Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  Many a man has staged his own death to dupe an insurance company. The companies in the States had no advanced database with which to cross-check claims; it was all done laboriously by hand as in the days of Dickens. Most companies would cautiously refuse a payment, but one or two would pay out and that would be enough to milk a million and then disappear. It was no doubt what Zinn had done.

  But there was the matter of the real Linder. Maybe I owed something to him, the poor heel, tossed against his will onto a beach for the sake of someone else’s scheme. One always owes something to the silent ones who are victims of other people’s circumstances. It was to him I felt an allegiance now. Maybe he had a wife or a sister I could return to with a version of the truth. It was not nothing.

  I must have fallen asleep then, because it was almost midnight when someone knocked on my door. It woke me up and for a moment, just as on that same morning, I had no idea where I was. It was a stealthy, timid tap, but when I didn’t answer it grew a little bolder. Through the peephole I saw the distended face of a woman, young and heavily made up, and there seemed to be a shadow or aura of someone else close to her but out of view. She knocked more loudly and I drew back from the door, waiting to spring, insofar as I can spring at my age. Finally they gave up and I heard shuffling on the carpet outside. There were certainly two of them, and I sat at the edge of the bed for a long time wondering about it. Perhaps they had gotten the wrong room, a pimp and his girl.

  TWELVE

  That night sleep didn’t come. I took out the blade from my sword-cane and oiled it like some old samurai pondering his soul. I’d never used it on a person, but it was my last line of defense these days. When the muscles give out, there is always cold steel to defend you. That smith in Tokyo had made it years before out of the tamahagane “jewel steel” that is used to make katana swords. A blade made from iron sand, capable of cutting through other metals and made elegant by a genuine hamon tempering line. I couldn’t live a day without it now.

  In the morning I sat at the terrace outside in the heat with the coffee men in their cowboy shirts and waited for Linder to appear through the front doors. I wore my aviators and spread that morning’s Diario de Colima wide enough to hide myself and drank my pots of café de olla with the usual churros. At nine fifteen Linder stepped out, pausing for a moment as the sun struck him in the face, and raised a hand to shield his eyes.

  Blinded for a moment, he didn’t see me. One of the bellboys behind him carried a small good-quality leather case with silver-colored buckles.

  A rental car came down the street and stopped right in front of them and they stepped with an improbable dignity toward it. My own car was parked in the hotel’s lot at the rear of the building, and I asked the waiter to tell the staff to bring it around for me at once.

  Linder, meanwhile, got into the driver’s seat, and the boy who had accompanied him saluted, handed him the bag, and stepped back from the car.

  He had been dressed like a normal businessman, the same pale suit he had worn to the bullfight, hair cropped close to the head. But his appearance had changed completely since the bullfight, as if he was growing into a new persona and doing so well.

  My car arrived a minute after he had departed from the zócalo. On the outskirts of the city I picked him up again, heading for the fast road south to Manzanillo. So he was heading back to the coast.

  He seemed like a man enjoying the first days of a tropical retirement. Fortune certainly was shining on him. And I had the feeling then that I had made a mistake about him up until now: he had no idea that he was being followed and he had no idea who or what I was. He was alone in his little world and that world was filled with sunlight and easy money. He had disappeared and reemerged and was sure that no one had noticed. It was the ease of those who know they can get away with things that other mortals can’t. It’s a type I know very well, perhaps better than any other. Unsurprisingly, he checked into Las Hadas. It’s one of the most famous hotels in Mexico. Sprawling over an entire peninsula, it was like a film set of a film set representing a luxurious neighborhood in Tangier, which is to say: a thing that doesn’t exist.

  It was a magnet for stooges and men on the lam, bottom-feeders and little playboys with trim mustaches, Americans with yachts who could berth at its vast and private marina, and women looking for easy scores. Moorish white and filled with lagoon pools and villages-in-Andalucía streetlamps, with a scene that spilled over into restaurants and nightclubs filled with unknown famous people and well-known shadow men who stepped into the light for a brief moment with a mission to enjoy the moment.

