“It was to be expected,” I returned. “But such things have happened no doubt before in your experience. They might, however, have left a word for you. That certainly was not polite.”
“They!” he cried. “They!” and with a quite unintelligible relief. “Then, Mr. Peacham, you are in the secret. You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
He sat down and clasped his little hands upon his little paunch, the image of a man who has just had a troublesome big back tooth drawn.
“My dear Mr. Landau,” said I, “I think you must be the only person in Marazan who is out of the secret. Why, Margarita Sabani and Ignacio Reyes — they are the great romance of the town. They have gone. Well, let us remember we were once young too, and not look for them.”
Charles Landau did not move. But all the colour ebbed out of his face. It became a grey mask with a pair of eyes — in which horror glistened.
“Ignacio Reyes is now scouring Marazan for her. He has not spoken to her to-night. He has not seen her except upon the stage.”
“But I saw him! He was standing at the iron door which leads on to the stage.”
“Margarita had disappeared then.”
“Disappeared? There wasn’t time for her to disappear.”
“Yes.”
But it was impossible! A minute before she had been upon the stage decked out in the Court dress of a youth of the eighteenth century, buckles and ruffles and gold-embroidered coat, and she had vanished.
“No,” said I violently. “I was born in Missouri. You must show me.”
And Charles Landau showed me.
Margarita Sabani, in running off the stage, had found her dresser waiting in the wings with a light wrap of silver tissue. She had flung this over her shoulders and walked quickly to the opening at the back of the stage. In front of her was a short passage leading to a couple of swing doors beyond which were a tiny vestibule, the stage-door-keeper’s hutch and the stage-door itself which gave on to a narrow street. On her right was the corridor leading to her dressing-room. At the angle of these passages and just as she was turning into the corridor she was stopped by the stage-door-keeper. He told her that Ignacio was at the stage-door and urgently wanted a word with her. She had seen Ignacio leave his box a moment or two before. She was certainly excited and indeed overcome by the enthusiasm of the audience. She could have expected no harm. So instead of going to her dressing-room she ran down the passage and between the swing doors.
The stage-door-keeper, a man named Garcia Pardo, crossed the stage to deliver a note to one of the company whose dressing-room was upon that side. When the door-keeper returned to his own place he found Margarita’s dresser at the angle of the passages. She asked him where Madame Sabani was, since she had certainly not come to her dressing-room. Garcia Pardo replied:
“She went down through the swing doors. I’ll find her.”
He pushed open the swing doors and went through. The small vestibule was empty. He looked out of the stage-door. The street was empty, too, except for a sergeant of police. In a few minutes it would no doubt be occupied by autograph-hunters and such people as find a diversion in seeing their stage-favourites at close quarters. But they were still struggling out from the exits of the auditorium. Garcia Pardo crossed to the sergeant of police, described Margarita and asked whether he had seen her.
“I have seen nobody,” the sergeant replied.
Garcia Pardo returned to the theatre and, according to his statement, was surprised to find Ignacio Reyes standing with Margarita’s dresser at the angle of the passages. He had only a moment ago been admitted past the iron door in the proscenium wall.
“I never went round to the stage-door at all. You can’t have seen me there,” he cried to the door-keeper.
Pardo admitted that he had not seen Ignacio himself.
“A man whom I took to be a messenger of yours, Senor, came to me with word that you wished to see the senora at the stage-door the moment she left the stage.”
During the last few moments alarm had been growing. It was now intense. The stage-manager and Charles Landau were sent for, the dressing-rooms were visited, the theatre searched. There was nowhere a sign of the girl, not even a shred from the silver tissue of her cloak.
“Margarita,” Charles Landau concluded in a despairing voice, “ran off the stage and out of the world.”
Frankly I was appalled. I didn’t believe one word of Garcia Pardo’s story and I knew this town of Marazan and its froth of bad people, thieves, gamblers, white-slavers and murderers.
“Ignacio Reyes says that his father has done it.”
