Vultures in the Sky

by Todd Downing

  Below the observation platform King stood in the shade of the Pullman and drew contemplatively upon a thin cigar. There was a look of concentration upon his face as he gazed beyond the train and from time to time turned his head nervously in the direction of the engine.

  “God, it’s hot!” Spahr stood upon the lower step and passed a handkerchief over his face. “Texas doesn’t know what heat is.”

  Rennert turned, agreed, and came a step or two nearer. He took the stickpin from his lapel and showed it to Spahr. “Ever see that before?” he asked.

  Spahr looked at it and grinned. “No. Looks like the bargain counter at a five and ten cent store.”

  Rennert turned the pin about in his fingers. “I was wondering if it belonged to Torner, the Mexican who died this morning. Did you see him last night in the Pullman?”

  “Yes, I saw him,” Spahr said readily. “He was in the smoker when I was getting ready to go to bed. He didn’t have that pin on though.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Well, fairly sure. I remember noticing his necktie, a loud one with pink and green checks. If he’d had that pin on I think I’d have noticed it.”

  “Thanks,” Rennert returned the pin to his lapel. “I may have been mistaken.”

  Spahr looked at him with some interest. “Where’d you get it?”

  “I found it in the Pullman. No one seems to want to claim it.”

  “I don’t blame ’em. I wouldn’t wear it on a bet.”

  Rennert changed the subject. “By the way, I was just reading one of your stories in the San Antonio Express. The extra edition that came out last night.”

  “Yeah?” Spahr was looking over Rennert’s head. “Which one?”

  “The one about the eclipse and human sacrifices in Mexico.”

  “Oh,” the young man grinned. “Pretty lousy, wasn’t it?”

  “I did miss the sacred virgins thrown into the sacrificial well.”

  Spahr’s blue eyes were partially closed as he stared upward into the sky. “I’ll have to put them in the next one,” he said absently. “I wrote that story when I had a hangover, maybe that accounts for the worst parts. I’d just gotten back from a trip down into the country around El Paso, following up a lead in the Montes kidnapping case, when I ran across an old college prof of mine. He gave me the dope on Mexico, seemed to take it all seriously. I thought I might as well make a story out of it.”

  “You covered the Montes case?”

  “Yes, while it was news. Everybody’s tired reading about it now so I got ’em to put another man on it while I came to Mexico.”

  “What’s your idea as to the identity of the kidnapper?”

  Spahr laughed. “You’re about the thousandth person who’s asked me that. I haven’t got any idea, to tell the truth. I always thought the kid’s nurse was mixed up in it but they’ve released her now. I don’t suppose they ever will know who did it. What’re those—buzzards?”

  Rennert’s eyes followed the direction of his gaze. “Yes, zopilotes they are called down here.”

  “A lot of ’em, aren’t there? There are three—no, four—in one bunch. Something must have died.” His jaw fell suddenly. “Think I’ll try another beer,” he said as he turned.

  “Mr. Rennert!” King’s voice was thin and brittle in the heavy heat-laden stillness.

  Rennert turned and walked toward him.

  From the doorway of an adobe hut an Indian face stared blankly past pink and scarlet geraniums at the train. There was an inveiled look about the unwinking obsidian eyes that reminded one of a lizard, lying upon a sunlit wall and staring at nothingness.

  King coughed nervously. “What’s the matter up there?” there was no attempt to conceal the anxiety in his voice. “According to the time-table we’re only supposed to stop here a minute or two. We’ve been here fifteen.”

  Rennert explained.

  King stood for a moment, drawing furiously upon the cigar. Dust filmed the lenses of his pince-nez so that his eyes looked remote. He spoke hurriedly. “Something queer happened back there in Saltillo. I thought I ought to tell you about it. This is the first chance I’ve had to get you alone.”

  Rennert noticed that he kept his eyes averted. “Yes?” he prompted.

