by Desmond Cory
“I don’t see why,” said Fedora.
“Of course you are. Thanks to this last-minute revelation of Maria’s, we’ve got the chance to get out of here with the job completed and a whole skin as per each. I don’t say the job was a satisfactory one, but it’s finished and we’ve got the answer to the problem that the Atomic Energy Department set us. I don’t say I like getting out, either, and leaving that sod Galdos crowing on top of his dunghill . . . but on the other hand, our responsibilities are to E.I.E. and we haven’t any business to run round starting off private wars of our own. Don’t you agree?”
“I might,” said Johnny, “if I was in a normal frame of mind.” He looked at Maria. “The trouble is, I’m cross.”
“Cross,” said Trout. “I see.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I’ll wait here till you get back, then,” he said, “and I’ll snatch a little sleep. I don’t suppose you’ll be long gone.”
Johnny watched him as the rhythm of his breath grew deeper and more regular, took on a reassuring, resonant timbre. After a while, Johnny began to smile. There was an awful lot to be said for having someone like Tiddler as a partner. . . .
Johnny slept, too, for over an hour. He woke a little before nine: then washed and shaved himself carefully in the hot water that Maria brought him, peering into the driving-mirror as he went round the difficult corners. Then he polished the mirror carefully with the towel, loosened the screws and turned it completely round. Then he went indoors; put on a clean white shirt and underpants, then Hendricks’ dark suit. It fitted him very well, though a shade loosely at the shoulders and armpits; that didn’t matter much. He strapped on the heavy leather belt so that the pistol-holster was just covered by the skirt of his coat; picked up the Colt revolver in his left hand, span it round his finger as Mendes had done and let it slide smoothly downwards into its recess. He put on Hendricks’ big black sombrero, pulling it well down over his forehead. Maria stood behind him all the time, watching him; she had gone rather white in the face.
“What’s the matter?” asked Johnny, almost harshly. “. . . Dead men’s shoes?”
“I don’t like it,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t like it. Besides, it makes you look . . . different, dressed in black.”
“I’m counting on that,” said Johnny. “If you don’t like it, Mendes won’t, either. He’ll see it’s me soon enough, but I may have given him a shock first. And that may make him nervous. Or so I hope.”
“You’re going to kill Mendes?”
“. . . Him first.”
He looked down at his left hand, held it out at shoulder-level in front of him. Then his whole body seemed to jerk and the gun was there in his hand, the barrel level, steady. “It may be good enough,” he said, putting it back. “It’d better be.”
And he looked at the sleeping Trout, wishing that at that moment he could share something of Trout’s monumental confidence. Still, this moment was always the worst. He knew that from past experience. But the knowledge didn’t help to make things any better.
“Can I come with you?” asked Maria.
“No,” said Fedora. “You can’t.”
He turned away towards the table, unwrapping the fat white bandage from his damaged hand. “You can fix this up for me again,” he said. “Before I go.”
Chapter Eight
GALDOS looked at his wrist watch. It was five to ten.
The old dodderer at the desk was still maundering on.
“. .. Well, that’s all right,” said Galdos, cutting him short. “There’s no doubt about it, then.”
“No, no, no. None at all. The map is an excellent one,” said the old dodderer, raising a lined, careworn face towards the light. “It’s a pity, in a way, that the blood. . . . However, the site is marked clearly enough. Yes. Yes. Quite clearly. Corresponds, as I said, to the old Sepulveda adit. Disused this many years. As you know.”
“Yes,” said Galdos. “I know.” He flipped Hendriclcs’ map up from the desk and slipped it into his pocket. “Looks as though we acted just in time, hey?” He smiled genially.
“Yes, yes. Mind you—this explains the point that was puzzling us before, um, ah, Don Tomas. As to the question of the Permian association. Clearly, coming from a mah mah mine—”
“Clearly,” said Galdos, taking his hat from the table. “That’s all right, Juanito. That’s all I wanted to know. Now get the hell round to the stables and tell Manolo to saddle the horses.”
“The horses?”
“Yes, the horses, the bloody horses, want me to spell it out for you? Mine and Mendes’. Tell him to get them ready.”