  I had been there before, but never on a job, and I had played golf on the immense course and watched the celebrity tennis tournaments with the stars of Mexican soaps I had never heard of, not to mention the stars of the local tennis club, Club Santiago. I sometimes saw Beau Bridges there, but most of the other stars were after my time and I had never kept up with them, though I recognized Ruta Lee and sometimes was tempted to ask her for an autograph. Cesar Romero on her arm, the sun upon their brows—those were the days, may they never return!

  Linder and I arrived almost simultaneously, so I went straight into the lobby as if I were already a guest and waited until Linder had completed his formalities, then followed him and his bellboy up to the room he had been given. It was a suite with a view of the bay, and when I had ascertained the room number I went back down and checked in myself. I, too, asked for a suite with a view and, after they had suggested a few units far from Linder’s, managed to narrow them down to a suite three doors down from his. Another hop took me to my room. The suite had marble pillars and a balcony with bougainvillea, and, seen from its balcony, the sea had a distantly nostalgic quality, a depth of blue I hadn’t seen in years.

  * * *

  —

  When the bellhop had gone, I put my hat back on and went to a corner of the large window and looked across to what I assumed was Linder’s balcony. He was not there, but I saw a bathing suit laid across the back of one of the chairs. I then drew up a chair and sat by my door listening to the corridor.

  Only a half hour later I heard a door click and someone pad down toward the stairwell. I opened the door quietly and saw Linder’s form in swimming trunks and a golf shirt receding down the corridor. I followed him down to the lobby. From there he asked his way to one of the beachside restaurants and took a table there. It was almost happy hour and he asked for a menu. Turning back to the lobby, I found one of the service boys—I can read the corruptible ones by their faces—and asked him to help me back to my room. He was about eighteen, bored on the job, and on the way I asked him about his work. The pay was abominable, he said, but I suggested there were ways to make a little extra. When we were alone in the corridor, I asked if he’d slip me a duplicate key for Linder’s room for a tip. I just needed it for thirty minutes. He hesitated, but the hesitation wasn’t entirely serious and he quickly pocketed the hundred and set off back to the lobby to get the duplicate. It took two minutes. Not wanting to leave me alone, however, he came with me to Linder’s door just as the concierge at the Cebello had. I stopped in my own room for a moment to pick up my listening device and then the boy let me into Linder’s room.

  It was just as orderly as the room had been at the other hotel, but now there was a suitcase laid on the floor and a pile of newspapers on the bedside table. I looked for a place to lay the bug and decided in the end to leave it under a corner of one of the rugs in the main room. It was so small no one would notice it, and the boy had told me that the maids only beat the rugs weekly. Leaving it there, we went out and the boy walked away without saying a word. I went down to the same restaurant and watched Linder eat his way through a plate of tacos.

  Eventually, he got up and went down to the beach for a swim. While he was there I took pictures on the tiny Minox and recorded his pale, shriveled form emerging from the waves. He returned to the table an
d ordered a bottle of tequila.

  There was always a commotion at Las Hadas at twilight. The guests came down to the beaches in their night finery, the live music started up, and the drunkenness began. It was time for Linder to go back to his room and dress up as well. I didn’t follow him. I waited for fifteen minutes, then went to my room and opened up the radio transmitter for the bug. He was in the bathroom clattering about. There was a long period of silence and then the phone rang. He walked up to it, picked it up, and answered “Yes?”

  There was nothing more before he put the phone down.

  He went out onto the balcony and from the window I saw him sit at the table and take in the view. The whole bay was lit up by fishing boats. Then, at last, his doorbell rang and he went back into the room. A guest had arrived.

  It was a man, and his voice rolled with a Mexican lilt when he spoke English.

  “It’s not bad,” the guest said, evidently walking around the room and talking it in. “You got the best one.”

  “Want some rum?”

  “Not yet. You coming down with me?”

  “I’m dressed, aren’t I?”

