Puzzle for Pilgrims

by Patrick Quentin

  She was standing fully dressed with her back to me, combing her dark hair and looking out into the moonlight. She hadn’t heard my knock. Then, suddenly conscious of a presence, she turned.

  It was the same each time I saw her. Her beauty caught my breath as if I was seeing her for the first time. She was straight and slim as a sapling. Her eyes were green like leaves.

  I said, “I just came with a little practical advice. Keep your door locked.”

  “Wasn’t it locked?”

  “It wasn’t. And it better be.”

  “Why?”

  “Unless you want Jake to get chummy with you.”

  “Jake!”

  “Marietta, you weren’t born yesterday.” I went to her and put my hands on her arms. “Or were you?”

  Her face was very close to mine. I saw her eyes change as if a sprinkle of frost had come. She was stiff, unyielding.

  “Now, baby,” I said, “no shivering.”

  Suddenly she melted in my arms. “Stay with me,” she said. “Stay with me, Peter. Just for tonight.”

  I ran my hand down her dark, soft hair.

  “Please, Peter…”

  She was shivering now, and she was gripping me to her as if I was the only thing that could warm her.

  I said, “Marietta, tell me something. It’s time now. What do you want? Who do you want?”

  “How do I know? Does anyone know?”

  “Martin knows what he wants,” I said.

  She reacted to the name like a dog reacting to a whip. She clung to me. Her lips moved over my cheek, and she whispered with an abandon that was more like despair than passion, “Stay with me, Peter. Stay with me. Stay with me.”

  Fourteen

  The inquest was, to me, astonishingly uneventful. It was held next morning in Sally’s sun-splashed living room. Nothing had been changed. The tuberoses, yellowing slightly, still stood in their blue and white Oaxaca vase by the French windows. The furniture had not been altered to present a more official appearance. The man in charge, a heavy middle-aged man with black, alert eyes, sat on the couch with a coffee table in front of him as a desk. A group of nondescript people, jurors or hangers-on, I was never sure which, stood respectfully at one end of the room. The Captain of Police and his two honey-colored buddies sat squashed tightly and stiffly together on the long piano stool. Jake, Iris, Marietta, Martin, and I lounged in the gay Domus chairs.

  Since no one else was sufficiently bilingual, Jake was chosen as interpreter. This to me seemed rash on the part of the law, but since they apparently had every confidence in him, and since there was absolutely no concrete evidence left to make the accident questionable, I suppose it was reasonable enough.

  The Captain of Police and his two assistants testified first. Then Jake gave his own story in Spanish. Iris and I, through Jake, were called upon only to substantiate the “simplified” version of the discovery of the corpse. The three of us together, we said, had paid Sally a social visit and had found her dead. Martin and Marietta had been coached by Jake before breakfast. They gave evidence that they had visited Sally much earlier in the afternoon, had talked to her about unimportant family matters and had left her in good spirits. Owing to the fiesta, there was little risk that anyone had been observant enough to notice the time of their actual arrivals and departures from the Casa Haven. Martin was called again, and the carpenter uncle of the Captain of Police. They both supported each other as to the rottenness of the balcony. No mention was made of the repair visit which the uncle had failed to make. The absence of a gutter and the insidious effect of the rain were played up to the hilt.

  After a lot of talking, some excited, some bored and plodding, the Coroner, or whatever he was, closed his notebook and stood up. The people in the corner had something to say about it all. Then we were dismissed.

  Everyone in the room must have known about the situation between Martin, Sally, and Iris. But, so far as I could tell, it wasn’t broached. But then the Mexicans are a polite race and, from their experience of the United States citizens resident there, divorce and sex intrigue were as natural a part of American life as burros and tortillas were for the Mexican peasant.

  In spite of my own personal misgivings, the inquest had been far from a mockery of justice. The house had been thoroughly searched. Obviously Sally’s claimed “proof” of a past misdeed committed by Martin and Marietta had not been found. Thanks to Jake, there was nothing else to find. Things might well have worked out the same way in Westchester County, unless some sensation-smelling journalist had pushed an investigation for its headline value.

