A Deadly Shade of Gold

by John D. MacDonald

  I got up, barefoot on cool tile, and made a soundless circuit of the room and stopped at the interconnecting door and, holding my breath, heard the faint sound that was disturbing me, a tiny little smothered keening, the small frail noise of the agony of the heart. I put my robe on and tried the door. It opened soundlessly into the other darkness of her room.

  "Nora?" I said in a half whisper, so as not to alarm her. The answer was a hiccuping sob. I felt my way to her bed, touched a shoulder, thin and heated and shivering under silk. I sat with her. I stroked the lean firm back. She was down there in a swamp of tears and despair, where I could not reach her. Much of lust is a process of self-delusion. If I stretched out with her, could I hold her more securely, could I make her feel less alone? If I gathered all this straining misery into my arms, tucked the hot fierce salty face into my throat, gave her someone to cling to in the night? These caresses were merely for comfort, were they not? They had absolutely nothing to do with the spectacular legs, and the clover-grass scent of her hair, and her lovely proud walk. This was just my friend Nora. And if all this began to turn into anything else, I had the character to walk away from it, didn't I? And certainly she could sense that seduction was the furthest thing from my mind, wasn't it?

  But there was one place to stop, and then the gamble of waiting just a little longer, and just a little longer. She had long since stopped crying. Then another stopping place passed, and beyond that there was a slope too steep for stopping, a slope that tilted it all into a headlong run. After the peak of it for her, she said something blurred and murmurous, something I could not catch, and fell almost at once into a heavy, boneless, purring sleep.

  Back in my own bed I said surly things to jackass McGee about taking rude advantage of the vulnerable, about being a restless greedy animal, about piling more complication on the shoulders of somebody who had enough trouble. I tried to tell myself this was no green kid. This was a mature, spirited, sensitive, successful woman, and grown up enough to do her own accepting and rejecting. But the intense wanting had come almost without warning, and together we had been more complete than I could have possibly guessed. Anxiety makes dreams all to vivid. In one that woke me up, I was in a small secret room, hot and murky as a steam bath, with a red battle lantern set into the ceiling. There was something there I did not want to find, but I had to look for it, knowing I was doomed if I could find it. I opened dozens of drawers and cupboards and they were all empty. I opened the last drawer, a great long low heavy drawer, and in there, wearing tall red shoes, were the severed glorious legs, side by side. As I stared at them, I knew the one with the knife was directly behind me, waiting for me to turn. I turned slowly, and Sam was grinning down at me out of his chopped face, and I lurched sweating up out of sleep.

  At nine-thirty showered and dressed, I wondered if I should knock at her door. I decided against it and went to the dining room. Eduardo said she had not yet arrived. Just as I finished the papaya, I glanced up and saw her approaching the table, walking with a slightly constricted demureness, her head a little on the side, her smile crooked. She wore dark green bermudas and a green and white striped blouse. I stood up for her, and Eduardo hurried to hold the chair for her. A flush darkened her face as she looked at me with eyes vast, dark and quizzical and said, "Good morning, darling."

  "Good morning." Eduardo took her order. She ordered a huge breakfast. When he went away, I leaned toward her and lowered my voice and said, "Nora, all I want to say...."

  She leaned and reached across the small table very quickly and put two fingers against my lips, stopping what I had rehearsed saying to her. "You don't want to say anything, Trav. There isn't anything you have to say."

  "Are you sure of that?"

  "I know things. I know we are very fond of each other. And I know that words don't do any good. Words fit people into categories, whether they belong there or not. Then they have to keep explaining themselves. It was a lovely and beautiful accident, and I cherish it. Is that enough?"

  "Yes," I said, "But I just wanted you to know that...."

  "Hush now."

  There is no man so assured that he cannot be made to feel slightly oafish if a subtle and complex woman puts her mind to it. She wanted no sex lectures from Father McGee, no apologies, no explanations, no resolutions for the future. They have an awesome talent for the practical, for the acceptance of the inescapable, for almost instantaneous adjustment.

  During our sun time and swim after breakfast, no sensitive observer could have been left in doubt about our relationship. She was not obvious about it. She merely related herself to me in an entirely different way, with a dark adoration of Mediterranean eyes, hanging on my every word in a way that turned me pontifical, making small affections, walking in a changed way for me, posing herself for me, her voice slower and heavier and furrier. She was focused on me like a burning glass in the sun. I was surrounded by her, and though the talk was never personal, never intimate, never explicit, we were carrying on a second dialogue all the time, in words unsaid. And when we went back to the rooms, she came to me sun-hot, eyes heavy and blurred, lips swollen and barely moving as she murmured, "No accident this time."

