by Desmond Cory
Fedora cleared his throat with an unexpectedly violent hawking noise. “Let’s leave the question of our respective genders to one side for the time being,” he suggested patiently. “At the present stage, we ought to be able to accept the fact that I’m a man and that you’re a woman without drawing any over-rash conclusions. Without prejudice, of course, to such conclusions being eventually arrived at in the course of time.”
“Uh-huh,” said Gracia, who apparently found this flippant Noel Coward stuff excessively stimulating; she was now hopping up and down excitedly on the very edge of the chair. “You’re the sort of man who doesn’t—”
“Besides, I’ve got Galdos to deal with first.”
“Gal . . .? Yes.” She stopped bouncing very suddenly, rather as though she had landed on a pin and been instantly deflated. “Yes, you’d better watch out. I’m warning you. He wasn’t joking last night, you know. He’s already sent for Paquito Mendes.”
“Oh?” Fedora was interested. “The gunnie?”
“Yes, the gunnie. And he’s a damned good gunnie, too. He should get here tomorrow . . . and my advice to you is to burn him down right away. We can fix it all right. I’ll find out where Galdos is going, and let you know, and you can wait along the road with a rifle and pick Mendes off from behind. That’ll be the best.”
Fedora shook his head sadly. “It sounds a fine idea, but I doubt if it’s etiquette.”
“What the hell d’you mean, etiquette? He’ll freeze you for sure if you don’t. And he’s a real nasty little squirt, too; I used to think some of Peron’s boys were mean, but I never saw a bastard like this one before.
Queer as all get-out. He hates me.”
“Oh Lord,” said Fedora. “One of those.”
“Yes, one of those. Me, I don’t know anything worse than a fairy who likes killing people—but he seems to appeal to Tomas. Tomas has funny tastes. Tomas is. . . . Never mind about Tomas.”
“Thanks for the tip-off,” said Fedora.
“Well, you be careful, that’s all. Whatever else he is, he isn’t a fool. He went into a huddle with the geological boys this morning, and it’s a hundred to one he’ll have found out about the carnotite by now. Whether he’ll try to kill off the three of you right away, or hang around till he knows a bit more about what’s going on, I don’t know . . . but he’ll do something, you can rely on it. I’ll try and find out what he’s planning and give you warning. I can’t promise anything—but I’ll try.” She got up, walked round to the back of her chair and leaend on it. “Last night he was really mad. He was going to call down murder and sudden death. I cooled him down a bit, I think—I told him he’d have to be careful of how he went round ironing respectable foreigners with perfecdy good passports—I cooled him down a bit, but not much. You be goddam’ careful, Fedora. You’re carrying my ticket now, as well as your own.”
“I’ll be careful,” Johnny promised.
She smiled, suddenly and radiantly. “Then the deal I suggested. . . . It’s on?”
Fedora shook his head. “I can’t do a deal like that,” he said. “Things are more complicated than you suppose. A lot depends on whether the stuff’s in Venezuelan or in British Colonial territory.”
“Why?”
“Because if it’s in British Guiana, all we can do is report it to the Government; and they’ll snitch it in due course. They’ll pay compensation to West, of course. . . . To you, in other words, since you’re his widow.”
“What sort of compensation? I mean. . . . ” She rubbed her fingers together. “How much?”
“That would depend on the value of the find. But at a guess—somewhere around a million dollars. Say three hundred thousand pounds sterling.”
“A million dollars?” said Gracia.
“That’s what Hendricks said, once.”
“And what if it’s on Venezuelan territory?”
“Then we make a claim in the normal way and go to war with the combine. And, so far as I’m concerned, in that case the deal’s on. I’ll have to check with the others, but the offer seems to me to be fair enough. As for those notebooks of yours. . . .”
“Yes?”
“They’d better be good.”
“Yes,” said Gracia. “With a, million dollars on the ball, they better had.” Her eyes seemed to have retreated slightly into their sockets; their expression was faraway, almost dreamy. “. . . Meet me tomorrow, here. Same place, same time. I’ll give them to you then. Okay? . . . And you bring some kind of an agreement.”
