by Desmond Cory
Johnny slipped off the bandage, waggled his fingers. Great white blisters like slugs were forming under the crinkled skin, and the nail of his middle finger had now come off. “It’ll mend/’ he said. “It’ll mend.”
“I’ll get the first aid kit out of the car, and fix it for you. You ought to have it seen—”
“Later,” said Johnny. “Later. Let’s hear all about it, first.”
Trout put the cup down on the table with a little sigh, leant back in his chair. “He was in a nasty mood,” he said, “all day. I couldn’t do anything with him.”
Johnny knew who he was talking about. “You didn’t find anything?”
“No, not a thing. If we had, of course . . . but we didn’t. Nothing at all. Well, and his temper got worse and worse as the day went on. He cooled off a bit on the way home, though, and I thought things were going to be all right But the bastard jumped straight into the Land Rover and drove off—just like that— without saying a word to me. I expect Maria told you about that.”
Johnny nodded.
“. . . The only thing I could think of to do was to go into town and look for him. I was pretty sure he’d gone there—where else could he have got to? I guessed he was just fed up with having me as a nanny all day long, and wanted to stage a little private rebellion. Well, so I went and hiked it. Twenty bleeding kilometres, and after a whole bloody day up on the hills. I was going to knock his teeth in when I found him,” said Trout, something of life returning to his eyes at the memory of his anger. “But I didn’t find him. I couldn’t. I saw the Land Rover, though, right away, so I knew he was there; and I went round all the bars and eating-places looking for him. Some people said they’d seen him and others said they hadn’t . . . you know how it is . . . and by one o’clock, I still hadn’t found him so I rested for a while in the car and then started out all over again. But I didn’t find him, not even then. In the end, somebody came and fetched me.” Trout poured himself out a second cupful of coffee. “. . . He was in one of the brothels. One of the first places I’d tried, as a matter of fact, but he hadn’t been there, then. Can you imagine anyone being such a bloody fool?”
Fedora said nothing. Trout drank more coffee, spilling a little down his wrist.
“Well, he’d got it, of course. It was that little bastard you were talking about, Mendes. He was waiting in the corridor and when Hendricks came out of the girl’s room he just blasted him down. Too easy, wasn’t it? Hendricks wasn’t even sober.”
Johnny said suddenly. “Was it the house where the post office is?”
“Yes,” said Trout. “That’s the one.”
“And the room . . . was there a muslin curtain over the door? Last door on the right of the corridor?”
Trout stared at him. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”
“That’s the room where I met Gracia West, that morning. Poetic little beast, that Mendes, isn’t he? . . . unless it was Galdos’ idea. Yes, it must have been Galdos’ idea. It’s just his way of showing us how much he knows.”
“What are we meant to be?” said Trout. “Terrified?”
Johnny shrugged. “It’s neat enough, though,” he said. “I suppose they sent out that little tart to get him—she wasn’t bad-looking, really. And then . . . that black suit . . .”
“They must have got it into the bedroom and taken away the clothes he’d had on.”
“So that it looked as if. . . . So that’s why Mendes took it.”
“That’s right. He was still there—he’d called in the police and all. At least, that wet sheet of a character we met in that bar. Of course, it was all open and above board from his point of view. He couldn’t run in a gunnie for shooting down another gunnie, and he said he’d warned Hendricks about wearing black, he kept on saying that until I wanted to push his face in, wearing black I mean.” Trout, aware of his own growing incoherence, stopped and, rather surprisingly, covered his face with his hands.
“Cheer up,” said Fedora. “It wasn’t your fault. These people are clever, in a way.”
“They are—they’re damned clever. Look at what they did to your hand—they’ve put you clean out of action. A bloody vile thing to do, but very clever. . . in a way.”
“All right,” said Fedora. “Go on. The copper wouldn’t have done a thing in any case, but as there was a reason for his not doing anything at all, of course he was overjoyed. What happened next?”