  Later, when once again I succumbed to the dreadful compulsion to try to explain us to each other, she stopped me with fingertips on my lips. Hers was the better wisdom. Merely accept what had come to us. The emotional involvement was there, making it good. We were using each other as people, not as handy devices, and by making so forthright an advance, she had evenly divided any guilt or blame, made herself an accomplice. I knew without being told that henceforth the aggressor role was mine. She had made her statement of acceptance, in a way more telling than words could have been. In her acceptance, I was in a surrogate role, which had a slightly unpleasant connotation. But, because we would not talk about it, it could remain slight, and thus not bruise male vanity.

  Bed is dangerous country. The physical act is the least chancy part of it, requiring only health, maturity, and a reasonable consideration. It is the emotional interaction that makes it mysterious and perilous, turns it into something that mankind finds so endlessly interesting. Perhaps it is this simple. If, through the physical act, you are affirming emotions you believe in, then bed is cleansing, heartening, strengthening. But if the emotional context is greed, or the need for domination, or the yen to humiliate, or just the shallow desire to receive a pleasurable sensation, then bed diminishes, coarsens and deforms.

  The complicating factor is the great talent of the human animal to place a noble tag on ignoble emotions, intellectualizing something out of nothing, but the emotions are not deceived. They detect emptiness. Men use the available emptiness of the sun bunnies and call it a healthy release, and by so doing, over a period of time, reduce each other to a spiritless vulgarity. I wanted Nora for the sake of Nora, and her response was affectionate, joyous, and weighted with a sturdy practicality. She was saying, in effect, "Let's not talk about what it means until we know what it means. But it means something, or it wouldn't be like this."

  While she was dressing for lunch, I told her I would see her in the lobby. I had noticed that Senor Arista was usually at his desk in the small area behind the registration desk during the hour before lunch.

  I leaned on the registration desk and said, "This is a fine place, Mr. Arista."

  He smiled carefully. "So glad you like it, sir."

  "No complaints. Say I was wondering about land around here. Like on the knoll over there where those houses are. Is it expensive?"

  He got up and came over to the counter. "The land itself, by the square meter, is not too dear. But you see, the big expense is in construction. Skilled labor has to be brought in, as well as all the materials. And, of course, it is very awkward for a tourist to purchase land. One must have a change of status, to resident or immigrant. Are you really interested, sir?"

  "Well... enough to want to talk to somebody about it."

  "All that land to the south of the hotel, app
roximately two miles and half a mile deep, is owned by the same syndicate which established the hotel, sir." He got a card out of his desk and brought it to me. "This man, Senor Altavera, handles these matters for the group. This is his Mexico City office. The way it is handled here, there is the one road that winds up the hill, and the present houses, six of them only, are on that road, and they are connected with the hotel water and electricity. It would be a case of extending the road and the utilities, and there would be added charges for that, of course. But if you are genuinely interested..."

  "Maybe you could give me some kind of an estimate of what the average house and land and so on would cost in dollars, total."

  "I would estimate... let us say a three bedroom house, with appropriate servants' quarters, walled garden, a small swimming pool, all modern fixtures and conveniences, I would say that for everything, it would be about one hundred thousand American dollars. One must use the architect the syndicate recommends, and build to certain standards of quality and size. I suspect that the same kind of land in the United States, and an equivalent house, would be perhaps as much as half again the cost."

  "With use of the boat basin?"

  "Of course, sir. And if one were to close the house for a time, an arrangement can be made with the hotel for care of the grounds, an airing of the house from time to time."

  "There are five houses now?"

  "Six."

  "What kind of neighbors would I have?"

  Arista looked slightly pained. "There is one United States citizen, a gentleman from the television industry. He is not in residence at this time, sir. And one Swiss citizen, quite an elderly man. The others are Mexican. It is not... a neighborhood in the social sense, sir. They are here for purposes of total privacy. You understand, of course."

  "Of course. I wonder if any of the existing houses are for sale."

  He hesitated, bit his lip. "Perhaps one that would be far more than the figure I... Excuse me. It is not at all definite. Really, that is all not a part of my duties. You should contact Senor Altavera on these matters. I am, of course, anxious that the property should be developed. It eases certain overhead expenses for the hotel operation, and it improves the hotel business."

  "How about the local supply of people to work for you? Cook, gardeners, maids and so on?"

  "Oh, these people are most difficult, sir. They are a constant trial. They learn well, and they have energy, but they have a fierce independence. Perhaps that is true of all peoples who are accustomed to make a living from the sea. They can give great loyalty, but they are very quick to take offense. And then they merely fail to come to work, and one must go in search of them. They are strong, as perhaps you have observed, and well formed. But they have many superstitions. It is one of my greatest problems, sir. It is not satisfactory to import help to this place because the local persons make them unhappy and they go away. Excuse me, it is not entirely black. With patience and understanding, these things can be managed." He smiled wanly. "One must be patient and understanding. When angered, these people can be very violent. At times there is murder done in the village, but somehow no one knows anything about it. Everyone is totally ignorant. I should say that for the people who own houses here, it is easier to have servants from the outside. They live at the houses and are in less contact with the village. We at the hotel are more at the mercy of the village."