“All right,” said Fedora. “Tomorrow. Six o’clock. Here.”
“Yes. This is a good place to meet: I always come down here in the evening to swim. Tomas is always in the office at six, checking the day’s figures or something. And he’s told the boys at the house never to come this way, except in the mornings. He’s jealous.” Her eyes had become aware again, were watching Fedora intently. She unfastened the bathing-wrap and let it slide down from her shoulders. “He doesn’t want them to see me . . . like this.”
South Americans are notoriously prone to unreasonable celos, but Johnny couldn’t help feeling that in this matter Galdos had some justification for his attitude. She was undeniably wearing a bathing-dress, a one-piece bathing-dress at that; but she wore it in such a way that her essential nakedness seemed to be emphasised by it, rather than reduced. “He’d be cross,” said Fedora, “if he knew.”
“He would. He certainly would.” Gracia caressed his chin with her slim brown fingers, stepped gracefully past him and out through the door. Turning back on the threshold. . . . “Take care how you come, and how you go away. Till tomorrow, then.”
Fedora nodded. He heard her bare feet patter quickly over the tiles of the verandah, descend the steps; then there was silence. He crushed out his cigarette carefully and put the end in his pocket and went to the door. Gracia had reached the diving-board and was poised at the end of it, her high, round breasts profiled against the evening sky. Her legs bent, then tautened as she launched herself outwards; her body gleamed for a long second in the sunlight before vanishing under the waters. She broke the surface some ten yards from her point of impact, her long black hair streaming down over her shoulders, and turned to wave to Fedora as he walked along the edge of the pool.
Fedora nodded absently. Then walked on.
Trout and Hendricks had not yet returned, and Maria was nowhere to be seen. Fedora undressed and sluiced himself down with a bucket of water; then dried himself, put on his shirt and a pair of slacks and wandered damply indoors again. For a few minutes he moved around the long room, picking things up and putting them down again. Eventually he sat down at the desk: West’s passport, lying on top of it, caught his eye and he reached out for it, riffling through the unused pages and finally studying intently the little cornet photograph inside the cover. This was West as he had been when alive; clean-shaven, tanned, a good-looking man with curiously slanting cheekbones; a man intent on going places and as yet unconscious of where the final place in that long line would be. Los Cielos, Venezuela, pop. 13,000. He could have read of it then in the gazetteer and the name would have meant nothing to him, just as it had meant nothing to Fedora a couple of weeks ago. Yet what went on in Los Cielos was to affect the whole course of man’s history in ever so infinitesimal a degree; the proof lay in that West had died there and that Fedora himself had come. Just what had already happened? Well, a man who had got off at the wrong station had stayed there to drink and to drug himself to death, to beat his mistress and to gamble his life away with his wife’s most recent lover; then one day, walking in the hills, he had found fragments of a yellow-coloured mineral that had lain in the earth for millions of years without attracting attention or causing the least excitement. . . . A brief and sordid little story with a crazy last-moment twist, and that was all there was to it. If the story held some deeper significance, Fedora was no nearer to grasping it at that moment than when he had entered the aeroplane that had flown him to Caracas. West’s widow had
told him something, but nothing much. . . . Fedora sat back and lit a cigarette, thinking the while of Gracia West and smiling very slightly as he did so. She was not the sort of woman whom Fedora could like or admire, but he was far too experienced to make the elementary mistake of thinking of her as a “bad” woman. “Bad” is a word that only takes on meaning when used in its proper context; and there was nothing in Gracia’s context to suggest that for her the word had any meaning at all. Johnny had been in Venezuela for less than two weeks; but he already knew that the code of morals extending over present-day Europe lay as the thinnest of veneers over the “civilised” towns of Venezuela, and elsewhere had no existence at all. Elsewhere there was only a curious and elemental society where the values of Europe were oddly twisted and sometimes totally reversed. In Los Cielos, money had no meaning: if you had plenty, you could make a lot more or lose it all in the space of a very few days; and if you had none at all, then it existed only as the shadowiest of abstract symbols. In Los Cielos, love had no meaning: if you had it at all, you recognised it as a kind of physical torture in which two beings sought to extract from each other an unattainable maximum of sensual and erotic experience and to do so by any convenient means; while if you hadn’t, it resolved itself into the lowest common denominator of the miners’ brothel, ten minutes of dark, confused activity on a straw-filled mattress. In Los Cielos, God had no meaning. To exist was everything, simply to be alive, and for those who failed in this elementary object—for those such as West—there was nothing but a meaningless grave in a meaningless churchyard with, of course, a meaningless cypress tree hanging meaning-lessly over it. No, you didn’t want to use words carelessly in Los Cielos, words like “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong”. . . . It only led to misunderstandings.