“Nothing,” said Trout. “He kept me waiting in his office for nearly two hours, then asked me a lot of damfool questions, then made me sign a lot of papers to take the body away. I thought I’d better take him. They wouldn’t bury him in town because he wasn’t a Catholic, and anyway he’s our responsibility.”
Johnny nodded. “We’d better bury him here.”
“I think so, too. It’s five days into Caracas, and in this climate. . . .”
“I see what you mean,” said Johnny.
They looked at Hendricks. Hendricks was still laughing. “Five days into Caracas,” said Fedora softly. “Were we thinking of leaving?”
“What can we do,” said Trout, “without A/m?”
They looked at each other. There is a taste, odd as this may seem, to sudden and irredeemable failure; and Johnny could sense it now, a sick, bitter flavour at the back of his mouth. He swallowed and said, “Galdos knows all about the carnotite now. He knows as much as we do, and maybe more. It’s no good our going back to look for another specialist, because by the time we find him and get back here again Galdos will have located the stuff, anyway, and put in his claim. If we pull out now, we may as well pull out for good. Our chance’ll be gone.”
“What chance?” said Trout. “If Hendricks couldn’t find it, I don’t see what we can do. You’re not a prospector, and neither am I.”
“So you think we ought to give up and get out?”
“What else can we do?” said Trout.
“Nothing,” said Johnny. “Nothing. Except. . . .” He looked down at his hand again, bent his fingers inwards. “I’m booked to kill Mendes at ten o’clock.”
After breakfast, Trout went for the first aid outfit from the car and bandaged Johnny’s hand very carefully. Then they both went out to bury Hendricks. The only instrument that Maria had been able to find was an old mattock with a badly warped handle; luckily, the soil was so soft in the paddock that this proved satisfactory. They began to dig in the farthest corner, taking it in turn to use the mattock: Johnny found that the effort hurt his back muscles only at first, that the steady rhythm soon soothed them, left them more pliant. His hand, though, was certainly a hindrance; he could do nothing with it. Most of the work was therefore done by Trout, with Maria helping more than a little; as the grave grew deeper, the sky grew lighter, full of the impendingness of dawn.
The sun had still not risen, though, when Trout and Fedora judged that the grave was deep enough. They went back into the house and wrapped Hendricks’ body up in an old blanket; then carried it out and, as respectfully as they could, lowered it into the browny-red earth. Then, and again taking turns with the mattock, they shovelled the loose soil back into place: before the grave was finally filled in, the sun rose. It shone on Trout’s drawn, sweating face and on Maria’s bare white arms, and it drew a sudden sparkle of light from an object that lay in the freshly-turned soil at Fedora’s feet. He looked at it for a moment, then stooped to pick it up. “What’s this?” he said.
“What?” said Trout. He was almost too tired to see straight.
“. . . This.”
Trout dropped the mattock, wiped his forehead and came up to squint painfully at the object in Johnny’s hand. “It’s a piece of quartz,” he said. “That’s nothing. Just a piece of quartz.”
“Yes, but look at it,” said Fedora. “It doesn’t belong here. Not naturally, I mean. It looks like . . . gold, or something.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” said Trout. He took the fragment from Fedora, turned it over and over in his grimy hands. It certainly did
look rather odd. “. . . I wonder where the hell it came from. . . .”
“/know where it came from,” said Maria.
She, too, was studying it closely, eyebrows pulled down lower than usual in a frown of concentration. Trout held it out towards her on the palm of his hand, but she shook her head. “I’ve seen it before. That’s one of Roberto’s bits of rock, that’s all it is.”
“What do you mean,” said Johnny, “Roberto’s bits of rock?”
“He had lots of pretty stones like that one in a case. And he threw them all away, a month or so before he died—all except for two of them. I don’t know why,” said Maria. “But he did.” Her attitude suggested that she knew this story to seem unlikely, but didn’t much care whether anyone believed it or not. “Over in this corner, that’s where he threw them. Fifty or sixty of them. There must be lots of them still lying about.”
Johnny took two or three paces away, parting the long grass thoughtfully with his feet; then stopped, bent down and picked up another fragment, a grey chip of rock deeply veined with blue. “Here’s another,” he said.
