The Spicy-Adventure

by Robert Leslie Bellem

  The gun boomed. Collins swayed, half fell, then laughed. “They took my eye, Schwartz, on account of your cowardice! I’ve looked for you for a long time.”

  The gun boomed again, but Collins did not sway this time. Nervous fingers had missed, frightened nerves had failed. Collins’ fingers closed around the thick Teutonic throat, his knee flew into an unprotected groin, his teeth sank into flesh. The red lust to kill grabbed him again.

  He was conscious once of the woman clawing at his back, beating at his shoulders, saying, “He’s dead! He’s dead. You’ve killed him! Schwartz, the head of our Intelligence! Get up, get up!”

  But the red lust to kill was heavy on him; he throbbed with it, raged with it. It was long moments before he arose from the thing that once had been Schwartz.

  * * * *

  Hours later the plane droned through the air, Collins at the controls. The woman, huddled beside him, said softly, “San Sebastian and peace. These dispatches delivered, you and I together, together.” He smiled grimly and headed the plane north. Presently she slept.

  The plane hit the ground before she awakened. She sat up straight, fumbled for the tin box of papers, glared at the man as the plane came to a halt in a cleaned field.

  The box was gone.

  Calmly he forced her out despite her protests, calmly he took her in his arms. His wound throbbed, her wound throbbed, but both pains were forgotten in the heat of their embrace. Bodies melted, lips flamed and were one. Eventually she moaned. “But if you threw the dispatches into the sea what will I tell my superiors at San Sebastian?”

  He drew her close again. “San Sebastian? Miles away, dear. You won’t tell them anything. We’ve crossed the Pyrenees now. We’re on the outskirts of Hendaye, in French territory. The only orders you’ll take from now on are mine.”

  She shuddered, trembled beneath his caresses. Again he sought her mouth. It was a long while before they caught a ride into Hendaye.

  MARRIAGE FOR MURDER, by C.A.M. Donne

  Originally published in Spicy Adventure Stories March, 1937.

  Maxie’s Magic Manhood Moss, boiled in water until it made a thick and evil-tasting brew, was guaranteed to instill red-blooded virility and unprecedented ardor into the most anemic man in all the West Indies. Concentrated Extract of Croesus Shinbone, used to flavor herb soup drunk out of a gourd in the dark of the moon, would teach him how to get rich. Shredded Beard of King Solomon, rubbed assiduously into the scalp and the swellings back of the ears with appropriate incantations, would fill him with wisdom so that he might keep clear of designing women who were unworthy of him and devote all his energies to the one whose love was true.

  All these things the slim girl with the straight black hair and the gold-and-ivory skin purchased from Maxie the Magic Man, whose address had been the Bronx before New York’s loss became San Juan’s gain. Then she bought a phial of Irresistible Lure Lotion, imported direct from Harlem, which would envelope the woman who used it in an aura of scent to which no mere male could remain indifferent longer than a few seconds.

  Maxie smiled thinly as he fingered the silver coins the girl stacked on the counter, so that his blue jowls were creased wolfishly. “That’s right, Maria,” he said. “If you lose one, go after another. Sooner or later you’re bound to get a good husband with Magic Max helping you.” He winked at Matt Rhodes, waiting at the counter to get a loan. Maxie Werner sometimes supplied small amounts of cash to his best friends for as little as fifty percent interest a month. Between checks from the Amalgamated News Service, for which he was correspondent in Puerto Rico, the young man occasionally found such generosity convenient.

  The girl looked at Maxie with dark, liquid eyes that could dissolve in tears or burst into flame in a split second. “If he is to be my husband,” she said scornfully in the careful English she had learned at the convent school, “he must never run away to marry an old American woman who stays drunk day and night, just because she is rich.”

  “Forget about Jarvis,” Max advised. “He ain’t no good, anyway.”

  “Forget him?” cried Maria, in sudden anger. “Perhaps I shall kill him yet—and his old hag of a wife, too!”