And misunderstandings were things that it was important to avoid. Trout and Fedora were like Martians in that part of the country, men from another planet, dealing with a people whose manner of thought they couldn’t hope fully to comprehend; Hendricks was, perhaps, a little less at a loss, for he knew enough of South America to be able to make the effort, at any rate, towards adaptation. That made him useful but dangerous; for the effort that had to be made was great, a constant strain, and in the long run it was probably the effects of exactly that same effort that had killed West, that had forced him in the end to negate his own existence as being neither the one thing nor the other. And that was why, from the first, Fedora had dealt cautiously with Hendricks; he was the man who knew the ropes, and it was curiously that same knowledge which was his greatest weakness. The bridge between two worlds is subject to constant stress and, in the end, will break.
. . . Fedora got up, stubbing out his cigarette, and went over to light the oil lamp. Then he sat down again, this time in a chair at the table, and listened to the faint noises of dusk percolating through from outside. Trout and Hendricks had not come back yet. Nor had Maria.
Fedora thought of the women in West’s life; or at least, of the two that he had met. Certain people might go so far as to say that he’d had it lucky. Maria, for instance; right now, it would be hard to say in what respect her body fell short of feminine perfection; her beautifully-shaped and pliant body, with its promise of unnamed delights. . . . Arid Gracia—well—all moral issues put aside, Gracia remained, of course, unquestionably a hellcat; there could be equally little doubt as to her quality in bed. One would suspect her, indeed, of just that kind of sexual extravagance which does drive men to drink. Here was no question of unnamed delights so much as of unnameable vices. Johnny, who had no objection to advancing fashionable gallantries to lathes in bathing-dresses, was nevertheless resolved to see that her offer of a business partnership received no purely personal extensions; he was fairly satisfied with his sexual prowess in normal directions, but was frankly uncertain of his ability to produce precisely those little spontaneous indulgences to which Gracia was probably accustomed. Besides, things were tricky enough without that.
Things were certainly tricky enough without that.
. . . There was a sound of boots clumping up the verandah steps; Trout came in, followed almost at once by Hendricks. “Hullo,” said Trout, swinging his knapsack tiredly to the ground. He walked over to the table and collapsed into a chair, unbuckling his pistol holster and heaving it on to the table. “How’d it go? A nice high-class seduction, as I hope.”
Johnny reflected privately that whatever happened, “seduction” would hardly be the word to describe it. “I don’t know,” he said. “It might be good news and it might not. Did you find anything?”
“No,” said Trout. “Not a sausage.”
He looked back over his shoulder at Hendricks, who had gone over to where his sleeping-bag lay and was now stuffing a small leather case into his holdall. “We walked for miles up and down with that scintillator thing he’s got there, but not a tickle. Bloody tiring, really.”
Hendricks came and joined the group round the table. It was obvious that his temper was not of the sunniest. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” he said.
“It’s interesting,” said Trout. “I don’t say it isn’t interesting.” Stretching downwards, he commenced to unlace his boots. “It’ll all come in useful when I write my memoirs.”
Hendricks inserted one finger into his mouth, picked irritably at his back teeth. “Isn’t dinner up yet? Where’s Maria?”
“I don’t know,” said Fedora. “She’s gone off somewhere.”
“Oh?” Hendricks leered. “You ought to look after your women better than that.”
“She isn’t my woman,” said Fedora. So many people seemed to be labouring under this misapprehension that it seemed to him prudent to clear the matter up, once and for all.