“I told you, there were lots” said Maria.
Fedora went on looking at the stone in his hand; his expression was rapt, absorbed. He threw it up in the air, caught it again, let it fall to the ground. He returned to stand beside the others. “What about the two he kept?” he asked. “What happened to them?”
“I don’t know,” said Maria. “I haven’t seen them since.”
Trout was staring at her; he, too, had seen what Johnny was trying to discover. “You saw them, though, didn’t you? What were they like?”
“Oh yes. They were very pretty. Yellow.”
“Fellow” said Trout and Fedora together.
Maria looked from one to the other of them, perplexed at their obvious interest. “Yes,” she said. She decided to be helpful. “Yellow, and with a sort of a funny—”
“Come into the house,” said Trout abruptly.
They all went back indoors. It did not take them very long to find the case; Maria unearthed it almost at once from a heap of wooden boxes to one side of the room. It was very like Hendricks’ sample box, but considerably larger. It bore an embossed label— F. Gonzales Murillo, Metallurgista, Serrano 12, Caracas. Inside were the usual number of small sections and compartments, all empty, but each one bearing a tiny printed ticket specifying the nature of the sample. “Radioactive minerals“said Trout, stooping down low. “My God. Tyuyamunite. . . . No, here it is— Carnotite, associated Permian sandstone. Yes, and Carnotite, associated Cretaceous sandstone.“He drew a deep breath. “Well,” he said. “Well. There it is.”
“Two different kinds of sandstone,” said Johnny. “That was what Hendricks was so puzzled about, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Trout. “Something like that.”
“Then that explains that little problem.”
“It explains damn-all else,” said Trout. He closed the lid of the box and pushed it across the table; he didn’t just look tired now, he looked like death warmed up. Hendricks, even with his fiendish rictus, had looked rather healthier. “I don’t get it. He bought those chunks of carnotite, he bought them in a shop in Caracas. He never found them at all. He. . .. No. I just don’t get it.”
“I think I do,” said Johnny. Trout looked at him from under his leaden eyelids; then, abandoning the effort, closed his eyes. “Elucidate,” he said. “Go on. I’m listening.”
“Well, it was all a plant,” said Johnny. “When he sent that specimen off, he never thought it would get to England. He knew that Galdos was checking his mail and he was sure that it’d be intercepted. Galdos was meant to read the letter and get all excited and go out to hunt for carnotite . . . and find the other piece that West had planted up in the hills, just as Hendricks did. But of course he wouldn’t find any more, because there wasn’t any more. So he’d have to go and see West and talk him into doing a deal, and then West was going to take his money and skip. A crazy sort of plan; but when you come to think of it,” said Johnny, “it ought to have worked. The only thing was that Gracia West let the packet go through and on to London, and Galdos never learned a damned thing about the carnotite until we arrived.”
Trout, with great effort, scratched the tip of his nose. “It does make sense,” he admitted.
“Of course it makes sense,” said Johnny. “That’s what Maria was telling me—he was sitting right here and going crazy thinking of ways to get his own back on Galdos. And what other reason could he have for throwing all the other samples away? . . . He didn’t want to take any chances on anyone seeing them, and noticing that the carnotite samples weren’t there, and guessing what he’d done. Hell, there isn’t any doubt about it, really.”
Trout levered his eyes open, very wide. “Then,” he said, “there isn’t any carnotite here at all. And never was.”
“If there is,” said Johnny, “West never found it.”
Trout looked at the box on the table for a little while and then began to laugh. Once started, he seemed unable to stop; he laughed louder and louder and harder and harder, great shuddering peals of merriment that echoed down at him again from the ceiling; his mouth seemed to be frozen horribly ajar in a laughing position, just as Hendricks’ had been. Fedora slapped him hard with the open palm of his left hand. The laughter stopped; Trout stared at Fedora with a look of shocked surprise that slowly faded into comprehension. “Thanks,” he said mildly, rubbing his cheek. “Maria? . . . I think we’d better have some more coffee.”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “And then you’d better get to bed, Tiddler. You’re just about at the end of your rope.”