  Rhodes’ eyebrows lifted as he surveyed the impassioned creature. Infuriated, she might easily murder a man or a woman, he decided—but in gentler moods she would be charming. Beneath her thin white dress the firm lines of her lithe body were exquisite. Her small breasts, untrammeled by any brassiere, thrust outward against the light fabric. Her face was extraordinarily pretty, with soft mouth and eyes and proud nose and chin. She was eighteen or nineteen, he guessed, and her hot blood was pure Castellon, although her ancestors had probably been in the islands for many generations.

  Watching the smooth motion of her flaring hips as she turned to walk into the blinding sunlight, he was faintly envious of the man for whom she had bought the love philtre, whoever he might be.

  At the door the girl nearly collided with a tall man of thirty or thirty-five, who wore a white suit and a tropical helmet with an air of swagger. He halted on his way into the shop, swept the helmet from his head and said, “Hello, my dear!”

  Maria’s chin went up and her eyes flashed. She would have pushed past the man, but he stepped in front of her, smiling at her fondly. He was Sylvester Jarvis, who lived at the Casa Ramirez by his wits, having fled the States to escape the consequences of some minor villainy. The previous day he had married Margaret Aiken, the well-to-do but unlovely grass-widow from Chicago, who also was in Puerto Rico to avoid scandal—and that same evening he had won the last of Rhodes’ money at poker, while his bride celebrated her latest nuptials by getting sloppily drunk at the bar.

  Jarvis spoke swiftly and softly to Maria, but his voice carried to Rhodes. “Don’t be that way, baby,” he said. “You know I hate her—but I need her money. I can come down to see you just the same, can’t I?”

  A serpent striking could not have been swifter. The girl’s tiny hand darted to her bosom, snatched a thin stiletto from its sheath between her breasts. Jarvis leaped back, screaming, a spot of red showing suddenly upon the white of his coat from a pin-prick wound in the left shoulder. Before Maria could strike again Rhodes held her.

  Her body writhed against the newspaper man, and even though it took all his strength to restrain her, he was happily conscious of her enticements. His right hand secured the dagger, forcing her tight fingers to relinquish its hilt; his left encircling her chest, was brushed by a soft breast that throbbed with the racing of her blood. He was sorry when she ceased struggling abruptly.

  Vincenzo, the Puerto Rican youth who helped Maxie sell charms and incantations and snake-oil panaceas to the superstitious natives of San Juan, came hurrying out of the back room, his handsome face marred by a black scowl.

  “You would do better,” he snarled at Rhodes, “to take her stiletto and drive it yourself into the yellow heart of Señor Jarvis! He should die for the things he has done to Señorita Morales!”

  Maxie, who had shown no alarm throughout the scene, snickered. He said: “Vincenzo wishes she’d try out some love philtres on him!” He pretended not to notice that the youth’s body stiffened and his scowl became positively murderous.

  “We’ll drop the subject,” said Rhodes sharply. “Señorita, I don’t blame you for what you tried to do, but this isn’t the time or place for it—and you’d get your hands and dress all dirty.” He released her, and she walked swiftly from the shop without a backward glance, forgetting her purchases, which she had dropped. “Maxie,” Rhodes continued, “I came here to get fifty dollars.”

  “Twenty-five,” Maxie said. “That’s all you can afford to borrow at my interest rate.”

  “Forty, then.”

  “I’ll give you thirty,” Maxie said. “You pay me forty-five the day your check comes. You been gambling again?”

  Rhodes nodded at the white-faced Jarvis, who was too frig
htened to speak. “Those birds at the Casa Ramirez are sharks at poker.”

  “You got to have brains to win,” remarked Maxie, shaking his head dubiously. “Now, if it was craps, I could give you a set of Maxie’s Enchanted Devil-Dice—”

  “But it isn’t craps.”

  Maxie went into the back room to unearth money from some secret place. He returned presently with three ten-dollar bills and a note for Rhodes to sign.

  “And if you ain’t got brains,” he said, handing Rhodes a metal disc three inches in diameter, “you might as well have some luck. This is guaranteed. It’s got magic words on it.” The disc had a horseshoe design and the phrase “Good Luck” engraved upon it. Rhodes hung the cord to which it was attached around his neck, so that it hung out of sight beneath the open collar of his shirt. “I’ll try anything that’s guaranteed,” he said.