  With a forefinger King carefully flicked the ash from the cigar. “I was standing on the platform, watching the crowd. An old Indian woman came up with some limes on a stick. My throat was dry so I thought I’d buy them from her. I was trying to find out how much they were when I noticed a man standing close by, watching me closely. He was well dressed, looked—well, white, if you know what I mean. He came up, said something to me in Spanish that I didn’t understand and shoved a piece of paper into my pocket. He disappeared into the crowd before I could stop him.”

  He paused and thrust the cigar back into his mouth. He put a hand into the pocket of his coat and brought out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to Rennert.

  Rennert unfolded it.

  It was an ordinary sheet of cheap ruled writing-paper. Upon it had been typed, with frequent erasures: “Nuestros amigos en San Antonio advierten que el peligro vuela sobre su tren. Se le espia. iCuidado!”

  Rennert stared at it, read it again.

  “It’s Spanish, isn’t it?” King queried. “What does it mean?”

  Rennert shrugged and folded the paper. “Do you mind if I keep this for a while?” he asked. “I’d like to study it over. I’m not sure, you see, exactly what it does mean.”

  A queer startled look flitted across King’s face. “It’s nothing serious, is it? Nothing to do with the train?”

  Rennert did his best to smile reassuringly. “It probably means nothing at all, it was evidently given to you by mistake.”

  “You think it was meant for someone else on the Pullman, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how could that man have made a mistake? I don’t resemble anyone else on the train.”

  Rennert had been staring thoughtfully at the mountains. He brought his eyes back to King’s iron-gray hair, silver in the sunlight.

  “You were buying limes, you say?” his voice sounded abstracted.

  “Yes.”

  Rennert was thinking of the fruit which King had brought back into the Pullman. Limes upon two sticks arranged in the shape of a cross. A message which, translated into English, read: “Our friends in San Antonio warn that danger hovers over your train. You are being watched. Take care!”

  Up ahead the engine was disturbing the brooding peace of the desert with its puffings and janglings.

  “¡A bordo!” came the conductor’s warning cry.

  Radcott strolled toward the train, his hands thrust into his pockets and his shoulders thrown forward. He stopped to toss a coin to the beggar, who sprang at it with the agility of a monkey.

  Rennert asked as he walked by King’s side toward the steps: “I believe you said that you didn’t see this man Torner last night?”

  King looked at him quickly. “No, not until this morning, while the train was at Monterrey. He was walking up and down the aisle then.”

  Rennert held out the stickpin. “I don’t suppose, then, that you could identify this as having belonged to him?”

  King glanced at the pin. “No,” he said, “I couldn’t.”

  They walked on, their feet making crunching noises in the gravel that sounded unnaturally loud in the hot heavy silence.

  Rennert said: “I wish that you would do something for me when we get to Vanegas, Mr. King.”

  “All right,” King had turned his head to look at the beggar. “What is it?”

  “I want you to send a telegram to your wife in Laredo.”

  King kept his head turned away from Rennert and did not answer at once. “Sure,” he said after a moment, “I’ll be glad to. What about?”

  “I want you to ask her about the location of the voice which she heard last night. You said, I believe, that it was behind her. That might have meant either the front or the
rear of the car, depending upon which way she was facing. She can send you the answer to San Luis Potosí.”

  King was frowning. “There’s no need to wire her about that,” he said shortly. “I can tell you. She was facing the front of the train. She always does. It gives her a headache to ride the other way.”

  “Just the same, I want you to wire her—to make sure.”

  “All right,” King’s voice was smothered, “I’ll wire her.”

  He paused at the foot of the steps and allowed Radcott to precede him. He turned once more and glanced across the sunlit ground at the beggar, who was sitting in the same posture, motionless, staring at the train.

  A slight tremor passed over his thin gray-clad shoulders. He asked: “Does Mexico make you afraid too, Mr. Rennert?”

  7

  The Sweetness of the Mango (4:20 P.M.)

