by Desmond Cory
“Exercise?”
“Yes,” said Trout innocently.
Hendricks flipped the book on the table shut. “Come if you like,” he said. “I don’t mind. You may get a bit more exercise that you bargained for, though.” He smiled humourlessly. “And if it’s just that you’re afraid I’ll get lost again or something, you can forget it. I was finding my way through the jungle in Uruguay before you boys had even left school.”
“Funny how everybody keeps harping on the subject of our education,” said Fedora. “We must strike them as a highly cultured pair, in these parts.”
“Be funny if you like,” said Hendricks briefly. “But if you’re thinking of trying to nanny me around, take my tip and don’t. Back in Caracas the idea was good for a laugh,- but you don’t want to take a joke too far. You play around as much as you like, but let me get on with the job in peace . . . for God’s sake.”
He got up and went out, shaking a cigarette loose from the packet in his left hand. Trout watched him go with a hurt expression. “Did I say anything?” he asked.
“No,” said Fedora. “Nothing.”
“It must be the heat,” said Trout.
“That’s right,” said Fedora. “The heat.”
He unbuttoned his shirt again, slowly; rubbed at his chest with the flat of his hand. Faint clattering noises came from the kitchen, where Maria was preparing their meal; and from beyond the windows the mad, high chattering of a parrot, darting from tree to tree. Trout raised his eyes from the book that lay closed on the table and looked towards the narrow, shuttered window: West must have sat here, where he was sitting now, many times, must have heard those self-same noises, must have felt that same close, fierce heat slowly stripping his flesh, his muscles, his brain, for six months, on and off, he had sat there; he had sat there until the edges of his mind had worn ragged and he had sought to shut out those noises and that heat, first with whisky and then, when that had failed him, with heroin. It was not difficult to understand him, in part; for to sit in that chair, silently, thinking, was in itself sufficient to give one a certain insight. And yet . . . why had he come here? What had he hoped to gain? or to get rid of? . . . Trout pulled at the lobe of his ear, and sighed.
“Him and his analyses,” he said. “Him and his Permian fornications. He has it easy.”
Johnny said nothing, but did so in a companionable way that encouraged Trout to continue.
“All he’s got to do is analyse a blasted chunk of rock; that’s easy enough. What we’ve got to do is analyse a man. That fellow West . . . what made him tick, what brought him here, what gave him the idea to go out one day and look for carnotite. . . . If we knew a bit more about him, if we knew how and why he went to look for it . . . that might even tell us where. But how can we find out those things?” Trout shrugged. “It’s not so easy.”
“Probably a simple enough story, if we ever got to I hear it,” said Johnny comfortingly. “He must have had the idea of looking for the stuff long before he got here. He must have been interested in it, anyway.”
“Why?”
“He’s got all those books about it. They’re pretty old, most of them; he hasn’t any of those magazines for a later date than 1951. Oh, he’s had radioactive minerals on his mind for quite a while.”
“On his mind,” said Trout pensively. “D’you think he went off his nut, at the end?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me at all. But mad or sane—he found the carnotite.”
“Yes. But what happened afterwards? Did he tell anyone about it? That’s important, too.”
“Who would he tell?” said Johnny; and Trout nodded. “Exactly. He doesn’t seem to have had a pal in the world. He didn’t even write, according to Maria . . . and as for his wife. . . .” He made a little noise with his tongue at the back of his palate. “I wouldn’t say that Galdos was so darned wrong about her. As really nasty a piece of homework as any I’ve ever come across.”
“Well,” said Fedora peaceably, “we’ll find out what she knows . . . this evening.”