  He picked up Maria’s packages and the stiletto and went out into the dusty street.

  He saw her some distance away, walking slowly along the flagstone sidewalk beneath the spaced palms, and hurried after her. The youthful Vincenzo came out in front of the shop and stood looking after him, still frowning.

  “Señorita Morales,” Rhodes said, lifting his hat as he drew near to her. “You forgot these.”

  She looked at him, smiling as though no thought of murder had ever marred her serenity. “My name is Maria, if you wish—Señor Rhodes.”

  “Matt is mine, if you care for the name, Maria,” he said.

  She laughed, and as suddenly grew serious again. “You will carry those things for me?” she pleaded. “It is so hot!”

  All together, they weighed perhaps six or eight ounces. Rhodes carried them with a will through the sizzling streets until she led him through a little passage into a courtyard where the sun was shut out and the air was cooled by a sparkling fountain. She put him in a canvas chair beside the fountain and ran into the house, to emerge in a short time with glasses in which ice tinkled pleasantly.

  “You must refresh yourself after your walk,” she said, raising her glass.

  Rhodes enjoyed the sweet flavor of Virgin Islands rum as he sipped the drink, but no sooner did the first swallow hit his stomach than he began to suspect one of the ingredients must be molten fire. He looked at her sharply, but her face was so innocent that he put away his suspicions and tried another sip. This time he felt the jar of an explosion within him.

  “Maria,” he asked, “did you by any chance put dynamite in this drink?”

  “No,” she replied demurely. “Only a tiny bit of Maxie’s Magic Manhood Moss, to see whether it is as efficacious as they say!”

  “But—don’t you know that it is apt to make me violent? Don’t you realize that I may be tempted to—make love to you?”

  Her eyes were inscrutable. “It may be,” she said, “that it will not work.”

  But it did. It sent hot currents boiling through Rhodes’ veins. It made him itch to touch the cool softness of Maria’s small body, his lips yearn for her kisses.

  Or maybe it was only the sight of her, stretched out in the deck chair at his side, that inspired him. For it had been a long, long time since he had seen girl as seductive.

  He captured her hand in one of his. “You mustn’t mind me,” he told her. “I really can’t help it, thanks to Maxie’s magic.”

  “Mind it!” she cried, and there was something fierce in the way she spoke. “Why should I mind anything, since the man I trusted has betrayed me!”

  “He’s the kind that always betrays women,” said Rhodes. “He’ll betray his new wife, too—and I guess she’ll deserve it.”

  “She is a hussy!” said the girl. “A slut!”

  He nodded. “And a drunken bum, in the bargain.”

  They went into the house. It was cool and pleasantly dark after the glare of outdoors. Rhodes sat on a couch against one wall and drew her down beside him. He put his arms around her and kissed her lingeringly, and the sweetness of her—or maybe it was the mixture of Maxie’s Magic Manhood Moss and Irresistible Lure Lotion, with which she had anointed herself—made him mad for her. His eyes roved feverishly over her breasts, her hips and the smooth slope of her thighs; his embrace tightened ardently and she responded with eager abandon…

  * * * *

  The sound of footsteps on the stones of the court aroused them. Rhodes smoothed his rumpled hair quickly and peered through a narrow window. The sun was nearly gone and the dim, fleeting twilight of the tropics filled the courtyard. He saw Margaret Aiken—Margaret Jarvis, she was now—standing at the fountain, glaring furiously about her. The middle-aged woman’s face was flushed and she had a disheveled, drunken appearance. In her hand she held a small revolver.

  “Sylvester!” she called sharply. She waited for an answer that was not forthcoming. “Oh I know you’re here, all right!” she shouted. “I’ve been told about your affair with this cheap town girl! I’m here to have it out with the both of you right now!” She staggered a step or two toward the doorway.

  Maria stirred swiftly beside Rhodes. He put his hand on her chest to keep her from rising.

  “Let me up!” Maria gasped. “I shall kill her for what she called me!”

  “No!” he whispered. “That would ruin everything!”

  The sound of their voices must have reached the drunken woman. “So you’re trying to hide!” she cried. She moved toward the door with determination, holding the gun in front of her, as if prepared to fire.