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nora approaching and I thanked him for all the information. He was wary, slightly skeptical, but willing to cooperate. I did not look like a man who would put up a hundred thousand dollar house in such a remote place, but he had learned not to judge Americans by looks. My woman was smartly dressed. The reservations had been made out of Los Angeles. I had the deep tan shared by the laboring classes and the leisure classes. It was best to be patient and polite. I guessed that compared to the size of the investment, La Casa Encantada was not yet showing a profit. The syndicate people might be slightly restive.

  I followed Nora into the dining room, smugly and comfortably aware of the sleek flexing of elegant calves, taut swing of round hips under the linen skirt, the valuable slenderness of her waist. Possession always seems enhanced in public places, when the eyes of strangers follow the look of your woman, in secret speculation. She handled herself with the habitual grace of a model, and when I sat opposite her at our small table, her dark eyes were alight with our conspiratorial secrets, her mouth set in a different contour than on other days. The long days of strain, compression, despair had been eased for her. She had reached her breaking point and had endured through it and beyond it.

  Now her mouth was softened, personal, intimate-but still spiced with a small wryness, an awareness of the irony of our new relationship to each other.

  Ten

  THE VILLAGE Of Puerto Altamura lay steaming in siesta, insects keening of heat, the birds making small complaints in the dusty trees of the square, brown dogs puddled in shady dust, vendors asleep in their stalls.

  The Cantina Tres Panchos was down the side street toward the sea, a few doors from the square. Three male heads were painted on the sign over the dark doorway, a crude drawing with garish colors, their mouths open in song. We went in, blinded by the change from bright sunlight to gloom. It was a bare, oblong room, about eighteen feet wide and thirty feet deep. There were two doors in the back wall. Between the two doors was an aged and silent juke box, dating from the preplastics era when they made them of wood and gave them a reasonably pleasing design. The walls were plaster, yellow-tan, streaked and blotched with mildew, pocked with marks of old violences.

  Calendar girls had been taped to the walls, frozen there in ancient provocative predicaments, caught halfway over barbed wire fences, caught on windy street corners with the leash of the poodle wrapped about one improbable ankle, caught on teetering ladders, caught midway in a fall into a swimming pool-all of them wearing precisely the same rueful, broad, inviting smile. The floor was of worn, scarred, uneven boards, the most recent green coat worn away in places, showing earlier coats of brown and grey and dark red. The bar was on the right, a tall scarred bar of dark wood, ornately carved. The brass rail was polished to a flawless brightness.

  The bartender was hunched over the far end of the bar, reading a newspaper. The chairs and tables were on the left. They were of the drugstore style of long ago, of sheet metal and twisted wire. The sole customer was at a table at the rear, sleeping with his head on the table, next to his straw hat. The hot still air was flavored with stale spilled beer, perfume, sweat and spiced cooking.

  I put Nora at a table near the doorway and went over to the bar. The bartender had a flat, broad, brown, impassive face, tiny hooded eyes, and a huge sweep of curved black mustache. In too loud and too contentious a voice I ordered a beer, a Carta Blanca, for Nora, and a tequila anejo for myself. The imitation of drunk is nearly always overdone. To be persuasive, merely let the lower half of your face go slack, and when you want to look at anything, move your whole head instead of just your eyes. Walk slowly and carefully, and speak loudly, slowly and distinctly.

  I went back to the table. In a little while the bartender brought the order over, bringing a salt shaker and wedge of lemon, with my shot glass of tequila. In slow motion I took a wad of pesos out of my shirt pocket, separated a bill and put it on the table. He made change out of his pocket and picked it up. He went away. I left the change there. I had told Nora how to act, told her to sit unsmiling and look everywhere except at me.

  I heard the clatter of heels. A girl came down the stairs in back and came out of the left doorway; a narrow, big-eyed girl with her dark hair bleached a strange shade of dull red. She wore an orange blouse and a blue skirt and carried a big red purse. She stared at us and went to the bar and had a brief and inaudible conversation with the bartender, and then went out into the sunlight, with one more glance at us, walking with a great deal of rolling and twitching. I hoped it wasn't Felicia. The girl had a look of brash impenetrable stupidity.

>   I signaled the bartender and pointed to my empty glass. Nora's beer was half gone. He brought me a shot and another wedge of lemon, took more money from the change on the table.

  On cue, Nora said in a voice of dreadful clarity, "Do you really need that?"

  "Shut up," I said. I sprinkled the salt on the back of my hand, the one in which I held the wedge of lemon. I picked up the shot glass in the other hand. One, two, three. Salt, tequila, lemon.

  "Did you really need that?"

  "Shut up."