  After a great deal of handshaking and smiling with the Coroner, Jake expansively invited us all for a drink at Paco’s, which was very post-fiesta. A couple of dark, languid waiters coped with a group of bouncing American schoolteachers plastered with Taxco silver jewelry. Below the terrace in the Zocalo, pigs grunted their way through the tumbled confetti and streamers. The carrousel was dead. A small, solemn boy was swinging himself in the pink swing. Flies swarmed over the stalls of candied fruit. Up between the feathery twin steeples, the Star of Bethlehem had reverted to being a grimy cardboard cutout.

  At the head of the table, Jake grinned and lifted his tequila collins. “Salud,” he said.

  His bright eyes moved from one of us to the other. “Well, babies, there may be quite a cackle of gossip among the Americans, but gossip doesn’t signify. You’ll have to come down and weep at the funeral, I guess. But after that I figure you can consider that little episode closed.”

  “Thanks to you,” I said.

  “Yeah, buddy, you’ve said it.” He looked right at me without smiling. “Thanks to me.”

  He turned to Martin. “You’d better go to Mexico City and start talking to Sally’s lawyer about the property. Know his address?”

  Martin looked uncomfortable, as if he weren’t accustomed to people mentioning such worldly subjects. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

  “You inherit everything, don’t you?”

  “I believe I do,” said Martin.

  “Okay. Start plaguing the lawyer. The sooner the better.” Jake took a gulp of his drink. “That’s what people are going to expect you to do. Better not disappoint them.”

  I don’t think Martin got the crack.

  “Of course,” Jake went on, “it’ll take a little time to get things smoothed out, but I can’t see as there’ll be any trouble.”

  He swallowed his drink abruptly and summoned the waiter to pay the check. When it was paid, he got up. The morning sunlight played on the red, cropped hair. He looked like a good-natured, rather dumb wrestler, the clean kid from the Y.M.C.A. who had the crowd rooting for him.

  “Well, it’s been swell knowing you folks,” he said. “Guess there’s nothing more I can do for you right now, so I’ll be on my way.”

  Marietta, sitting next to me, stiffened. I felt pretty surprised myself.

  “You’re going?” said Iris.

  “Sure.” The white teeth flashed. “I’ve always wanted to make Acapulco. The playground of the world. Guess I could do with a little sun-baking for a while. Sun fiend, that’s Jake.”

  He moved to the terrace and gazed down at the suspended gaiety of the Zocalo.

  “Not as big a drop as the drop from Sally’s balcony,” he murmured thoughtfully.

  Iris slipped her hand into Martin’s. There was an uncomfortable silence.

  Jake turned again, grinning. “Maybe I’ll give you a buzz when I get back to Mexico, just in case any other of your pals falls off of anything. How’s about an address?”

  Iris looked at Martin. “We don’t know where we’ll be yet. But you can always get us all through Peter.”

  I scribbled my telephone number on a card and handed it to him. He pushed it into his pants pocket without reading it.

  “Okay, kids. This is it.”

  Iris suddenly said, “Thanks so much, Jake. You’ve been wonderful.”

  He grinned. “Think nothing o
f it. Got to help your pals, haven’t you? Nothing to it anyway. Just a spot of simplification.”

  He moved to Marietta and watched her with flagrantly masculine interest. A faint smile played around his lips. He put his big hands on her shoulders and kissed her full on the mouth.

  “Sorry about this, baby. You don’t mind having me walk out on you? Peter can drive you home, can’t he?”

  Marietta’s green eyes watched him. “Yes, Jake, Peter can drive me home.”

  That had me staggered. I had been certain this was the moment he had chosen to drop his role of disinterested pal and come out in his true colors, whatever they were. But here he was walking out of our lives. And even bequeathing me Marietta too.

  He shook my hand. He shook Iris’s hand. He slapped Martin on the back.

  “Well, kids, take care of yourselves.”