Trout closed his eyes again vertiginously. Johnny watched Maria as she walked out into the kitchen once more; he was conscious of a sudden affection for her that verged on tenderness. At such times as this, a girl who can be relied on to produce good coffee when asked to do so and who asks absolutely no questions is worth her weight in rubies . . . or carnotite, for that matter. Though there wasn’t any carnotite. Maria, it was Maria who had known the answer to their problem all along; a startlingly negative answer, not at all the answer they had expected, but an answer all the same. Their task in Los Cielos had now been completed; at last they could make their report. There was no carnotite, and never had been.
Trout had been right to laugh; it was really very funny. It was funny that a half-cracked scheme in the mind of a moneyless refugee from the Argentine should have brought two men halfway round the world in search of something that had never existed; it was funny that the arrival of those two men should have forced others to join in the hunt. West had been killed, and that perhaps had nothing to do with it; but then his wife had been killed and Hendricks had been murdered, Maria had been raped and Fedora had been beaten up . .. and all for nothing. He and Trout had come for nothing and now there was nothing to stay for; the affair was over, finished; he and Trout now knew something that Galdos, who knew so much, did not and could not know. That was funny, too. Funniest of all was the state of the world that had made all this possible, that had made a piece of yellow stone something for men to be killed and tortured and beaten for.
Now it was all over. That part of the business was over. But they would still be waiting for Fedora at ten o’clock. If he kept that appointment now, it would be because he chose to kill or be killed for something more important than a piece of stone that he knew not to exist. He did not know exactly what that something was, but he sensed its presence within him; it was not hatred, no, not that any more, not since Maria had helped him, but something that used his hatred as though it were a drug to sharpen and speed his reflexes, that was at its strongest when his mind was coolest and most dispassionate. Something that was the opposite of common sense—that was the only way to describe it. He leaned forward to look at Trout’s wrist-watch again; it was just on half-past seven. It had taken longer to bury Hendricks than he had realised.
Trout sat motionless in his chair, breathing deeply; any
one might have supposed him to be asleep. But Fedora knew that if he were to touch the big man’s shoulder with the tip of his finger, Trout would be instantly awake; he had not yet permitted himself the luxury of total relaxation . . . though he was tired, of course he was dead tired. He had been on the job for twenty-four hours without a pause, had walked something like fifty miles in the stifling Venezuelan heat; not even Trout’s strength and stamina could resist such a weariness much longer. Johnny lit a cigarette, his first of the day: Maria came in again with the steaming coffeepot, and Trout opened his eyes at the smell of it and grinned.
“Tiddler,” said Johnny.
“What?”
“Have you got a gun?”
Trout blinked at him in a mildly befuddled way. “Yes, why?”
“They took mine from me. I’ve only got Hendricks’ forty-five, and that might be a bit heavy for me . . . left-handed.”
“Mine’s the old three-two I always carry,” said Trout, producing it. “Borrow it if you like.”
Johnny took it, examined it. But he already knew that it wouldn’t do. It was a lightweight Mauser with the barrel cut off an inch or so from the trigger-guard; that made it handy and compact and fine for indoor work, but much too inaccurate to be of any use at long range. It wasn’t a gun so much as a simple mechanism for the firing of bullets. With his filed-down .45’s, Mendes would be able to blast him down long before he had even got near enough to use it. . . . It was Hendricks’ revolver, then, or nothing. He pushed the flat little Mauser regretfully back across the table; went over to fetch the Colt, which was still “lying where he had knocked it from Maria’s fingers a few hours before. He checked the workings meticulously to see if the blow had damaged it; satisfied, he looked up again, to find Trout watching him closely.
“You’re going on the bash, then?” he said.
“It’s like I said. They’ll be waiting for me at ten.”
“You’re crazy,” said Trout, lowering yet more coffee down his gullet. “You’re crazy,” he said, putting his cup down on the table.