The sun glared down on the rocks by the bed of the river, striking interesting-looking lights from the angled quartz on their surfaces. Jurassic? wondered Fedora, as he picked his way across them: or . . . the other kind? To hell with it, anyway. Whatever they were, they made for damned hard going. He had already barked his shin on a projecting knob and torn his trousers in the process. He paused for a few moments, wiping the perspiration from his face and neck and looking up towards the shimmering hills; Trout and Hendricks were up there, somewhere, in a cavern in a canyon, excavating for a mine. It was even possible that they could see him. A hundred yards farther on there was a bend in the river that would take him out of sight, but at this moment. . . . He imagined himself in Trout’s shoes, staring down at a tiny speck against a vivid background of sun-washed rock, barely visible, perhaps, against the dark twisting thread of the river. He waved his handkerchief once in the air, in salute to those imaginary but possible spectators; then put it back in his pocket and set off round the bend. The pitch of the driving waters rose a beat in intensity as he approached it.
This was the Salto del Gato. Here the high banks of the river rose yet higher to form twin cliffs maybe twenty feet high, with thirty or thirty-five feet of space between them. The path that Fedora might have taken, had he not preferred to take a short cut, came down the slope to the left and skirted the edge of the cliff; he gained it, walked along it, stopped once more to peer over the edge. The waters moved past below him, swathing relentlessly through the wet black rocks, a powerful grey torrent flecked with white. Here it was, then, where West was supposed to have taken his fatal tumble; certainly, a nasty place for mishaps of that nature. It might even have really happened that way. It was just possible. The actual manner of West’s death was, in any case, supremely unimportant. This was the path that led from the Venta de los Pajaros to Galdos’ hacienda; it was possible that he had come that way in response to some such invitation as that which Fedora was now accepting. . . . That was just speculation, though. That wasn’t very important, either. Johnny brought the pistol-holster on his belt a little farther forward against his hip; raised his hand to estimate better the distance from the cliff where he stood to the other. . . .
Thirty-five feet or thereabouts. Quite far enough. A very respectable jump for any kind of a cat; but, as Hendricks had said, quite within the bounds of possibility. Yes, and what else was it he had said? . . . that night? . . . about his having seen a cat? Johnny’s eyebrows, which had lowered themselves momentarily, levelled out again; he remembered now. A cat up in the hills, that was it. Well, maybe he would have a chance at it and maybe he wouldn’t. It depended on how much time he had to spare in the future. Which was to say that it depended in part on the results of his interview with the Señora West . . . for which, of course, it was important not to arrive late. . . .
Johnny glanced at his wrist-watch, and then briefly towards the sun; then left the path once more and strode on along the bank of the river. The going was a little easier, now; a gravel bed thickly strewn with boulders, through which it was not too difficult to pick one’s way. Johnny walked on for ten minutes and then, rounding a rock shoulder, found a yellow-roofed hacienda full in sight at perhaps two hundred yards’ distance.
He rested his shoulder against the hot rock and, thus covered from view, surveyed the house intently for two or three minutes. In general outlines, it was not essentially different to West’s dilapidated shack, but it had a sleek, cared-for appearance that spoke eloquently of opulence. It stood surrounded not by rough grass and shaggy palm trees but by a formal garden, where red and purple and orange flowers bloomed in great garish bunches; the walls of the house had been freshly plastered, and the plastic shutters over the windows were of ultramodern patent design. A narrow crazy-paving path left the garden and twisted through the rocks towards the river, not far from where Johnny stood; at the point where it ended, the rocks of the left bank had been blasted away with d
ynamite and smoothed with cement to form a wide, quiet pool, into which the powerful currents of the river hardly seemed to enter. A small house, just large enough to be a house and not a hut, had been built under the shadow of the overhanging rocks there; white posts, a tiled verandah, a veiled suggestion of coolness. Beyond were coffee trees in formal rows.
Fedora turned, and descended a few feet almost to the level of the water; thus screened from view, he approached the little house from the blind side, passed the high-diving board that projected from a ramp across the pool, and entered the shade of the rocks. The door of the house was half open. He mounted the verandah steps; pushed the door a fraction wider open, and looked inside.
“. . . You’re late,” said the Señora West, sulkily.
