by Desmond Cory
Johnny, in mid-peroration, was overcome equally suddenly and inexplicably by his sense of humour; the which, a moment before, had seemed farther out of his reach than at any other time. “Oh well,” he said, deflating himself. “You’re right, of course. People should say what they mean.”
“Come on,” said Maria, grabbing him by the hand. “I love you. Or anyway, I will soon.”
“No, listen. It won’t do, I tell you. It’s that Hendricks, he wouldn’t like it.”
Maria stared at him. “So what? He doesn’t have to like it.”
“If I went to bed with you, hid want to go to bed with you, too.”
“You wouldn’t let him. You’d stop him, wouldn’t you?—like you stopped that other fellow. Now there’s a bastard, if you like,” said Maria. “He’s always trying to get on top of me, I’ll slit his guts open one of these days. Or anyway, you’ll do it for me.”
“I will always be your little friend and protector, but the arrangement you propose is out of the question. We have already,” said Johnny patiently, “had one naming row with Hendricks. And one is enough. The next one may be final. And we just can’t afford to row with Hendricks. . . . You see how it is.”
“I see how it is all right,” said Maria tightly, “maldito maricbn. . . .”
And this time, Johnny was slow; or at least, not fast enough. She didn’t try to scratch him; she slapped. And very hard indeed. Johnny, his head ringing like a bell from the impact, ducked and again too late; her nails caught him under the chin, ripping the skin open and sending a little tingle of pain down his spine. Luckily, perhaps, she made no attempt to follow up her attack; she stood still for a moment, probably in the hope that he would grab her, then turned and ran to her bedroom, sobbing with considerable abandon. She slammed the door behind her, quite as furiously if not ns forcibly as had Hendricks the night before. Johnny dabbed at his chin with his handkerchief and muttered crossly to himself under his breath.
Things, of course, would sort themselves out all right, eventually. Meanwhile, things—to speak frankly —were a bloody mess-up.
“All this sex,” said Fedora to himself. “So very unhealthy.”
He looked down at the river, which continued to flow past him, dark and strong. It seemed more brown today than black; probably that was because of changes in the minerals it absorbed on its long course down from the hills. Hendricks would know all about that. But it would hardly be worth while asking him. He was inclined to get impatient, or seemed to, when questioned! on what he obviously regarded as elementary points of I mineralogy. It was best, Johnny thought, to leave him j alone.
He looked around him once more, at the river and the rocks and the hills and at,the aching sky above! them; then crossed the final stretch of coarse gravel and! emerged once more behind that shoulder of rock that! overlooked Galdos’ hacienda and the swimming pool. I As yesterday, all was deserted; motionless. Then he] heard a faint splash; turning his head, he saw a wide! circle of froth opening outwards from one side of the pool and, after a pause, Gracia’s dark head breaking the surface. Fedora, who was thinking that he would j not at all have minded a swim himself, rubbed the back of his neck with the palm of his hand and then ) descended from the rock; began to plod his way round I to the little summerhouse.
Gracia was sitting on the verandah steps when he i arrived, drying her shoulders with a red-and-green bath towel. “I saw you coming,” she said. “Over the rocks. It took you an awful long time to get here, ] didn’t it?”
“I followed the river,” said Johnny. “It’s safer.”
“Well, now you’re here you’d better come inside.”
They went indoors, into the hot, bare little changing-room. Gracia took the bathing-wrap from the peg where it was hanging, slipped it casually over her shoulders. “Well,” she said, in an expectant voice. “What’s the verdict?”
“It’s all right,” said Johnny. “It’s on.”
“I’ll want it in writing.”
“I’ve brought it in writing.”
She nodded. “Let’s see it, then.”
She sat down at the wooden table and, with great care, went over the somewhat smudgy document that Trout and Fedora had prepared the previous night. In the end, she looked up and nodded again. “That seems to be all right. But what’s E.I.E.?”
“The organisation we represent,” said Fedora.
“But I thought you said you were Secret Service?”
“No, I didn’t. You did,” said Fedora. He pulled out a chair and seated himself opposite her. “We’re a private organisation, but we work for the British Government from time to time. Anyway, everything’s in order.”
“Ummm. Whose are these signatures?”
