“Jesús, stop the car,” Robles said.
The old man brought the jeep to a bumpy stop. The automatic appeared magically in Emilio’s hand. He turned around in the small front seat and faced us.
“You must not try to kill Pablo Duarte,” Robles said.
Emilio’s face was a block of wood. The old man never even turned his head.
“I’ll bite. Why not?”
“You’ll promise? You’ll give your word?”
“No.”
“Then you would martyr yourself? Kill him, and yourself be killed?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Emilio.”
Emilio opened the canvas door and climbed out of the jeep. “Señor,” he said. He waited outside with his gun. Here the grass was shorter. He stood in it up to his knees. He waited for me with his gun.
“What the hell, Robles,” I said. “All I did was save your life.”
“Precisely, Mr. Drum. One life.” He shrugged. “One death. If Duarte dies, what happens to my people? Hostages, reprisals, violence and death. This is what you wish?”
“He had my friend beaten to death.”
“Esteban, who lies sick in Puerto Casado, is Emilio’s brother. Jesús here is their father. Do you see them rushing across the border?”
“They’re professional revolutionaries. I’m not.”
“Then you don’t approve of us?”
“What’s the difference? You’ll survive without my approval.”
“Yes. But will you?”
There was a stand of trees fifty yards off the road. From them a macaw screamed derisively.
“Sure I will,” I said. My voice came out thin and brittle. I barely recognized it. “You’re not using your head.”
“No?”
“No. Unless Caballero’s book means nothing to you. I’m the only one who can deliver the book.”
Robles took a long drag on his cigarette and flipped it out the jeep’s open door. He remained perfectly still until the macaw screamed again, and then he said, as if he had been waiting for it, “Get in, Emilio.”
Emilio got in. His father started up the jeep.
“Emilio would have killed you, Mr. Drum.”
“I know it.” This time my voice was a little better.
“I like you. I am grateful to you. But my personal feelings are of no importance. I am glad you gave us a reason why you must live.”
My throat was dry. “I’m going to kill Duarte if I can,” I said.
Robles nodded his head slowly, sadly.
Emilio grumbled a curse.
We drove for a long time without anyone talking. The swamps gave way to dry flat bush country. The road widened, a dense tangle of secondary growth bordering its shoulders. Then the scrub trees were gone and I saw rangeland, miles of it, gently undulating to the horizon.
It began to rain. Emilio worked the manual wipers for his father, but they didn’t do much good. We moved forward at a crawl. The road was much better. It crested a long hill as the sun came out. Black-bellied clouds held up the sky. The sun came through a break in them, dazzling. The hill fell away steeply toward the Paraguay River. Climbing the banks on either side—and looking very white and absolutely clean from this distance and in this light, although when you entered it it would not be clean at all—was Ciudad Grande. The city and the river appeared tilted in the strange light. An ocean-going freighter seemed ready to steam down an impossible hill of water into the neat white adobe models of buildings.
Jesús took the jeep swiftly down the hill.
Robles said, “Arturo Mistral, Caballero and I were very great friends in our youth. Now they are dead. I hope you are wrong about Eulalia Mistral. I hope she is not in any danger.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Suerte. The Mistral house is at Number Four Bolivar Calle, near the Park of Simon Bolivar. You have money?”
“Some.”
He gave me a fistful of Paranaian dolares. The jeep stopped on the outskirts of Ciudad Grande, under an enormous andira tree. “If you change your mind about Duarte, if you need any help getting out of the country—you have only to call Emilio. He will hear you.”
I got out of the jeep. So did Emilio. “That’s what I was afraid of,” I said.
Chapter Twelve
A TAXI which had been old when the Pan-American Union held its first meeting took me to Number Four Bolivar Calle. It was a big old white adobe house with a red tile roof. It was set well back from the street, and in the Spanish fashion presented a windowless wall and a small, unimposing door to the outside world. Hibiscus in flower grew along the adobe, matching almost perfectly the red tile roof.
I went to the door and banged the knocker and wondered what whoever answered it would think when I took off the big-brimmed white hat, as I must, and showed them the crew-cut yellow hair.
A fat, frowzy, middle-aged woman whose big breasts were hanging unconfined under a hibiscus-red housecoat and whose breath smelled of cerveza, which is beer, came to the door. She had hair on her upper lip and a tuft of it growing from a mole on her chin. She stared at me out or bleary, bloodshot eyes.
“Señora Mistral?” I asked.
Her answer was a squawky burst of laughter. The big unconfined breasts quivered like gelatin. “Qué me dice! Do I look like the Mistral?”
I said I had never met the Mistral and asked: “Ella a casa? She home?”
“When is she not?”
I let that one lose itself out over the park across the street. I smiled politely, expectantly.
“Pues bien, hombre. Come in, come in.”
I went in. It had once been a very fine house, but it was not a fine house now. What had been the large central patio was divided by cheap hangings into several small hallways. There was a musty smell and a smell of stale human odors which belonged only partly to the frowzy woman. Two old men needing a shave and a bath came out of one of the hallways. They leered at my hostess, who quivered. Then they went outside.