  Coralie Van Syle closed her eyes in delicious relaxation and, after a long time, opened them again, hoping to catch once more that breathtaking stab of excitement which had gone through her that morning when she had awakened in her berth and looked out over the desert into the unreality of the mountains of Mexico. It was gone now—never, she knew, to be recaptured—but there remained something distinctly more pleasant, something which took away awareness of the cool shaded compartment in which she sat and the fabricated comfort of her surroundings, something which drew a merciful screen between her and the scalding heat of the sun on alkali-crusted sand and rock, the ugly distorted little trees and the diminutive whirlwinds that writhed between her window and the mountains. The mountains were blue and haze-dimmed, hovering in the air like mirages—and she was moving between them, as unreal as they.

  She leaned back in her chair, carefully inserted a cigarette in the jade holder and pressed the catch on a gold lighter. She gazed over the tiny flame into the mirror on the door and studied her reflection. She flexed her thumb, adjusted the holder between fore and index finger and was satisfied. She drew upon the cigarette and laid the lighter upon the top of the table. She looked for a moment at the bright upraised surface of the lighter, paneled by smaller receding surfaces, and at the initials engraved there. CVS. Coralie Van Syle. She formed the syllables slowly, letting them rest for an instant on her tongue and lips before releasing them. She thought: I am Coralie Van Syle and in a strange land where I know no one and no one knows me. Nothing else matters.

  Her lips, from long force of habit, formed other practiced syllables: Popocatepetl, Ixtaccihuatl, the rocks of Acapulco, Chapultepec, Taxco, and the Causeway of the Sad Night. There had been, of course, those names upon the maps of the Orient and of Egypt in the circulars of the travel agencies. She regretted them. But time was short—so terribly, terribly short that she had hated each ugly little station in Texas that retarded her journey to the Rio Grande.

  Upon the table lay a flat leather book and beside it a fountain pen. She reached over and took them into her hands. She wrote, tentatively, upon the fly leaf then turned the pages until she found the one she was seeking. The fingers which held the pen moved for a few minutes over the lines. She closed the book and laid it back upon the table. With a vestige of the old secrecy, for which there was no longer any need, she placed three brightly jacketed volumes on top of the book in which she had been writing.

  Beside the books lay the little bunch of silly yellow wall-flowers which that impressionable young newspaperman had bought for her on that blistering hot railway platform. She hadn’t bothered to put them in water and they were drooping now, their edges shriveling. Strange, the way that old Mexican woman had acted—as if she hadn’t wanted to sell them. She had said something in Spanish which neither of them had understood. The young man had given her a peso for them.

  She stared at the flowers, her eyes suddenly unseeing, and tried to remember more of his incoherent rattling talk about something which had happened up in the Pullman, among those boring ordinary people. With fierce satisfaction her lips formed the words: boring ordinary people.

  Try as she might she could not fight off the queer sensation of uneasiness which was creeping over her again. It had been returning with increasing frequency throughout the day, tapping at the foundations of her resolve that nothing should mar the perfection of that flight into strange glorious space. What, she told herself desperately, was as important in all the world as this intoxicatingly sweet sense of freedom? That alone mattered now.

  With perverse desire to taste again the mango-sweetness of guilt she drew the beaded hand bag from the place where it nestled beside her in the chair. She had tasted a mango for the first time that morning. That, she thought, was exactly what it was like—the first bite into a ripe mango and the sudden revulsion from its sweetness. She laid the bag upon her lap and carefully opened the clasp. With cautious fingers she took out an object and placed it upon the bag.

  It lay there clean and sharp and evil-looking, against the tiny black and white beads. She looked at it for a long time before she could bring herself to touch it with a forefinger. She had seen them before in doctors’ offices, associated in her mind with spotless white enamel and a pervading odor of disinfectants. But here, lying in her lap, it looked different somehow, and made her almost sick. The point of the needle looked so sharp and there remained in the glass tube a little of the thick liquid, almost as black as ink. Without wanting to, she pressed her finger against the end of the tube. The liquid welled up and she jerked away the finger. A shiver of coldness went through her.

  The knocking at her door was very gentle and she did not realize for an instant that it was knocking. It came again, more insistently this time, and she thrust the syringe into the bag. She snapped the bag shut and rose. She was not aware until after she had called “Come in” and the door had opened that she was standing with her fingers tightly gripping the handle.