She was sitting in a deck-chair just inside the room; not doing anything,’ just sitting there. She wore a green-and-white bathing robe wrapped tightly round her body, and her legs stretched out from it, long, brown and bare, across the floor. Johnny watched her for a moment, then padded over and sat down in the empty chair beside her. “Sorry,” he said. “Not very late, I hope.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Gracia. She pouted. “You got here, that’s the main thing. We can talk here, if we’re careful. Nobody’s likely to come this way.”
Johnny looked round him. The room in which he sat was bare and simple; four or five canvas chairs, a wooden table, a big locker, ten or twelve pegs fixed to the wall: a changing-room, no more, for people using . the pool. To the right was another door, which also stood open; Johnny glimpsed through it a length of tiled floor, some picture or other hanging on a white wall, part of another canvas chair. . . . “What is this place?” he asked.
“Just a summerhouse. For swimming from. That’s all. Sometimes we put a guest in it. Sometimes when it gets hot we sleep down here . . . but the river makes too much noise.” She shook her hair deprecatingly. “What’s it to you?”
Fedora said, “Nothing at all.”
She pushed herself down lower into the deck-chair and, for some seconds, looked him slowly up and down. “I suppose you’re from the English Secret Service,” she said at length. “Or something like that. Would I be right?”
“Not,” said Fedora, “exactly.”
“Anyway, you’re here because of the carnotite. That’s what matters. Or are you going to tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
She looked at Johnny expectantly. “I’m not going to tell you anything,” said Fedora. “I came here to listen.” He offered her a cigarette.
“I got the mail,” said Gracia slowly. “I got all those letters that came to him from England. So you can see that I know plenty. Roberto found carnotite here in Los Cielos; and that’s a thing that any number of people seem to want; and that’s why I want to cut myself in on it. I’m his widow, after all. I’ve got my rights.”
She leaned forward to light the cigarette, raising a hand casually to prevent the wrap from falling open and down from her breasts. “I’ve got influence with the Oficina de Correos“she said, blowing out a thin tidy stream of smoke. “A lot of influence. That sample would never have got to England, if it hadn’t been for me. Tomas gave orders that all Roberto’s mail was to be examined . . . and if it hadn’t been for me, that sample would never have got through. I got it through; and I picked up the answers, as they came. Now that Roberto’s dead, Fm the person you ought to do business with. Don’t you think so?”
“It looks that way,” said Johnny. “I’m all ready to talk business. That’s why I came.” He drew pensively on his cigarette, then said, “Who killed Roberto?”
“I don’t know,” said Gracia.
“No?”
“No.” She shrugged, again caught the wrap just in time. “Maybe Tomas had him killed. And maybe he just fell in the river and was drowned; it could have happened that way. He was drunk that night He was drunk every night, if it comes to that.”
“How did it come to that?”
“What?”
“Why was he drunk every night?”
“He was that way,” she said.
“Always?”
“No. He wasn’t that way in Argentina. You think I’d have married him, if he had been? . . . He was one of the boys with big ideas in Argentina. Then when I Peron had to skip and the whole thing went to pot, he i just went to pieces. It had happened before we left B.A., even. Why, I guessed even then the way he’d end up. And I wasn’t wrong.”
“But you went with him to Caracas,” said Johnny softly.
“That’s right. I did. I don’t say there wasn’t a chance, then. If he’d got a hold of himself, if he’d treated me right, things might have worked out better. Oh, yes, I went with him. Why not?”
“He still had plenty of money.”
“Yes. He still had plenty of money; there was that, too.”
Johnny looked at her curiously. At that moment, he found himself almost liking her. “And how did Galdos come into it?”
“Oh—we met him and he liked me. I was hating by Roberto’s guts by that time, and he mine, so I went in with Galdos just for the pleasure of fooling him. We did fool him, too. My God, we did. But now the thing’s gone too far. God knows I’m not meant to spend my life, or the best years of it anyway, in an all-forsaken hole like this . . . with nothing to do but gambling and sex and . . . and . . . and watching people kill themselves by degrees. That’s why I want to talk business. That’s why I’ll help you find the carnotite.” She reached out impulsively to seize Fedora by the wrist; this time the wrap did open, and stayed that way. “There’s money in it, isn’t there? Big money? They wouldn’t have sent you all the way from England, if there weren’t.”