“Mine,” said Fedora. “And Trout’s. We’re two of the directors. You can see from the heading of the paper that there are only three, so that makes it legal and all that. Don’t ask me how.”
“So you’re a company director?” Gracia was watching him now with rather more interest than ever before. “Of a big firm like this that works for the British Government? Hell, you must be important. You must be rich.”
“Not very rich,” said Fedora.
“No?” said Gracia, not believing him. “It makes me feel a bit better, anyway, this does. I mean, dealing with a business firm is one thing and dealing with two-three tough boys running on a loose end is quite another. This is much better than the Secret Service. Well, well, well.” She ruminated for a moment. “And your head office is in London, eh?”
“That’s right,” said Fedora.
“I’ve heard a lot about London. Quite a town, it must be; I’d like to see it. You think I’d go down well there, or not?”
“Rich widows go down well most places,” said Fedora. “Sometimes they go down a bit too fast and don’t come up again. But that’s another story.” He rattled his ringers on the table. “What about the notebooks?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve brought them.” Gracia folded the paper carefully and slipped it into the bag that lay open at her feet. Then she got up, went over to the locker, opened it; took out a big leather holdall. “This is it,” she said, carrying it over to the table.
Johnny watched alertly as she unzipped it, took from its recesses a small, cheap, red cardboard-bound notebook. “This looks to me like the important one,” she said. “This one has the most notes about Los Cielos in it. The others are. . . . Well, you’ll see.”
Johnny took it and flipped it open. The first page was almost blank, but bore at the foot a couple of lines written in violet ink. . . . Roberto West, Buenos Aires, 1954. . . . Notes on AILS A’s report on the Cerro del Caballo deposits. . . . The handwriting was round and clear, rather childish. He turned the pages quickly, coming at last to the heading, Los Cielos, 1957. . . . There followed two or three pages of the same handwriting, the lines run close together, a disproportionate number of figures in the text.
He looked up mildly, closed the book and put it on the table. His foot raised itself slowly halfway up the right leg of his chair, hesitated a moment. . . .
At the end of that moment Gracia West was still looking at him, but she had no clear idea of just what happened. She had never seen Fedora move really fast before, and it was something like standing close to an exploding human hand grenade. The chair went sideways as though kicked by a mule, spinning wildly over the tiled floor, and Johnny wasn’t there any more but diving to the left of the table, twisting as he fell to land on his left forearm and his thighs, while his right hand jumped to his pistol holster, smacked hard against the butt of the pistol and flicked it outwards and forwards. Yet in that split fraction of time between the final contact with the floor and the tightening of his finger on the trigger, something hard and heavy came smashing numbingly into his wrist, tearing the pistol from his hand. It scuttered over the floor, hit the wall, span and came to a stop. Fedora stayed where he was, both hands on the floor, staring in front of him, conscious that for the second time that afternoon he
hadn’t been fast enough. He had been very fast indeed, but the hard black boot in front of him had been even faster. He wondered who it belonged to. He looked up.
“Get you,” said Paquito Mendes, almost with awe.
Johnny, in his turn, was regarding the great Paquito Mendes with considerable surprise. It seemed incredible that anyone could look so much like the conventional bad man of the Western films, and yet so utterly different. The uniform, in itself, was perfect: black sombrero, black open-neck shirt, tight black pants and black chapajeros, with twin revolvers slung in low holsters on a belt that criss-crossed Mendes’ flat little belly in quite the accepted style. But Paquito himself was hopelessly incongruous. He was small and delicately-built and finicky, almost bird-like, in his movements; in place of the unshaven jaw and hard, shifty eyes that one might have expected, he had a soft blue luminous gaze of an almost angelic innocence and a complexion that obviously owed much to the nightly application of vanishing cream. His hair, under the tilted-back sombrero, was dark and exquisitely waved and smelt of attar of roses; his eyebrows, raised now in exaggerated amazement, had been carefully and skilfully plucked. But he used altogether too natural a shade of lipstick.
