed it for a moment in his hand; then put it down again. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I still don’t get it.”

  “Get what?” asked Johnny, with his mouth full.

  “The heroin angle.”

  Johnny shrugged. “The thing that puzzles me” he said, “is how he managed to mainline that stuff into himself for seven months, and drink himself into a coma ev
ery night into the bargain, without getting dead a whole lot sooner than he did. Must have had a constitution like an ox.”

  “He could hardly have been human at the end, certainly. Well, he gave Maria the hell of a time, the way she tells it.”

  “It’s a grim life anyway,” said Fedora.

  Maria looked up, jerking a sucked bone out of her mouth with her fingers. “What’s that you’re saying about me? What were you saying?”

  Neither of them took any notice. “If she was telling the truth about those letters,” said Trout,”—that’s another very funny thing. West couldn’t have got any of those letters they sent him from London at all. Either Galdos picked them up, like Maria suggests, or else. . . hell, or else they’re still lying about in the town Fast Office. We’ll have to go into Los Cielos tomorrow, and take a look.”

  “Well, but if they’re still there—why should they give them to us?”

  “Well charm them into submission,” said Trout.

  They finished the meal in silence. Maria’s eyes jerked speculatively from one to the other of them, but she didn’t say anything; while Trout and Fedora found that the act of eating greasy rice with their fingers compelled their entire attention. besides, they were very hungry. Eventually, Trout pushed away his plate with a last defiant clutter and looked round him almost angrily. “This is cheerful, I must say,” he said. “I don’t see what we’re all so long-laced about. Is there any coffee left?”

  Maria, who was still sulking, nodded.

  “Well, go and get it, and we’ll have some whisky with it again. That should brighten things up.” Trout pushed his chair back, crossed to the table in the corner of the room and switched on the radio. “Let’s see if we can’t get some nice solid swing. I feel in a. . . . Ah, that isn’t bad.”

  He tuned carefully in to a steady trickle of Mexican by the sound of it; then stood for a few moments by the set, clicking his fingers in time to the music and undulating his behind in what he probably considered to be an irresistibly provocative manner; at last, desisting, he went back to sit down at the table once more. “Do you think,” he said, “we ought to go out and look for him?”