  He waved and strolled away towards the inner bar. As he disappeared, he started to whistle softly under his breath.

  The tune he was whistling was “I’ll Be Seeing You”.

  I was sure then that we would be seeing him—soon.

  That was when the trouble would begin.

  Fifteen

  I drove Marietta home. She was abstracted, almost unfriendly. As soon as we reached Mexico City, she left me. She got out of the car by the Caballito and walked away, slim and straight, through the clear sunlight toward the Arch of the Revolution. That night Iris telephoned and told me that Martin had moved into the apartment of a friend who was out of town. She had taken a room at the Guardiola. At least they had enough sense for that.

  After the phone call, all three of them slipped out of my life as suddenly and completely as Jake and Sally Haven.

  I read in the paper that Martin and Marietta had attended Sally’s funeral in Taxco. It was a small, uninterested paragraph. That was all. If my memory of Jake had not been so vivid, I could have pretended that the whole Sally episode was over.

  I expected Marietta to call, but she didn’t. Something, pride maybe, kept me from calling her. Then after a couple of days of loneliness I telephoned her number to be told that she didn’t live there any more. They didn’t know where she was.

  I picked up Martin’s novel in a little bookstore on Hildago. Apart from Iris’s unqualified superlatives, I had been told nothing about it. I started to read it skeptically, but after the first few pages I was absorbed. Martin’s talent was authentic.

  The story was simple. It was about a brother and sister growing up in an English country house. They lived in a world of their own, bound together by a love that was inarticulate but poignantly constant. They thought life would go on forever the same, with the wonder of catching black and yellow newts in the cress-filled ponds, the perilous climbing of elm trees after rooks’ eggs, the greedy scramble for blackberries on the dusty August lanes. Then, gradually, they began to find out that nothing lasts. They grew a little older and became adolescently awkward with each other. They tried to make things stay the way that they had been. But they were inevitably defeated. The boy was finally sent off to public school, and the book ended heartbreakingly with his return for the summer holidays. He brought with him a new school friend whom he worshiped. They shared the same bedroom. They were inseparable. He was lost in a new love and the girl was forgotten.

  It was obviously a picture of Martin and Marietta. Even the cowslip hill was there, the hawthorn staffs, the nightgowns, the pilgrims. It was written with a gentle tenderness that gave me a new respect for Martin. But mostly I was haunted by the portrait of Marietta as the little girl with the green, green eyes, the flying dark pigtails, the dirty knees, and the great, tragic love in her heart.

  After I had read the book, she was seldom out of my mind. I started to frequent the bars we used to patronize. I never saw her. Gradually she became almost an obsession. I would think I saw her dark head in the blue light that bathed the dancing couples at Ciro’s. When the peeling swing doors of the Cantina Delta were pushed open, I turned to look, sure it would be she. But it wasn’t.

  The thought grew insidiously that she was with Jake, that they had made some secret arrangement, that they were together in Acapulco. I had visions of them on some lonely silver beach at Los Hornos, Jake big as an ox in swimming trunks, Marietta’s clean, firm body giving itself voluptuously to the sun.

  One evening Iris called. Her voice sounded constrained, awkward.

  “Hello, Peter.”

  “Hello.”

  There was a silence. I said, “How’s Martin coming along with the lawyer?”

  “Everything seems to be going swimmingly. The will’s very uncomplicated. Everything to Martin. The lawyer says it’s just a question of getting it probated or something.”

  “Fine.”

  “Sally was an orphan, you know. There aren’t any near relatives to contest.”

  “Finer.” I asked,” Has it ever occurred to Martin to refuse the money?”

  “Why on earth should he do that?”

  “Under the circumstances, do you imagine Sally would have wanted him to have it?”

  “Really, Peter, that’s awfully rarefied, isn’t it? After all, he put up with her all those years. You can’t expect him to let the money go to waste. Someone has to have it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She seemed genuinely puzzled, and I might have expected it. Ethical niceties don’t mean much to the feminine mind. Particularly not to the feminine mind in love. Probably she had already managed to convince herself that there had been nothing out of the ordinary about Sally’s death.