One of the twin revolvers was not in its holster, but in his right hand; and his right hand—for all the delicacy of its manicure—was as steady a hand as any Fedora had ever seen. However, as Fedora watched and took very great care not to move, Mendes smiled gracefully and raised one shoulder in an infinitesimal shrug; the heavy revolver flickered around his finger-tip and then slid downwards, as though of its own volition, into the holster. It was gone, vanished, as though from the hand of a conjurer. Johnny got slowly to his feet; pure show-off, he reflected, but all the same neat enough and certainly indicative of the things that Mendes could do with a .45. An artist all right, in his way. . . .
“Not bad,” he said. “I liked that.”
Mendes bridled a little. “Terribly good of you to s-s-say so. I thought that thing of yours with the chair was most aback-taking, too. I really do love violent men.”
Fedora looked past Mendes’ shoulder to Galdos, who was standing in the door; then at the other man . . . what was his name? . . . Pedro . . . who stood, sneering faintly, just behind. It looked as though Old Home Week had arrived; everyone had come but the kitchen cat. He fingered the edge of the table dubiously behind his back, wondering if it might not be best, in the long run, to dive for his pistol and get the whole damned thing over with. He didn’t like the look of Galdos at all.
Gracia had, of course, hinted that Galdos might be cross . . . if he knew. This supposition was now confirmed. Galdos did know, now; and he was cross. He was so cross as to appear hardly human. His eyes had sunk deep into his head and seemed to consist largely of specks of blood; that vein was throbbing away again high up in his forehead, an ugly purple in colour, and a thin thread of saliva was looping downwards from his half-open mouth. If Galdos in a good temper was a somewhat repulsive sight, Galdos in a bad temper was something to convince the most fervent opponent of Darwinism: indeed, an orang-utang might be considered in many respects a markedly more beautiful and pleasing form of life.
“So,” he said, after making a number of turkey-cock noises that could hardly be accepted as useful contributions to the conversation. “So,” he said, stumping forward and switching the cane in his hand aggressively, “So you’re here. Are you? Hey?”
This at least was coherent; Johnny sensed, however, that the question was purely rhetorical. He made no reply. He hoped that Galdos was going to hit him, and hit him hard; so that he could stagger and fall convincingly to the right, where his pistol still lay on the floor. But he was disappointed in what, a moment before, had seemed a certain bet. Galdos stopped in front of him, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand but making no move to strike; while Mendes stepped daintily to one side, picked up the pistol with an air of repugnance and threw it out of the doorway. A distant splash indicated clearly enough its final destination, in the depths of the pool.
“Has he got another?” said Galdos. “Pedro . . .? Search him.”
Pedro came forward, patted Fedora’s pockets soothingly; then, straightening up, crashed his fist into Fedora’s face. It was a much harder blow than Fedora had expected; people who really intend to hurt other people have nowadays the science to start off very gently, and in that sense the force of the blow was reassuring. In other senses, no. It shook him off his balance, and he took a couple of paces crab-wise until he hit the wall; then shook his head, raised his hand and wiped the blood from his lower lip. Pedro watched him, still doing a heavy-villain sneering act. Mendes watched him, a new light of restrained enthusiasm in his lustrous eyes. But Galdos was now watching Gracia West, who still sat at the table, looking at Galdos’ chest; the corners of her lips were drawn whitely together and she was breathing very quickly and heavily, her breasts moving in little irregular heaves under the thin material of the bathing-suit. Galdos watched Gracia West for some little time.
Eventually, he took the notebook from the table, glanced through it, put it in his pocket. Then he put one hand to the table and hurled it against the wall with such force that it splintered. Gracia West, with the last physical barrier between them thus snatched away, made a rather horrid little whimpering noise.
Galdos leaned forward. “You,” he said, as though experimenting with the sound of his own voice. “You’re for it.” A bubble of froth appeared again on his lips. Then there followed, as though some mental sluice-gate had been removed, a high, piping flood of the most revolting language that Fedora had ever been privileged to hear. Maria’s vocabulary had interested him considerably two days before, but this was another matter altogether; this was not material for the philologist so much as for the psycho-analyst. He stood, still partly dazed, against the wall, while the high-pitched almost-screaming voice worked itself up to a final summit of scabrous eloquence, dropped abruptly off, and then began in a new key of comparative calmness. “Puton” he said, taking a step nearer. “Dirty whore. You think I’m a fool or something? You think I’m wet behind the ears? Y por eso vienes aqui media desnuda, como la puta que eres. Tu no quieres baharte ni nada de eso — sola cosa que t’interesa es joder. T con ese coño, ¿ no es verdad? . . . Con ese. . . . ” He kicked the chair out from under her, much as Fedora had done to Hendricks the previous night, and she collapsed with a little bitten-off exclamation to the floor. “You thought you’d try a double-cross, eh?” said Galdos, standing vindictively over her. “But I know a trick worth two of that. You’ll see, by God. You’ll see.”