  “Good afternoon.” The man stood with one hand still upon the knob of the door and asked, “Am I disturbing you?”

  She felt that his cool gray eyes were studying her and she cast a quick glance into the mirror of the door by his side. Its angle distorted her face but she saw only too plainly the hectic flush that had mounted to her cheeks. She knew, too, that she was breathing in gasps and that the hand which held the bag was trembling noticeably. She repressed the anger which flooded over her and said with an effort at composure: “You startled me.” She laid the bag upon the top of the table and turned to him. “Come in, won’t you?”

  “Thank you.” He closed the door and stepped forward.

  She motioned toward a chair, said “Sit down” in a voice that she scarcely recognized as her own and sank again into the chair by the table.

  He sat in the other chair and she thought, but could not be sure, that his eyes rested a moment too long on the beaded bag. His eyes were brown, she saw now, and merely flecked with gray. His dark brown hair was thin and touched with gray at the temples. She had seen him, without paying much attention to him, in the diner that noon, with the tall man who had stared so disconcertingly at her. And, she remembered now, that the newspaperman had introduced them at the steps of the Pullman.

  “My name,” be said in a soft pleasant voice, “is Rennert. I am one of the passengers back in the Pullman. Mr. Spahr introduced us on the platform at Saltillo, you may remember.”

  “Oh yes,” she was getting her voice under control now, “I remember you very well.” She groped desperately for something to go on with and found herself saying: “A warm trip we’re having, isn’t it?”

  His eyes seemed to rest steadily, yet not rudely, upon her face. She thought that she detected a slight movement at the corners of his mouth as he agreed: “Yes, it’s very warm today. We reached an elevation of about seventy-three hundred feet back at Carneros but are going down again now. By tonight it will be perceptibly cooler.”

  She crushed the stub of her cigarette into the tray and reached over to get another from her case. To do so she had to move the bag and again she thought that the man’s eyes were fixed up
on its beaded surface. Or maybe upon those yellow flowers, whose scent seemed all at once overpowering in its sweetness. She took out a cigarette, tapped it against the case and fixed it in the holder. He got up, struck a match and held it for her. She looked at the lapels of his blue serge suit, at the white soft collar of his shirt and at the unobtrusive blue-and-white tie which he wore. She smiled slightly and said: “Thank you so much.” She watched him sit down and light a cigarette for himself.

  Blue wisps of smoke stood between them, wavering in the current from the electric fan. She wondered what he found to interest him on the other side of the room behind her. There was nothing there except that battered old hatbox, whose lid wouldn’t stay closed.

  “My errand here is a bit delicate, I’m afraid, Miss Van Syle,” he said, looking at her with a pleasant smile. “You’ve heard of the occurrence back in the Pullman this morning?”

  She was breathing more regularly now and managed to put the correct intonation into her voice as she said: “You mean the man who died while we were passing through the tunnel? Mr.—what’s his name, Spahr?—told me about it. Terribly unfortunate, wasn’t it?”

  “Very,” he paused. “I hope that it will not entail any unpleasantness for the rest of us, however.”

  “Unpleasantness?”

  “Yes. You see, when his body was taken off at Saltillo there remained some question as to how he died.”

  “But I thought Mr. Spahr said it was heart failure?”

  “That’s the natural supposition, of course. It’s just possible, however, that the Mexican authorities may wish to make further inquiries into the matter. In case that happens I thought that it might be well for all the passengers to be ready to give any information which may be required. To avoid delay, you understand.”

  She said: “Oh yes” in what she knew was an inane manner and added quickly: “But I wasn’t in the Pullman at all so there’s no possible information which I can give them.”

  “No,” he agreed readily, “there doubtless isn’t, but I thought that I would see you anyway, just in case you might be able to throw some light on the man’s movements last night. His name, it seems, was Eduardo Torner. He was a Mexican by blood but a citizen of the United States. The only Mexican on the Pullman. He got on the train at San Antonio last night. I don’t suppose you saw him there?”