  “You look like a dancer.”

  Linder had a voice like a child’s, gentle and high. It came as a surprise. The words were sung as a kind of libretto.

  “Where are we meeting Topper?” he sang.

  “At the bar. He’s already there getting friendly.”

  “Is that right? What a scoundrel.”

  “I told him you didn’t want him to drink.”

  “Too late now.”

  They went to the door and opened it. I put on a jacket and followed them back down to the lobby. There was a party that night for the Thalians, an American society for children with mental health problems that was popular among Hollywood donors. The festivities were already under way and, as darkness fell, fireworks erupted into life on the beach and conga lines appeared in the surf. There was so much confusion that I failed to find Linder and his friends, not even in the bar where they were supposed to have met. At least, however, there were so many people of my age that I was more anonymous than usual. I went looking for them like a fisherman after shrimp.

  At the pool I sat at the outdoor bar and watched the crowds surging around me until I was satisfied that my unsavory gentlemen had buried themselves elsewhere. I asked one of the waiters for a Cuban cigar from their menu and he brought me one, along with a gimlet made half-and-half with Rose’s lime. But I thought about my wasted esophagus and laid it down on the bar in front of me and waited. The Thalians were going mad on the sand, and a man in Aztec garb was running up and down with firecrackers attached to his arms. I unwrapped the cigar and clipped it, then lit the end and waited for it to take. As I took in the first lungful—the best odor known to the race—I sensed someone about to sit down next to me.

  First I saw the heliconia of his absurd shirt, then a tanned arm laid across the bar close to me, and a smell of something like sandalwood, only very faint, competed with the Cohiba Esplendido. How did I know that it was connected to my quarry, I wonder, even before I had half-turned and glanced up at his face—handsome, you might say, despite all the distressing events of a sixty-year life? He had eyes as blue as a husky’s and his face had only just begun to succumb to gravity. He looked better than I did at that age, I had to admit, and the downward lines that scored his face were shallow and elastic. His skin had a limber, oiled quality that made it admirable from a distance of two feet. A man, I suddenly thought, who washes his face in ass’s milk or some expensive Japanese serum.

  He seemed not to have really noticed me, but then, I thought, no one sits next to someone else entirely by accident. There’s always a reason, conscious or otherwise.

  But be that as it may, he ordered an inferior Jack Daniel’s for himself without glancing in my direction and took out a small toy top from his pocket and put it on the bar. He set it spinning with a flick of his fingers and watched it as it wobbled, stabilized, and then wobbled again.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” he said to the barman.

  Then he finally turned to me.

  “Care to give it a go, sir? They say it’s good luck if you can keep it spinning for a minute.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  He smiled and there was a handshake in the gaze.

  “It’s bad luck. But you’ll get over it.”

  The barman said, “I tried it last night and couldn’t do it.”

  I reached out and took the metal top and spun it.

  “That’s the spirit,” the man said. “You get better the more you do it.”

  The top hummed with a tiny noise and then collapsed at the forty-second mark.

  “You didn’t commit,” he sighed.

  “I never was any good with tops.”

  “I get it. But you’re smoking a very nice cigar.” He turned to the barman. “I want what he’s smoking.”

  “Cohiba Esplendido.”

  “Yeah, one of those.”

  The husky eye turned on me.

  “So, what are you in for, Mr. Gimlet?”

  “Beating the wife,” I said.

  “Figures. It’s a tough spot. Have you met the Thalians?”

  The conga lines were shouting to the stars at this point.

  “Not personally,” I said.

  “A charming group. You on your own?”

  “Like I said—the wife had me put away.”

  He chuckled and the Cohiba arrived—but this time on a plate. It was quite a little ceremony. The barman clipped it for him.

  “It’s not much of a place for a man alone,” he went on. “You must be the only man sat alone in the whole place. That’s why I spotted you. A man alone, I thought, sitting at the bar with a cigar. The old gringo. There’s always one.”

