Puzzle for Pilgrims

by Patrick Quentin

  “One thing, baby. The hotel bill’s waiting at the desk. While I tuck my shirt in, how’s about running downstairs and taking care of it? Do that little thing, will you?”

  Seventeen

  Jake drove off with Martin and Marietta in Martin’s car. Iris and I were left standing on the curb outside the massive splendors of the Hotel Reforma. There was a mountain chilliness in the air, and the Paseo was forlorn and empty. The faint moan of accordion music drifted out from Tony’s Bar, where the tourists were still beating it up. At some distance up the Paseo, red neon lights glistened out the name of Mexico’s reigning movie star: “Maria Felix.”

  “Give you a ride back to the hotel, Iris?”

  “Thank you.”

  We went to my parked car. As I started it, she moved away from me close to her door. There was no physical contact between us. She was wearing an unfamiliar perfume, something light and summery, that Martin probably liked. It made her seem even more alien. The street lights, passing by, brought her face and her dark hair gleaming in and out of sight. Her profile was lovely, but there was a new fragility to it, the fragility of worked ivory. She looked more mature and much more unhappy. Not like my wife. That’s what a couple of months of Haven had done to her.

  I said, “This isn’t the sort of evening when you go home for a good night’s rest. How about a drink at my place?”

  “I was going to ask you,” she said.

  I parked in the Calle Londres, took her past the hanging bougainvillea vine and up the iron stairs to the apartment. I let her in and turned on the light. It was the first time she had been there since the day she had left. It was curious watching her move into the living room and drop her fur wrap onto a chair, half a home-coming, half a visit from an inhabitant of Mars.

  “Find a seat,” I said. “I’ll get drinks.”

  I went into the bedroom and found rum, Coca-Cola, and limes. I made Cuba libres. Iris liked them. I put them on a tin tray and carried them into the living room.

  Iris had sat down on the Porfirio Diaz couch.

  I put the tray on a massively carved coffee table and sat down next to her. She picked up a glass.

  “Cubas,” she said.

  “Yes.” I felt suddenly embarrassed that she would think I was using the familiar drinks in a sentimental attempt to revive the past.

  “Martin hates Cubas,” she said. “He says the Devil is American and invented everything that ends with Cola.”

  “He probably did.”

  She turned to me quickly. “Peter, what can we do?”

  “When you’re playing poker, can you beat four aces with two pairs?” She shivered. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  I said, “If you’re planning to make a career out of Martin, you’d better get used to things being bad.”

  She put her drink down and her hair tumbled forward over her cheek. I’d seen it do that a thousand times. I had always loved it. Now it gave me a pang.

  She looked up at me. “You do think Sally was murdered?”

  “I know Sally was murdered. I always have. So have you.”

  She didn’t answer.

  I said, “She even hired a detective to protect her. Sally was mean with money. She’d never have done that unless she was genuinely afraid. She threw a scene at my place, saying either you or Martin or Marietta was going to murder her. I laughed it off. I thought she was playing to the gallery. I guess she wasn’t.”

  Iris sank back on the couch.

  I said, “I’ve asked it once before, Iris. I’m going to ask it again. Did you kill her?”

  She was almost calm. Her golden-brown eyes, so unlike Marietta’s green ones, were steady.

  “Why should I have killed her? She telephoned to tell me that she was willing to divorce Martin, that everything would be all right.”

  “She called me too,” I said. “Everything would have panned out without her being murdered.”

  “If Sally hadn’t been lying,” she said bitterly. “Sally was always lying, dangling things and snatching them away. The truth wasn’t in her.”

  I watched her over my burning cigarette. “And the truth’s in you?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “You haven’t told me the truth yet. For example, you knew Sally was dead down in the stream bed long before Jake found her, didn’t you?”

  It is curious how many different silences there are. This one was dangerous, the silence before an explosion.

  She said, “I’ve been trying to think of you as an enemy. I can’t quite do it.”

  “Then?”

  “It’s all right to tell you the truth, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll make you write a check for fifty thousand dollars.”

  She smiled, fleetingly. It was an unexpected time for a smile, and I realized it could only have happened because we were man and wife, because we knew each other so well and hadn’t quite got used to the habit of acting in front of each other the way strangers are supposed to act.

  The silence came again. It seemed even more delicately balanced.

  “So?” I said. “The truth?”

  “I did know she was dead. When I came in, I looked everywhere for her. I went out onto the balcony. I saw her—lying down there in the stream bed.”

  “I thought so.”

  She said passionately,” I knew she was dead, Peter. You could see by looking at her. I knew there was nothing I could do.”

  “I know.”

  “The music was coming up from the Zocalo. They were playing ‘Begin the Beguine’. Somehow that made it so awful. Music, worn-out juke-box music, the moon, the fights, the Star of Bethlehem, Taxco—and Sally lying there.”

  She picked up her drink, looking at her own fingers curling around the glass. “But it wasn’t the way you saw it, Peter,” she whispered. “It was different.”

  “Different?”

  “The balustrade.” She looked up, her eyes shadowed with fear. “It wasn’t broken.”

  I didn’t speak.