  With a sudden twist Maria eluded Rhodes and sprang to her feet. The stiletto he had taken from her in the shop lay on the table. She snatched it up. He gripped her wrist with both hands and tried to take it from her.

  The other woman was in the room now. In the dusk she must have thought Rhodes was her husband. “You beast!” she said. “I’ll give you what you deserve!” She pulled the trigger of the revolver, and flame spurted from its muzzle and Rhodes felt a twinge of pain in his left shoulder.

  Rhodes had the stiletto now, but he had lost Maria. Snarling like a tigress, she had wrenched herself free and had sprung at the intruder with hands clenched. Swearing beneath his breath, Rhodes was about to follow her and seize her again, for her own safety, when he heard a movement at his back. He whirled, holding the dagger ready to strike.

  A tall shape loomed dimly before his eyes. Something swished through the air toward him. He tried to dodge, but the thing crashed against his temple and bright lights danced inside his brain. He felt himself falling down, down into pitch blackness…

  * * * *

  Consciousness returned very slowly. Rhodes opened aching eyes and found that night had fallen and darkness was all about him. He moved his limbs experimentally and discovered that his left arm was useless and his right hand gripped something hard and rounded and coated with some slippery, viscid fluid. He uncoiled his fingers from the thing and his hand dropped to a soft mound that felt slimy, too. With dawning horror he became aware that he was touching a woman’s breast!

  He got to his feet and groped in his pockets for matches, swaying dizzily. He struck a match on the paper folder from which it had been torn. He saw that his right arm, from finger-tips to elbow, was coated with blood!

  In front of him, on the floor, lay the body of a woman—the woman who had come there to seek her husband! Her clothing was only shredded rags. Blood drenched the upper part of her body and from beneath her left breast protruded the haft of a stiletto, around which Rhodes’ fingers had been gripped.

  He stared in awful fascination until the match burned down and licked viciously at his thumbnail, hissing as it came in contact with the thickening gore. He dropped it and groped until he found a wall switch and flooded the room with electric light. There was no one in the room save himself and the dead woman.

  He ran through the house and found it empty. He wondered what had happened to Maria. A ghastly suspicion came into h
is mind.

  Had the strange child planned that this would happen? Had she lured him there to play at love, knowing that her hated rival would come? Had she killed the American woman, then deliberately framed him? Would the police arrive shortly discover his fingerprints upon the bloody knife, and arrest him as the murderer?

  He couldn’t believe it—and yet he remembered that there is no length to which a Spaniard, man or woman, will not go in search of vengeance when cheated in love…

  Footsteps came hastily through the court. Rhodes snapped out the light and crouched beside the door. He had no weapon save the stiletto, which he could not bring himself to touch, and his bullet wound had crippled him, but he was resolved to fight nevertheless against any attempt to capture him until he had had a chance to go into this thing further.

  A voice at the door called softly: “Rhodes!”

  He recognized it as Maxie’s voice, and decided to take a chance. He stepped into the half-light of the doorway and was relieved to see that the dealer in pseudo-magic was alone.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “You’ve got to scram!” Maxie said.

  “Why?”

  The other’s tone was sarcastic. “Maybe you’d rather spend your life in the oldest, dirtiest prison in the West Indies,” he said, “—or hang!”

  “But I haven’t done a thing, Maxie!”

  “Maybe not,” he replied. “Maybe the girl done it. I don’t know. But I do know that somebody sent word to the cops not ten minutes ago that you killed a woman here, and that, slow as they are, they’ll be along any second. If you want, I can get you away.”

  “Let’s go!” Rhodes said, realizing that this was not the time for argument. He followed the lean merchant through the passage into the street, into another passage and through a maze of black, unfrequented lanes that led toward the harbor. On the way Maxie spoke in jerky whispers.

  “There’s a freighter in,” he said. “The Mardi-Gras. I know the skipper, and he’ll take you to New Orleans.” He thrust a roll of bills into Rhodes’ hand. “Here’s a hundred bucks. Pay me back when you get ready. There’s a note with it, telling the skipper who you are.”