  “I’m always the oldest gringo at the bar. I like it that way.”

  “Do you? Don’t you get a little lonely?”

  He spun the top again while the barman lit the Cohiba for him and passed it to him. The toy spun continuously for over a minute and we inhaled the leaf of Cuba simultaneously.

  “I always wonder why men travel alone,” he continued. “Me, I have my business partners. They’re somewhere around having a better time than me.”

  “Are they old as well?”

  “Yeah, everyone’s old now. It’s a fine country for old men.”

  I raised my glass for a tap—it was about time.

  “Kampai,” he said, and obliged.

  “Maybe in the future everyone will be old and it will be better that way. We won’t be so anxious about it.”

  “Yeah, but what about the muchachas?”

  “Those days are behind me now,” I said. “But there’ll always be someone to make you happy.”

  “Maybe.”

  He rolled his cigar in his hand and his smile was quite elegant.

  “You traveling down the coast?” he said.

  “I’m retired up in Baja. I come down here for the surfing.”

  He laughed. “You’re quite a funny guy.”

  I asked about himself.

  “I’m here with my boss. He has a house near Barra de Navidad.”

  He spun the top yet again and we both watched it while the smoke from our mouths swirled around the glasses. I now had an uneasy feeling about him, from where I didn’t know.

  “If you feel like joining us for a drink,” he went on, “please do. But I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Waldstein.”

  “That’s a cracker of a name. You don’t look Jewish.”

  “I’m German.”

  “German genes. Can’t beat those. We’ll be at the Loco bar later if you want to join us. Feel free. Don’t worry, we’re fun.”

  “It’s me who isn’t fun.”

 
; As I got off my high stool and put out my Cohiba—the barman gave me a napkin to wrap it in so I could smoke the remainder later—he flicked his forefinger off his brow and gave me the charmer smile.

  “I still say you look a little lonely, Waldstein. It’s not a good thing to see.”

  But I went back to my room alone and sat in an armchair in the dark listening to my radio. The hours passed and the party outside reached me as an inhuman sound and the occasional flash of a pinwheel. Waldstein, I thought, where in hell had I obtained that name fished out from the unconscious with such ease? Then I remembered. He was one of the dead, too. A drunk who embezzled a betting company on Long Island and who was killed with a screwdriver on a rainy night some year back when JFK was still breathing. One forgets everything except the name. And he wasn’t a German, he was a Jew. His body was put into the trunk of a car outside a laundromat and was as small as a child’s. I shouldn’t have betrayed his memory. I shouldn’t have betrayed my own memories, for that matter. Poor Waldstein: I told him I’d make it up to him. Then, an hour after midnight, the door of Linder’s room opened and the man himself rolled into it, a little the worse for wear, stumbling against a table and cursing.

  After crashing around the place he picked up the phone for the last time that night, and his voice was so low that it was hard to hear every word.

  “We’ll go up to Barra tomorrow—yeah, that’s right—I don’t care what he says—just pick up the suits and drive up there. Who’s at the house? We want to be alone now. Got it?”

  After the phone had been slammed down angrily he collapsed into his bed. Thereafter he made no sound. The snoring began. I turned off the radio and began to feel weak myself. My head was burning and throbbing after the drinks and heavy cigar and it was worse than usual, as if the man with the top had made it so with all his spinning and cheap talk. I went to bed and my legs barely took me there. I laid the cane next to me and felt an unusual paralysis making its way up my legs until it reached my hips. The room began to disintegrate as if in the first seconds of an earthquake, and the marble and plaster had begun to shift. I thought for a moment of calling reception, but when I had decided to do it my hand would not rise toward the phone; it disobeyed all commands and lay by my side as if wounded. Instead it was the phone that rang. I wanted to pick it up, but my hand continued in its state of mutiny as the rest of my body panicked in a quiet way that an observer would not have noticed. I felt my mind falling, like a man missing his step in the dark and tumbling over a cliff. And, of course, I was indeed that old man, and I had suddenly become the quarry.