Fedora nodded. “There’s money in it, all right.”
“I want to go in with the three of you. A quarter share, that’s all I want. A quarter share, and a quick ride out of this stinking hole. How does that strike lu you?” Her eyes stared Fedora in the face, enormous, pleading. “That’s a fair offer, isn’t it?”
Just what is it,” said Johnny, “that you’ve got to offer?”
“What is . . .? How do you mean?”
“You say you’ve got the letters,” said Johnny patiently. “That’s fine. But we’ve got the letters too, and there’s nothing there that we don’t know already. What we want to know is where the stuff is . . . that, and nothing else. And if you don’t know that, then you’re no damned use to us at all. . . . Do I put it clearly?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Well, I don’t know where it is
but I’ve got his notebooks.”
“Notebooks?”
“Yes. I took from the desk in his house, the day after „ :hey found the body. The same ones he had in the Argentine, but with a whole lot of new entries . . . all
in that twaddle that geologists use, though; I can’t understand a word of it. But your pal Henriques could.”
“Hendricks,” said Johnny absently. “Yes, I should think Hendricks could.”
“All right, then. What about it?”
Johnny looked out through the door towards the dark pool, where the waters purled gently, incessantly, against the stiff cement. Gracia leaned forward, to see what he was looking at; but he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. She relaxed again, resting her wrist on his thigh and watching him steadily with the same ironical, amused wariness that he had seen in her eyes the evening before. Then she looked away and down; raised her right leg perhaps six inches from the floor and examined, casually enough, the smooth brown curves of her calf and ankle. “What have I got to offer,” she said, as though to herself. “That’s a good one.”
“. . . Those notebooks. Have you got them here?”
She looked up at him again, lowering her foot to the ground; then slipped back into the depths of her deck-chair. “Not on me,” she said, moving a little within the wrap as though to offer herself for inspection. “Do I look as if I have them on me? This thing hasn’t any pockets.”
“You know
what I meant,” said Fedora.
“. . . Maybe they’re here and maybe they’re not. They’re safely hidden, anyway.”
“I wouldn’t say the same for you right now,” said Fedora irritably. “I wish you’d. . . If we’re going to . . . Anyway.” He took a firm hold of himself, remembering the lamentable consequences of the late Don Roberto’s failure to do so. “You never thought of showing them to Galdos?”
“What? You think I’m crazy? He could use the carnotite as well as anyone else. And if he found out about it, how the hell would I ever get away from him?” She bared her fine white teeth furiously at Fedora. “On the other hand . . . if you boys let me down. . . . ”
“If that’s the way you feel, I don’t see why you went in with him at all.”
“Oh hell,” said Gracia West. “It was different in Caracas. I liked him at first, he interested me. I thought he was a real man, someone who’d gone places and still knew where he was going . . . not like Roberto. . . ”
“And with pots of money.”
“Pots of money, yes. We don’t have to harp on that, do we?”
“Oh no,” said Fedora. “Oh no.”
“Well, he’s not a man at all, he’s a bloody animal. Eats like an animal and drinks like an animal and . . . and . . . he’s got no feelings at all. Just instincts. God, I hate him, I hate him.”
“Anyone would think you were married to him,” said Fedora mildly.
“No. I’d never do that. He is different to Roberto; I was right about that part of it. He scares me, if you want to know, and that’s a thing Roberto never did. Roberto used to hit me and once he got after me with a carving-knife, but he never scared me the way Tomas does. Doesn’t he scare you at all?”
“No,” said Fedora, truthfully. “Not scare me, no.”
“Ah,” said Gracia in a hushed voice. She reached out her hand again and took Fedora possessively just above the knee. “No, you’re right. He doesn’t scare you. I saw that last night. Well, and that’s because you’re a man, a real man . . . the sort of man who doesn’t—”