  She went on,” When I saw her, I—I put my hand on the high balustrade to steady myself. It cracked. I could tell how rotten it was. And suddenly I realized that if… if there’d been an accident… that she couldn’t have fallen over the balustrade, not possibly.” Her voice was low, pinched. “I realized that she must have been thrown over.”

  “So you broke the balustrade to make it look like an accident?”

  “Yes, Peter.”

  “Why? Because you knew Martin had been there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “The ring.”

  “Where was it?”

  “On the balcony. Right there. I saw it gleaming. I knew he’d had it with him that morning in Acapulco. I knew he had to have been there.”

  “Why didn’t you destroy the letter in the typewriter, see the slipper, the overturned vase?”

  “I didn’t notice them. I was half sick with fear. I broke the balustrade, sent it falling down. I picked up the ring. I didn’t notice anything else. I thought I was going to faint. I went to the living room. I sat down. And then, almost at once, you were there.”

  “Poor kid.”

  “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “I want to believe you so I believe you.”

  She got up. Her black evening gown, cut low over her breasts, rustled like a flurry of dead eucalyptus leaves in the patio outside.

  “Martin didn’t do it,” she said quietly. “You can’t live with a man, see him night and day, and not know a thing like that about him.”

  “You can’t?”

  She turned. Her face was obsessed. “He did go to Sally. He told me. But he didn’t drop the ring. It was a present from her to him when they were married. She asked for it back. That’s why it was there.”

  “On the balcony floor?”

  “There wasn’t a scene, Peter. She was pleasant. She said she was sorry for all the fuss she caused. She said she’d give him the divor
ce and go back to the States.”

  “And when he left and you arrived, she was dead.”

  She flared,” Marietta was there, too.”

  “Earlier.”

  “She could have come back. Anyone could have come. The servants weren’t there.”

  “If Marietta wanted to murder her, why didn’t she murder her the first time? Why should she leave and let Martin come and return?”

  “Where was she, then, all that time when Jake was waiting for her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She tossed back her hair. “You want to believe Martin did it, don’t you?”

  “I do?”

  We stood close together, glaring at each other, antagonistic. The white skin of her throat was working. I felt angry too. The dreadful sterility of it all swept over me. The two of us, who had loved each other so much, hating each other. Why? Because of other people, other people’s lives and lusts.

  Slowly the anger went out of Iris’s face.

  “Peter, what’s the matter with us? What the hell’s the matter with us? Is it Mexico?”

  “The altitude?”

  “I don’t know. It could be.”

  “You don’t fall in love with someone because they’re eight thousand feet above sea level.”

  “Then—what is it?”

  “Did Martin tell you about his favorite song when he was a kid?”

  “No.” The flicker of anxiety that always came when she felt she’d been left out of something that belonged to Martin showed in her eyes. “No, Peter.”

  “It’s a hymn. Used to sing it myself. It goes:

  He who would valiant be

  ’Gainst all disaster

  Let him in constancy

  Follow the Master.

  There’s no discouragement

  Shall make him once relent

  His first avowed intent

  To be a pilgrim.”

  She watched me curiously. “And so?”

  “That’s the trouble. We’re all of us pilgrims, knocking each other down, stamping on each other’s faces, acting like sons of bitches just so we can get to the top of our own little hills. Sally got in the way of one of us. So…”

  “God knows what we get at the top of the hill, Peter.”

  “God knows.”

  Iris sat down on the couch again. “We certainly louse things up, don’t we?”

  “We louse them up.”

  I sat down next to her. The silence was different now, an exhausted silence, as if all the emotion in the world had been used up.

  She turned to me, her lips half parted in a way that made her look curiously naive.

  “I love Martin very much, Peter. It wouldn’t change the way I feel—whatever he’d done.”

  “I know that.”

  “Peter?”

  “Yes.”

  “If Marietta had killed Sally, would you…?”

  “Iris, let’s not talk about Marietta.”

  She shivered. “My love for Martin, it’s—not a pretty love. It’s physical, but it’s never been physical. We never…”

  “I know.”

  “Sometimes, when I feel shutout, when he goes off into the past, it hurts so that I almost hate him.”

  “Sometimes I love you, sometimes I hate you.”

  “Yes. I know. It’s shoddy. But love’s shoddy.”

  “Was our love shoddy?”

  “I suppose so.” She added suddenly,” No, it wasn’t. Was it, Peter?”

  I looked at her. I didn’t just see the desirable mouth, the warm ivory of her skin, the curve of her bare arm, I saw all the things we’d done and said and thought and felt together.

  “I didn’t think so,” I said.

  This was another kind of silence, reminiscent, rather sad, trembling on the verge of something which neither of us quite wanted.

  Iris broke it. She shrugged her smooth white shoulders bleakly. “Then there’s nothing we can do—about Jake?”

  “Nothing at the moment, except pay the fifty thousand dollars.”

  “And pay on, on, on?”

  “That’s for you and Martin to worry about. I’ll be out of it.”

  She looked at me quickly. “No, you won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of Marietta. You’re in love with Marietta. And she’s as much in this as Martin.”