He began to beat her. He did so with remarkable ferocity and no science whatsoever; Gracia heard the cane hum through the air and gave a high, shocked scream that ended in a gargling noise. Between the first blow and the second she found time to roll over and hide her head in her arms; after that, she didn’t move at all. Fedora stood with his hands pressed hard against the wall and his eyes closed, not so much to shut out the unwholesome sight as to clear his vision more rapidly. He could hear, in any case, the sharp, whistling impacts of the cane on Gracia’s soft flesh and the soft, continuous moaning noise she was making; and then, as Galdos began to tire, a bovine grunt of effort preceding every blow. Johnny was quite unable to view these sort of goings-on with approbation, but he had been quick to realise that if Galdos were to expend all his energy on Gracia, his rage would have much abated by the time it came to Fedora’s turn. Gradually, his head cleared; he lifted it once more and rested it against the wall, watching as dispassionately as he could the masses of muscle bunching under Galdos’ shirt along the line of his shoulders, at the vivid purple welts lifting themselves up slowly from Gracia’s back and thighs. He had seen worse things than this, he told himself, at the Gestapo office in Rheims; this was much too violent and unscientific to be really painful. In a couple of minutes or so she would pass out, and that would be all; they would have to turn their attentions to Fedora. Fedora himself knew too much about pain to be seri
ously worried at the prospect of similar treatment. But they would probably kill him at the end of it, and he was not such a fool as to feel contemptuous of death itself. He took out a cigarette and lit it; not because he wanted to smoke but because it was important for him to assess just how much his hands were shaking.
The rhythm of the blows was slowing down now, and the sound of Galdos’ panting had become much more evident. At length, the blows stopped; and Gracia began to writhe again and to gasp as though for air. Galdos stood looking down at her, the cane dangling from his fingers; after a while, he opened his hand and let it fall to the floor.
“That’ll have taught you something,” he said, “you sow.”
He turned and came towards Fedora, his face still set in lines of a brutally sadistic enjoyment. “The boy friend,” he said, drawing back his upper lip. “Little Mr. Sabelotodo. All right. We’ll fix you, too.”
He jerked back his fist and poised it, obviously for the pleasure of seeing Fedora flinch. Fedora didn’t move. Galdos said a rude word and hit him low in the belly with all his strength. Fedora doubled up; Galdos measured him carefully and then hit him again, very hard indeed, in the face. Fedora stood still, looking through half-closed eyes at a dancing red room full of shadowy forms; until something caught him, twisted him round, threw him backwards. He hit the door in the near wall, which flew open; bounced off and pitched straight to the floor. He was almost unconscious, but not quite; he heard distinctly a curious, excited giggle that could only have come from Mendes. It ran round the room like a hunted rat, and faded away, and then there was silence. Something struck him hard in the ribs; it felt like a boot; he didn’t move. There was the sound of the door closing, the rattle of a bolt; then silence again.
An unpleasant, unnatural silence. Johnny tried to raise himself from the floor, and found that he couldn’t; not yet. He moved his head a fraction, looked at the drops of mingled blood and saliva that had fallen to the floor from his mouth. He guessed that he had lost a tooth, maybe two. But not more. A voice suddenly boomed like a gong in his ears, then went away until it was as the faintest of whispers. He hadn’t understood what it said. There was a short pause, then, “Go on,” said the voice, more loudly. “Get out. Get out.” Galdos. . . . Yes, he heard that clearly enough, and the sounds that followed; the movement of booted feet over the floor, the rasp of someone spitting—probably Pedro; a gentle click as the outer door was closed. Then there was silence again, except for a quiet animal-like whimpering. That would be Gracia West.