“That’s fine,” said Hendricks. “I’ll have her, then. And I’ll belt the little bitch, what’s more, if she can’t get our grub up on time.” He tilted back his chair and bawled, ” Mariiii-aaaaaaa?” Nobody answered.
“She’ll be back,” said Trout comfortably. “If not, Johnny can do the cooking for once. He’s had damn-all work to do today, other than go into secret conclave with desirable señoritas, and I wouldn’t call that work, you know, when there’s a ruder word for it.” He kicked off his boots with an air of supreme contentment, waggled his toes ecstatically. “Come on, Johnny—spill the works. What’s the shady lady got on ice for us?”
“She’s got West’s notebooks . . . or so she says.”
This item of information was received in a gratifying silence. Trout said, “Go on. What’s the catch?”
“She says she’s fed up with Galdos and wants to get out. So she hands over the notebooks and if we strike on British territory, we see she gets West’s share of the compensation. If it’s in Venezuela, we cut her in on “a fourth share of the profits.”
“A fourth?” said Trout, seriously alarmed.
“Yes. She thought we three were planning to split it three ways, and I didn’t explain the real state of affairs in any detail. Naturally not. Still—are we entitled to do that kind of a deal?”
Trout nodded. “Technically, yes. We’d agreed that if we found the stuff in Venezuela, we’d claim on behalf of E.I.E. through the CAMBUS outfit. And so far as E.I.E.’s concerned, you’re a director and I’m a director, so we’ve got a quorum. We ought to notify Jimmy . . . but as we can’t. . . . Well, anyway, technically, yes.”
“In that case,” said Johntty. He got to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I hereby propose that the Señora Gracia de West be admitted as a partner without portfolio into the hitherto unregistered company what will exploit the hitherto undiscovered mine what we think is somewhere up there, on the basis of a twenty-five per cent cut in the hitherto unappropriated whack-out.” He sat down again. “I don’t suppose I put it quite right, but you know what I mean anyway.”
“Yes,” said Trout. “We know what you mean. But look here—what’s in these notebooks?”
“She doesn’t know,” said Johnny. “Sh
e says it’s all in a horrible geologist’s jargon she can’t make head or tail of, but which Hendricks could probably sort out in no time at all. It’s a dead toss-up whether his notes are any use to us or not . . . but what do we lose? If they are helpful, we’ll find the stuff at once. And if they’re not useful and we don’t find it at once, then the chances are we won’t stay alive long enough to find it, in any case. Galdos has brought in his pet gunboy to be introduced to us.”
Trout scratched the back of his neck. “That fellow Mendes that everyone goes on about?”
Johnny nodded.
“. . . I suppose we’ll have to do it,” said Trout. “I don’t like it, mind you, but if things are the way you say they are. . . .” He considered for a moment. “What’s the proposition, exactly?”
“I’m to see her tomorrow, same place, same time, to say yes or no. She brings the notebooks, I bring a signed agreement. From then on, she works for us. That could be worth something, too; having someone to spy out the land at Galdos’ place.”
“It certainly could,” said Trout, “if the place really is popping with half-tamed gunmen, all itching to engineer our instant dismissal. All right, Johnny. Resolution hereby accepted.”
“Good. I think maybe it’s—”
“Just one thing,” said Hendricks. They looked at him. He was staring mutinously at the table. “If this deal goes through, you can count me out. That’s all.”
After a while, Trout said, “Why?”
“Because I don’t like it, that’s why. All this shimmying round with skirts so that we don’t know where we are. What kind of a set-up is this, anyway?” He stared hotly at Fedora, his fists bunching into hard white knots on the table. “If you really want that kind of a woman—or any other kind, for that matter—as a business partner, then you’re a couple of bloody fools and I’m getting out from under. The less I have to do with it, the better.”
Trout sucked his lip with a plaintive slopping noise. “I know what you mean,” he. said. “And of course nobody’d choose a hemp-puffing nympho for a partner. Not for a business partner, anyway. But the point is we haven’t any choice. If she’s got West’s notebooks, she’s got something that’s worth our having and we want them and we want them quick.”