“Well, it’s an apartment house,” the frowzy woman told me. “Didn’t you know, señor? It’s been an apartment house for years.” She squawked, “Francesca!” and then pointed. “You go through there.”
I went past a cheap silk-screened hanging which showed a fierce-looking jaguar all but lost against a background of the national colors, which were green and orange. Viva El Grande, it said in black letters under the jaguar.
Francesca Mistral was seated on a camp chair in a small, bare room. There was a small window high up on one wall casting a shaft of sunlight into the dim room, in which Francesca Mistral sat as if it had transfixed her there. She wore a black shawl on white hair and had on a black dress. She was much older than I had expected. She looked old enough to be Eulalia’s grandmother. She had the most expressionless face I had ever seen on a woman. Her eyes were very pale gray with pinpoint pupils from staring into the sun. She had no eyebrows and wore no make-up. She gave the impression of waiting for something with neither patience nor impatience. She was very thin, almost emaciated, and her temples were indented. Thin blue veins traced a delicate pattern over them. I did not know at first what she was waiting for.
“Señora Mistral?” I said.
“Sí.”
“I’m looking for your daughter.”
“No está aqui.”
“Then where?”
“Who are you?” she asked, but did not really seem to care.
Once, at an electronics exhibit at an industrial fair, there had been a machine that made words. It was very clever, but the mechanical voice was completely devoid of any human tonal qualities. She sounded like that.
“A friend.”
“A friend?”
“Yes, a friend.”
“No está aqui.”
“Is she coming back soon?”
“Back soon. No.”
“Where is she then?”
“Sick.”
“What is it?”
“Sick they said. And took
her away.”
“The policia?”
“Sick they said and took her away the policia.”
“Where did they take her? Please, señora. Think.”
“Yellow hair,” she said, looking at me with mild surprise. It was her first human reaction.
“Where did they take Eulalia?”
“I knew many men with yellow hair and red faces in England a long time ago.”
“Eulalia.”
“It rained all the time. It was cold.”
I went over to her and touched her shoulder. My fingers touched bone. There didn’t seem to be any flesh on her. “I’m trying to help your daughter,” I said. “Please try to help me.”
“Eulalia is sick.”
“I know. But where? Where is she?”
“Where sick people go. The hospital.”
“What’s wrong with her? What did they do to her?”
It was very hot in there. It had been a long hard night. I was dead on my feet. My shirt was glued to me. I smelled my own sweat.
“Do you think I’m going to die soon?” she said. “It’s a sin to kill yourself. Despair is the one unforgivable sin, the padre says.”
She stared ahead sightlessly. I spoke again, but she didn’t hear me. I shook her, but it didn’t help. I got out of there with the knowledge only of what she was waiting for. She was waiting for death.
The frowzy woman met me in the hall. “The girl is very sick,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“I overheard your conversation with the Mistral, the loco. I was here when they took her away. They took her away screaming, señor. It was the night after she came.”
“Police?”
She laughed and quivered. “Would I tell you if it was the police? Do I look loco too? It was the state médicos, the doctors from the new hospital on the hill. You know the one, of course?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Of course,” she said, smiling. “Avenida de los Santos, fool. Oh, you fool. Go with God, fool. The girl was scared. She was hysterical with fear. She wasn’t sick.”
“I know,” I said.
“And I told you nothing. Go with God.”
She only looked frowzy; inside, where it counted, she wasn’t frowzy. I went into the street. The sun beat down fiercely, sucking the color out of everything. Emilio wasn’t around. I hadn’t seen him since we left Hipolito Robles in the jeep. I put on my hat and hailed a cab and told the driver, “Avenida de los Santos. The hospital.”
It stood high on a hill north of the city overlooking the river. It was all gleaming blue glass and structural steel supports and had probably cost more than the entire national budget to build. A sign over the main entrance told you that all cures came from the benevolence of El Grande. There was a statue purporting to be Indalecio Grande on horseback in a frozen canter beneath the sign. It looked suspiciously like the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt outside the Museum of Natural History in New York.
Inside, the hospital was bare and surprisingly dirty. They couldn’t help me any at the administration desk. They were profusely polite. But since as they assured me a señorita Eulalia Mistral had never been registered at de los Santos, the politeness and the porcelain cap smiles meant nothing. I debated showing them my F.B.I. Association card but decided against it. I thanked them and they thanked me and I went back outside where the cab was waiting.
“Bolivar Calle?” the driver asked.
I shook my head, wondering if I’d come in the national back door unnecessarily. I had something to sell which everyone in the Parana Republic wanted to buy. Looking at it that way, they would have flown me down at their expense in a private plane—on a one-way ticket, of course.
“When Primo Blas Lequerica’s in town,” I said, “where does he stay?”
“Al Palacio del Presidente, señor.”
“Then that’s where we’re going.”
He ground gears and the cab sped down the hill. It was then nearly two in the afternoon. Siesta hour. The streets of Ciudad Grande were almost deserted as we drove back down into town. The air had cleared and the sky was a gleaming cerulean blue, as if all the civil servants in Ciudad Grande climbed up there on ladders every morning and polished it. I wondered how far I could play this by ear. I still thought it a good idea I’d crawled in the back door. Primo Blas Lequerica was one thing. I’d see Lequerica now. But Pablo Duarte was not Lequerica. I wanted to keep away from Duarte until I was ready for him.