“Yes, Don Tomas. Very well, Don Tomas. And the, ah . . . the, ah. . . .”
Galdos went out, leaving the bletherings of his Chief Geologist suspended in mid-air. He looked at his wrist-watch again; it was almost ten. He walked quickly out of the combine offices and down to the mainjjate, where the sentries saluted him punctiliously. He lit a cigar as he went. Once through the gates, he turned left and crossed the street to Pepe’s bar. It seemed to be a fine, dry, sunny morning; but there are plenty of fine, dry, sunny mornings in Venezuela. He reached the bar; spat on the doorstep and went in.
Mendes was sitting at a table by the window, drinking manzanilla. “Oh hello, boss,” he said, brightly.
Galdos sat down beside him without bothering to return this salutation. “You’re coming with me,” he said. “Afterwards.”
“Very well, boss,” said Mendes.
“Up in the hills. We got what we were looking for, last night.”
“Congratulations,” said Mendes, looking at his fingernails. He didn’t sound very interested. He wasn’t.
The barman brought Galdos a tall glass of yellow, bitter beer; and Mendes watched him as he drank it. Mendes didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke, either. He was a good boy, Mendes was.
“They found it,” said Galdos, tapping the glass gently with one fingernail. “They found it all right. Well, that means we’ve got to take them. There’s no other way.”
Mendes looked at his wrist-watch; an extraordinary Boy Scout-like contraption that showed the time, the date, the month, the year, and the times of sunrise and sunset. It had cost him three hundred dollars in Mexico City. He compared it with Fedora’s wrist-watch, which he wore on his other wrist, and sneered. Then he said,
“D’you think they’ll come?”
“They may do. They may come at ten, like I said. Or they may not. Anyway, they’ve got to come this way ‘cos there isn’t any other. And when they do. . . .” Galdos drank more beer. “I’ve got the boys waiting. They won’t get through.”
He looked out of the open window. The morning sun was still comparatively low, angling a hard, bright light down the dusty road; bright enough to make him screw up his eyes. He leaned over to look down the street. There were people sitting in the shadowy doorways and on the cobbles, and a long file of men stood along the iron palings that fenced off the combine buildings. Galdos had never seen the street so crowded at that hour of the morning. He saw a little stir of uneasy expectation run through the crowd as he stared towards them, and his lips twisted irritably. “How do they know?” he said.
Mendes shrugged. “They always do,” he said.
“. . . That business down by the pool yesterday. That was a mistake. We shouldn’t have creased Gratia. I think now it may cause all kinds of trouble and that it was a mistake.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” said Mendes. His voice was stuthedly indifferent.
“No, but she wouldn’t have talked. The fact is that I never thought we’d have to freeze the other two, as well.” Galdos’ shoulders sagged slightly at the thought. “If they’re fools enough to stop, well, all right. But if Pedro has to use that chopper. . . .”
Galdos rolled a cigarette and lit it, the fat blunt fingers moving a little more jerkily than usual so that the cane joggled awkwardly from its strap around his wrist. For some reason, he was not confident; a
nd he knew that he wasn’t; and the knowledge annoyed him immensely. It was not that anything could go wrong. Nothing could. That was what made his lack of confidence so inexplicable. He looked at Mendes, and the muscles of his cheeks relaxed slightly. Mendes was a good boy. Mendes was confident, all right.
“Well,” he said, pushing back his chair. “Come on, then. There’s no point in—”
He stopped. Another faint but unmistakeable stir of interest was running through the crowd. He took the cigarette from his mouth, listening intently, and heard it almost at once; the distant, steady thrum of the Land Rover’s engine. He looked sideways at Mendes; who was on his feet now, standing with his hands tucked into his belt and his feet perhaps eighteen inches apart, smiling a little. “Here they are,” he said. “Isn’t that grand?”
“Come on,” said Galdos again. They went out.
The Land Rover came into sight, rounding the bend and picking up speed as it entered the long street. Galdos threw away his cigarette. Mendes didn’t move. The Land Rover approached them fast, then began to slow down. The roar of the engine died away to a whisper; it coasted to a standstill beyond the office gates, some fifty yards from them. A dead silence.