  I had guessed what she was having such difficulty in trying to say. I helped her. “With the money coming through soon, I guess you’ll be thinking about marriage. Want me to get the divorce wheels working?”

  “Peter, it’s awful, but would you? That’s what I called about. Do you mind terribly?”

  A few weeks ago I had minded terribly. Did I care now?

  “You can put all the blame on me.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll find out what to do tomorrow.”

  “I’m awfully sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  The silence came again, but she still stayed on the wire.

  I said, “And how’s Martin?”

  “Oh, he’s fine.” She added rather quickly,” Of course, I don’t see a great deal of him. He thinks it’s wiser that way right now.”

  “And Marietta?”

  “Marietta? Don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “She’s living with Martin.”

  “She is?”

  “Yes, the apartment’s big enough for two. She moved in last week.”

  I had been imagining Marietta with Jake. I saw now how shoddy a thought it had been. I should have known it was Martin. A blight seemed to descend. Absurdly, I found myself wishing that I had been right, that it had been Jake.

  “Yes,” said Iris,” she’s being perfectly wonderful. She cooks for him, does everything.”

  “She does?”

  “She even helps with the new book. Every night they’re together, talking about—about old times, remembering things from the past, the governess from Scotland with the elastic-sided boots, whether it was apricot jam or strawberry jam they liked best with their muffins, whether it was five or six eggs in the double-breasted lapwings’ nest back of the third gardener’s cottage.” She laughed. “So English. So veddy, veddy English.”

  I wished she hadn’t laughed. It hurts to have someone you’ve loved very much giving herself away like that.

  Pity for her rose in me almost like physical desire. I wanted to say something to comfort her, to assure her, uselessly, that you didn’t get jealous of a man’s sister.

  “All the time,” she said into the phone. “She never leaves him. That’s why I see him so seldom. All the time they’re together there in the apartment—remembering.”

  Later, the Mexicana telephone rang again. I hurried to answer it, knowing it wouldn’t
be Marietta but hoping. A familiar, bantering male voice said, “Hi, Peter. Guess who this is.”

  “Hello, Jake,” I said with a sinking heart.

  “How’s tricks with you, Peter?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just back from Acapulco yesterday. Boy, what a place, Acapulco. Boy, what a tan I got. Yeah. I intend to throw a little party to show it off. Got quite a fancy suite at the Reforma. How’s about coming over?”

  “It’s late,” I said.

  A cluck sounded over the wire. “Hey, Peter, what’s got into you? Who ever heard of not going to a party because it’s late?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “That’s more like it. How’s about the others—Marietta, Iris, the widower? This has got to be a real reunion.”

  I said, “I don’t know where Martin and Marietta are, but Iris is at the Guardiola.”

  “She knows where the others are at?”

  “I guess so. Want me to call Iris?”

  He laughed. “No, sir. I think they’d kind of appreciate it more if the old maestro called himself. Okay, Peter. Hop a taxi. Suite two seventeen.”

  “Right away?”

  “Sure. The whisky’s itching.”

  My car was parked outside. I drove up the stately night quietness of Insurgentes, turned into the Paseo de la Reforma, and parked outside the Reforma Hotel. I had a pretty good idea what was coming.

  Sixteen

  Jake’s suite was indeed fancy. I wondered how much it set him back per day. I found him alone, in his shirt sleeves. He was fiddling around a dumb-waiter loaded with glasses and ice and whisky. His big forearms, thrusting out from the rolled sleeves, were red-brown from the sun.

  He swung round, grinning at me cheerfully. He came over and banged me on the shoulder.

  “Hiyah, Peter, old horse.”

  The red hair was even more closely cropped. His blue eyes watched me, bland, friendly.

  “Get a load of the tan.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He yanked his shirt out of his trousers and pulled it up, revealing a broad expanse of brown chest and stomach.