I thought of all the cops in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in the States who had given me a hard time. I laughed out loud and the cab driver looked at me in his rear-view mirror in surprise. Those cops had organization, sure, and maybe some of them were as tough as Duarte. But they had law to fret over and Committees for the Preservation of This and That and anxious city halls and anyway there were places in the States and precincts in all the big cities where the really bad ones wouldn’t be given badges to wear or would have their badges taken away.
The only thing Duarte had to worry about was the ability and organization, if any, of the opposition. That got me to thinking of the private dick books where Sam Shovel is pitted against a police force out to get him, from the captain to the big-bottomed dame who spreads green soap on the city hall floor at night. In the States it couldn’t happen that way, except in the private dick books. In the Parana Republic that was the only way it could happen.
I paid the cab off with some of Hipolito Robles’s dolares in front of the Palacio del Presidente. I walked up a flight of marble stairs not quite as wide as the bleacher stands in Griffith Stadium. I stared up at the palace. It was worth staring at. Superimpose the façade of a Greek temple on a medieval fortress and you’d come close. There was some muscle out front in the form of two uniformed guards with Tommy guns. There were two brass-studded doors which an A-bomb might dent at ground zero. There was another equestrian statue of Indalecio Grande and a sign which said El Grande gives you good government. There were the usual city hall drifters and grifters lounging around among the marble columns. It was nice to know you could come and go, at least during office hours.
I went inside past the guards and asked at a reception desk in a dark air-conditioned hall for Primo Blas Lequerica. I was sent up an escalator to the second floor. It was the first palace I had ever heard of with an escalator. A young fellow at the top gave us all the once-over as we floated up single file. “Un momento, señor,” he told me.
He waved his hand and a second young fellow trotted up and led me along a corridor to what could have been a cloak room. There were hooks that coats might have hung on; holster straps hung on them instead. There were shelves for hats—with revolvers and automatics, all neatly tagged.
“Por favor,” the second young fellow said, holding out his hand. I undid the white shirt and removed my shoulder holster. He took it away from me, smiling, and wrote out a ticket, tearing off the bottom half and giving it to me. He hung the holster up and I went down the hall to where I’d been told I could find Lequerica.
I went through a door and got the usual receptionist treatment. No, I had no appointment. No, I was not expected at all today. Yes, I realized Primo Blas Lequerica was a very busy man. Yes, we have no bananas. Yes, thank you. It would be a very nice gesture if you rang him for me anyway. The name is Drum. Gracias. De nada. Gracias. Gracias.
For half an hour I cooled my heels. A couple of fellows who didn’t look anything like gringos went in through the steel door behind the receptionist’s four-by-four world. A buzzer buzzed and the receptionist said something softly into a squawk box. Then out loud she said: “Señor Drum?”
I went through the door expecting to find Lequerica. I found a small, metal-walled compartment. This being where it was and I being there illegally, it scared the hell out of me. But it turned out to be an elevator. When I got in, it went up. When the door opened and I stepped out a guard frisked me. I went down a hall past a row of doors with a guard in front of each of th
em. They must have had some palace payroll. When I reached Lequerica’s door the guard there frisked me. I asked him if he’d had any business lately, and he smirked. The door closed behind me.
It was an apartment which made Lequerica’s Fifth Avenue penthouse look like a place you might rent for two bucks, no questions asked, for a roll in the hay. It had a living room forty-eight or fifty feet long, with no windows at eye level. The windows were high up. It was not a room with a view because the view was inside the room. It was decorated and furnished like a nonobjective painting come to life, with a mobile hanging from the ceiling showing more sides and angles than a tesserat, a huge coffee table in ice-blue marble like the Rhone Glacier, almost enough functional chairs to seat the entire Social Register of New York, and Primo Blas Lequerica in a white linen suit which probably cost as much as the Matisse, no doubt an original, hanging on one wall.
“I know,” he said, waving me to a chair which looked like a coolie hat and was as comfortable as a feather bed. “When you couldn’t beg or buy your way aboard that ship in New York without a note from me, you decided to fly down here and try again when it arrived up the river in Ciudad Grande.”
“Wrong,” I said. “I got aboard all right.”
He didn’t stumble over that one. Instead he took his graceful, poised, high-class gigolo body over to a built-in bar and mixed us some drinks. He said in his excellent English, “Forgive the sarcasm. You like them dry?” He was mixing Martinis.
I said I liked them any way at all. He gave me a very dry Martini and began to sip one himself. “It’s a secret formula passed down from generation to generation in my family,” he said. “You rinse the glass with vermouth and then pour it out and add all the gin you want.”
“Delicious,” I told him, wondering why he was trying to put on the charm.
“So you went aboard the ship after all,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“And now you’re here without a visa.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? You couldn’t get a visa to my country inside of two weeks unless you were a direct descendant of Simon Bolivar. There aren’t any.”
Murder Is My Dish Page 11