“They’ve stopped,” said Galdos; and he, too, began to smile. “Can you beat it? They’ve stopped.”
The door of the car opened; a man in a black suit and a black hat swung himself slowly out. Galdos’ eyes widened involuntarily in amazement, then narrowed again; he glanced towards Mendes, whose face had suddenly turned an unhealthy yellow. “Don’t be a fool,” he said urgently. “It’s only—”
“It’s him,” said Mendes, the words seeming to whistle because his lips were stiff. “Por Dios, it’s him. It’s Hendricks.”
“You bloody superstitious idiot. It’s Fedora, that’s who it is. He’s got the other man’s suit on, that’s all. Look at the bandage he’s wearing.”
He looked back angrily towards Fedora, who seemed to be making adjustments to something inside the car and above the driver’s seat. “What’s he doing?” he asked; and then, because it obviously didn’t matter much what Fedora was doing, “He’s alone, anyway. The other one hasn’t come.”
“He’s in black,” said Mendes, as though unable to believe it. His shoulders gradually began to straighten themselves again. “He’s in black.”
“Maybe he thought he’d give us a fright, dressed up like that,” said Galdos, all the more contemptuously since it was so obvious that, if such had been Fedora’s aim, he had notably succeeded in it. “. . . Well, damn it, he’s waiting for you. Go ahead and get the bastard.”
Mendes looked at him, one eyebrow cocked skywards. “Yes?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“All right,” said Mendes. “All right. My goodness, no need to be so cross.”
He began to stroll forward, all his attention instantly riveted on the black-suited figure that stood motionless at the side of the car. He was vigilant, but perfectly confident. Confident, but taking no chances. He advanced slowly, giving his nerves time to recover from the violent shock of seeing Hendricks swing himself down from the driving seat. Mendes was superstitious,
as are almost all Central Americans, and the shock had been a very real one; now, though, he knew that it was Fedora; he could see the enormous roll of bandage on Fedora’s right hand and even make out the details of Fedora’s face; and he felt within himself a kind of fierce irritation that Fedora had been able to play upon his emotions in that way. He was resolved, too, that what had happened should make no difference whatsoever to the speed of his draw or to the accuracy of his aim; Fedora, apparently, would be fighting left-handed, but Mendes was a purist in his job and would have concentrated with an equal determination on the task of killing a man with no hands at all. He walked slowly, and slowly the distance between the two men diminished; the watching crowd was deathly silent, and nothing moved in the whole street other than the tiny puffs of dust where Mendes placed his feet. Fedora stood like a statue, his feet a little apart, his hands flat on his belly, utterly motionless: he was well within range now, Mendes calculated, yes, at any moment now, any moment now he might. . . .
And light hit him in the eyes like a blow, stabbing him into an unexpected and almost total blindness. He jerked back his head, the revolver leaping upwards into his hand and, in the same split second, the realisation coming to him of just what Fedora had been doing to the driving-mirror. . . . He jerked back his head, and with his movement Fedora drew Hendricks’ Colt with a quick sweep that was smooth and controlled and quite fast enough and shot him with it in the belly. Mendes stood there in the street, the revolver dangling downwards from his right hand, his entire body contracted in a furious and unrelenting struggle with the immediacy of pain, and Fedora fired again. The first shot had been for safety, at the lowest vulnerable part of Mendes’ body, saving that immeasurable fraction of time which it would have taken to raise the barrel of the Colt any higher. The second shot was to finish the job; the echoes died away between the houses, Mendes’ legs gave way suddenly at the knees, and his body straightened outwards in a final reflex that pitched him forward as though he were diving, as though diving from a high springboard into a dark, dark pool. . . .
Fedora slid the revolver back into its holster, went forward to the small, slumped body. He knelt down to take his wrist-watch from Mendes’ outflung wrist. Mendes had been a good boy, he reflected sadly; very good indeed. He just hadn’t known all the tricks.
“. . . Stay where you are,” said Galdos.
He came striding down towards Fedora, his lower lip pushed out and trembling with rage; he looked like a racehorse owner who has seen his favourite charge unfairly nobbled at the post. “I saw what happened,” he said, slobbering a little. “Clever. Very, very clever.”
