by Desmond Cory
“Yes,” said Fedora. “In a way.”
There was still not the slightest movement from the crowd. In the middle of the hot street stood Fedora, Fedora surrounded by four dead bothes and facing Galdos. Galdos still could not move; only after perhaps ten seconds had passed did he extend the tip of his tongue to moisten his lips. The little black eye of the .32 pistol watched him all the time. His tongue went back in, and his thick fleshy lips began to shake.
“To hell with it,” said Fedora. “I don’t make speeches.”
He struck, with his right hand and with all his strength. The impact of the blow sent a hot streamer of pain writhing down his spine, but there was a compensating thrill of pleasure in feeling the foresight of the pistol ripping open the loose skin of Galdos’ cheek. He hit five times in all; then waited as Galdos slowly pushed himself up to his knees. “Get out of here,” he said. “Go on, get out.”
Galdos put one hand to his face, looked at the blood on his palm as though not quite able to believe it. Enormous tears of pain were welling from his eyes. Then he got up and began to run, in a wobbly sort of way, towards the combine gates.
Safely within them, he stopped and looked back. Fedora was already getting into the Land Rover. He looked round him, knuckling the blood from his right eyebrow and whimpering to himself; then sensed, rather than saw, the way in which the crowd were now watching him. He turned and ran on towards the office doors, remembering as he mounted the steps that this time the guards had forgotten to salute him.
Trout, of course, was still asleep.
“Don’t wake him up,” said Johnny, seating himself heavily in the chair on the other side of the table. “We’ll pack up and move off later in the morning. He can sleep for another hour yet.”
Maria nodded. She snuggled down into his lap and began to unroll the bandage.
“Did you get Pedro?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Johnny. “I got Pedro.”
“And Mendes?”
“Yes, I got Mendes.”
“Anybody else?”
“Yes, there were two others. But I don’t know who they were.”
“Oh,” said Maria. “Well, that’s all right then.”
Fedora smiled to himself. There was no denying it; as a professional gunman’s wife, Maria would have been a phenomenal success. He waited until she had removed the bandage and cut away the butt of the .32 from the skin that was clinging to it; then he put his bad hand up to her chin and turned her face towards him and kissed her.
“I expect you’d like some coffee?”
“I would,” said Johnny. “I knew you’d say that.”
. . . The village was empty when they drove through it, empty as it had been when they had first entered it. The wheels of the Land Rover sent up a cloud of powdery dust over the silent houses, and the beat of its engine was echoed hollowly all the way down the street. . . . Then they had passed it by, had left the last outposts behind, and were travelling fast down the rutted camino del sur, through the banana-palms and the shoulder-high cane and between the great flanks of the hills. Trout, somewhat refreshed after his sleep and freshly shaved, was driving; Johnny sat by the far window with his arm round Maria, who sat between them.
Trout looked sideways as they rounded the bend that led down to the river; at Fedora, though, not at Maria. “Is she coming all the way to Caracas?”
“If it’s all right with you,” said Johnny.
“Well, for God’s sake, of course it’s all right with me. But what are you going to do with her when we get there?”
“It’s a nice town,” said Fedora vaguely. “A good place to hang around in till the next job comes along. Why don’t you hang about, too?”
“I might, at that,” said Trout. This time he did look at Maria. And grinned. . . . “Ask her if she’s got a little sister.”
“The place is packed out with them,” said Johnny.
Maria gave a little impatient wriggle and said, with something of her old petulance, “Why don’t you talk Spanish? Me, I like to know what’s going on.”
“He was asking me what we were going to do in Caracas.”
“. . . You’re going to play the piano to me. Aren’t you?”
“I hope so,” said Fedora. “I hope so.”
The Land Rover bucketed through the watersplash, mounted the steep rise beyond and at last turned its nose towards the north. Caracas was five days ahead of them, five days through the plains and the jungle and the hills and the heat and the mosquitoes, a long way ahead: London was immeasurably far, on another planet. Trout eased the accelerator a little farther forward. After a while, he said,
“Why didn’t you kill Galdos?”
Fedora thought for a moment before replying. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’d rather he just remembered me.”
“He’ll remember you, all right,” said Maria.
The sun overhead was almost at its zenith.
Galdos urged his horse onwards through the scrub, its hooves scuttering awkwardly on the loose stones. The map that Hendricks had made was a very good one, as he had recognised from his first glance at it; he had no difficulty in finding the way. Hendricks had been a fool to have carried that map with him the night of his death; he had been a fool to mark the site so clearly; he had been a fool, anyway. And Fedora had been a fool, too. He had been a fool to let Galdos go free; for with this map, Galdos thought, there might yet be time . . . time to send a telegram to influential friends in Caracas. . . .
He steathed the horse with his knees over a difficult stretch, turned it upwards along the long cleft that opened in the side of the hill. That cleft was marked on the map, he knew; but he glanced at it, just to make sure, before putting it back in his pocket. Everything was clear on the map, everything; from the course of the river to the contour of the slope, from the point where he had started to the point where he would end . . . the old Sepulveda adit, the point marked on the map with a little inked-in cross. . . .
The cuts and bruises on the sides of his face ached with a savage insistence; he had put ointment on them, and sticking-plaster, yet still they burned, seeming to eat into the flesh of his face like acid. Galdos urged the horse on even faster, animated—as Fedora had been the night before—by the bitter impulse of his hatred. He did not like riding the hills alone, for he was a man with too many enemies; but the hate that he now felt would have driven him to acts of far greater recklessness. Especially if, for reward, he found the carnotite, the carnotite which even now he might well be able to wrest from Fedora’s possession. Galdos had powerful friends in the Minislerio de Minas, as elsewhere in the Government; even now, it might be he who laughed last.
The horse entered the narrow gully. Galdos looked up at the tall tree that overhung the path directly before him, then at the dark shadow of the adit in the rocks to the left. This was it. This was the place where Hendricks had made the final corrections to his map, where he had inked in a cross for Fedora’s benefit. . . .
Galdos rode on. He glanced up at the tree again; blinded by his hate, he saw nothing. And the puma, its long body rigid, great talons gripping the rough bark, crouched itself down. . . .
. . . the muscles tensed in its sleek brown thighs . . .
. . . and then it sprang. . . .
THE END