  I don’t know why that took me off my guard, but it did. And by bringing Marietta into my mind, Iris had dispelled the intimacy. We were just two people again, two people hopelessly tied to two other people, with the shadow of murder hanging over us all.

  Iris rose and reached for her wrap.

  “Time I went back to that dreary hotel.”

  I got up too. “You don’t have to leave, you know.”

  She turned, the coat dangling from her hand. “I don’t?”

  “There’s no law against a wife sleeping in her husband’s apartment.”

  Her face lightened. “I’d love to stay, Peter. At the hotel I’d feel shipwrecked. On a raft.” She laughed. It was a sudden, spontaneous laugh, and I realized I hadn’t heard her laugh since we were in Mexico. “But there’s a practically insurmountable problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “I haven’t got a toothbrush.”

  “Yes you have,” I said. “You left one in the bathroom. A pink one.”

  “Oh, that divine pink one. I bought it at Liggett’s.”

  “Walgreen’s.”

  “Liggett’s.” Iris dropped the wrap again.

  I said, “About the divorce.”

  She swung round. “What about it?”

  “Shall I still get things started tomorrow?”

  She looked nonplused, a little dazed. “I—well, maybe we should wait, just a while, wait to see what happens with Jake. You never know. It might not…”

  “No,” I said, “it might not. Then I’ll hold my horses?”

  “I think you’d better.” She moved to me and stood close to me. “Peter, you’ve been so good.”

  “Sure.”

  She watched me appraisingly. “You look fine. Handsomer every day. What are you thriving on? Love?”

  “Disaster,” I said.

  “Goodnight, Peter.” She reached up and kissed me on the mouth, a light, cool kiss. I felt an impulse to pull her to me and make it a real kiss, but I resisted. The kiss stayed cool.

  “Goodnight, Iris. Remember where everything is? The bathroom, et cetera?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “When do you want to get up in the morning?”

  “Oh, any time. Whenever you do.”

  “Goodnight, Iris.”

  “Goodnight.” She took the bedroom. Twenty minutes later, as I lay, worn-out and half asleep, on the Profirio Diaz couch, I thought, Marietta slept here, right here.

  I turned over, pressing my face against the musty silk brocade.

  I dreamed of Sally.

  Eighteen

  Next morning I drove Iris to the Guardiola to change her clothes. After breakfast we went to Martin and Marietta’s, not for any specific reason, but because we were inevitably drawn there.

  Martin’s apartment was somewhere behind the Bellezas Artes Palace in a district I didn’t know. It was in one of those new, vaguely German, modernistic buildings which are springing up all over Mexico City. The construction could only have been a few months old, but the stucco was already peeling off the walls, and someone had broken a pane in the fancy glass and iron door.

  At the apartment Marietta opened the door to us. She was wearing an apron. I had never thought of her in a domestic role. It didn’t go with her. It wasn’t believable.

  She greeted us casually. She was in one of her abstracted moods which were so exasperating for me because they made her as inaccessible as the peak of Popocatepetl. She seemed perfectly serene, almost bored.

  “Come in. Jake’s in bed. Martin’s out.”

  She led us into the little living room. It was shoddy enough, a few w
ispy geraniums on the broad window sill, some cheap modern Mexican tape chairs and a red and white striped studio couch. The sheets, resting on it in a neatly folded pile, showed that Marietta, the inveterate couch-sleeper, had spent the night there.

  A little kitchen stretched to the left. In the rear wall was a door which led presumably to the bedroom.

  Marietta said, “I’d better look at the coffee,” and went into the kitchen.

  Jake’s voice sounded boomingly from the bedroom. “Do I hear visitors? Come on in and say good morning to Jake.”

  The sleazy intimacy of it all was horrible, Marietta in an apron fixing coffee in the kitchen and Jake’s voice drawling from the bedroom.

  Iris and I went into the bedroom. There was nothing much there except a chest of drawers, a built-in closet, and the bed, large and low with a yellow tufted spread.

  Jake, bare to the waist, was lounging in the bed, propped against the pillows. A breakfast tray was balanced on his lap. He was smoking a cigarette, dragging at it with his big arm crooked at the elbow. He stretched voluptuously, making the tray wobble, and grinned at us.

  “Hey, Iris. Hey, Peter. This is the life. Wonderful little cook, Marietta.”

  We didn’t say anything.

  “Happen to have a morning newspaper, Pete?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Feel like running out to the corner and getting me one?”

  “No,” I said.

  He looked reproving. “Now, now, temper.”

  Iris said, “Where’s Martin?”

  “Martin?” The blue eyes fixed her face. “Never sleep with that guy. He hogs the sheets. I sent him out to see the lawyer. Gotta pester lawyers or they never come out from under their cobwebs.”

  He twisted around, humping the bedclothes with his hip and yelled, “Hey, Marietta, how’s that second cup of coffee coming along?”

  Marietta appeared with a cup of coffee. She took the dirty cup off the tray and put the fresh one down.

  Jake clamped his brown fingers around her wrist and grinned up at her. “Hey, what about cream? You know I take cream in my coffee, beautiful.” Marietta pulled her arm away. She went out and came back with a pitcher of cream. She put it on the tray. She looked at him with a long, steady, green look.