“Clever,” said Fedora, “in a way.”
Galdos stopped in front of him, folded his arms over his chest. “And what makes you think you’re going to get away with it?”
“I’m a gunman,” said Fedora mildly. “Don’t you see my fancy suit? They tell me they don’t have murder raps in this town, not for the boys in black.” His vague blue eyes surveyed Galdos intently.
“They don’t have murder raps in this town when I say not,” said Galdos thickly. “Because what I say goes. I told you to get out of here, you and your pal, and you seem to think you can shoot it out instead. And that’s the worst mistake you ever made, Fedora,
because I don’t mind using etiquette when etiquette works my way, but when it doesn’t work my way I’ve got enough bloody common sense to do the other thing. And I’ve had about enough of your dam’ silly interfering. And I’m going to put a stop to it, you hear? for good and all. Suppose you put that left hand of yours up in the air.”
“Eh?” said Fedora, who hadn’t been listening to all this.
Galdos grinned tightly. “Look behind you,” he said.
Johnny looked round. There were three of them. One of the three was Pedro, and Pedro had a tommy-gun. A muscle jerked in Fedora’s left cheek; he hadn’t bargained for tommy-guns. “Very interesting,” he said. “What do I do now? A bubble dance?”
“They’re going to shoot you,” said Galdos, slobbering some more, “just the way you shot Paquito. And we’ll see how you like it.”
“Don’t be wet.”
“What?”
“Don’t be wet. How d’you think you can shoot me down in the middle of a crowd like this? There’s all of five hundred witnesses here.”
A faint line of perplexity appeared in Galdos’ forehead; he was not prepared to meet this kind of stupidity. “You must be a bigger fool than I ever took you for. You think I was just shooting off when I said I was the boss round here? I’ve got five hundred witnesses who know a dam’ sight better than to go round blabbing about what I see fit to do. And right now I’m going to show those five hundred bleeding witnesses what happens to people who dorit do like I tell them. Kind of an object lesson, you might say.” He sudd
enly gave vent to another series of macabre,
hiccuping laughs. “And you think you’re clever. My God, that’s funny, that is.” He reached forward, took the revolver from Fedora’s holster and, in a sudden spurt of vindictiveness, hurled it at the Land Rover; it struck the windscreen, starred it. “Turn round,” he said. “Turn round.”
Johnny turned round, slowly. The three men looked at him with a certain sadistic amusement; the barrel of Pedro’s tommy-gun tilted slightly downwards, to point at his stomach. The pistols that the other men had hardly looked to be necessary. Again, there was that deadly silence: nothing and nobody moved.
“Give it him, then,” said Galdos, almost casually. “In the guts. The way he got Paquito. And,” he said, surrendering himself once more to his amusement, “he thought that was clever. Clever!”
Pedro, who also seemed to think all this was extremely funny, tucked the butt of the tommy-gun into his hip and steathed himself for the kick. He saw the buckle of Fedora’s belt, gleaming brightly in the sun, an obvious and convenient point of aim; he was gazing at it as he put his finger to the trigger, and it was therefore the last thing he saw in his life. The shot was followed instantly by another, a high, thin, staccato clap of sound; then two others that sounded as one but with the heavy bark of the .45 a fraction behind the other. A bullet knocked up a white puff of dust between Fedora’s feet; that was the only shot that missed. Fedora, in his present difficult situation, was not interested in missing.
Pedro leaned quickly forward over the tommy-gun and collapsed to the dust and after that, didn’t move. The second man, a shade slower in falling, landed half on top of him; he moved his feet a little, but not for long. The third man, who had almost had time to shoot back and whom Fedora had therefore been obliged to treat rather cursorily, was still on his feet, looking in a tired sort of way at his own hands pressed tightly against his chest: Fedora pressed the trigger yet again and a blue, blood-filled hole jumped into existence at the base of the man’s forehead. Galdos stood as though turned to stone while Fedora wheeled round to face him: he found himself staring, as though mesmerised, at the extreme end of Fedora’s thickly-bandaged right hand, where the bandage had been charred away by the hot blast of the bullets and where the tip of the barrel of Trout’s little .32 was now poking coyly through.