“Exactly,” I answered.
That was my thought all along. The old man bellowing in his finca that he would see his son dead first, wouldn’t stop at bellowing — not he. Herriberto Reyes was rich, he was powerful, and he wouldn’t find the authorities squeamish if he wanted their help. He had had their help. Else how was it that the police sergeant had seen nobody? And what was he doing keeping watch in a little empty street, anyway?
I rose to my feet.
“Just wait here, Mr. Landau, until I have dressed myself decently. Then we’ll go and wake up the Comandante. We may still be in time.”
But the little man stopped me.
“You can’t appear in this case officially, Consul. To attempt it would only mean trouble for you and very probably much humiliation. Margarita Sabani is not a citizen of the United States. She has nothing to do with the United States. She belongs to this country we are in — Ensenada. Her real name is Pilar de Hoyos.”
I stood stupidly in front of Charles Landau, swaying, I think, a little on my feet, like a boxer in a ring who has received a blow which has jarred his wits out of him.
“Daughter of Anton de Hoyos?” I asked.
“Of Los Angeles,” he returned.
“And Ignacio knew it?”
“No doubt!”
“And no doubt told his father.”
Landau didn’t answer, but it was certain. The De Hoyos blood was good Spanish blood like the Reyes. Ignacio was certain to have made the most of it to his father. And there, you see, was the dreadful business at last made clear. The rich Herriberto Reyes accommodated and the refugee Anton de Hoyos, the man with the black blot against his name, punished as no man was ever punished in this world. For the girl, young, lovely, adorably happy, snatched away at the moment of triumph into unspeakable horrors — not a thought! She was a pawn upon the chess-board. She didn’t count.
The same shocking conviction had taken possession of the little Jewish impresario, too shocking for either of us to put into words. He sat and cried without shame, reproaching himself bitterly for crossing the border into Ensenada.
“Perhaps Ignacio has found her,” I said, but I didn’t believe it. Neither did Charles Landau.
“He promised to bring her here if he found her. He thought that you would somehow manage to shelter her,” he said miserably.
He looked up at the clock upon the mantelshelf. “It is after four o’clock now. There is nothing to be done.”
He got up on to his feet with a lamentable little gesture of submission. But I wasn’t prepared to submit. A girl kidnapped in the middle of a town to satisfy an old man’s pride of race and a Government’s thirst for revenge — no! Such things mustn’t be, couldn’t be, shouldn’t be.
“Wait a moment,” I said.
I walked up and down the room and at last I got some glimpses of an expedient.
“I can interfere,” I said. “The Cherubino dress belongs to you, doesn’t it? It’s your property. I can raise the whole question of Pilar de Hoyos’ disappearance by means of that dress. Yes, I can.”
“But not to-night,” said Charles Landau; and that was true.
But I couldn’t even raise it the next morning. For before ten o’clock the complete costume, neatly folded and packed, was delivered at the stage-door of the Opera House. Can you imagine anything more damnably, cruelly subtle than that? Anton de Hoyos
was to know exactly what had happened. Pilar had now no clothes at all and there is only one sort of house where women don’t need clothes.
Meanwhile Ignacio Reyes also had disappeared.
But four nights afterwards, at nine o’clock, I heard a cautious knocking upon the window of my library. I went at once to the door. Ignacio Reyes was on the step and another, a shorter and older man, stood behind him.
“Good God!” I exclaimed in a whisper. “Come in quickly.”
The smaller man was Anton de Hoyos. I locked the door and took them into the library. Both men were haggard and unshaved, their clothes dishevelled and white with dust, their eyes red for want of sleep.
“You here!” I said to Anton, in consternation. “You are mad.”
Anton waved my reproach aside. It wasn’t worth an answer. And the last time I had seen this man he was shivering in terror under his bedclothes! Ignacio began to speak at once. I had only once seen him before and never had had a word with him. But he spoke as if we had parted company half an hour ago.
“We know where Margarita is now,” he said. His voice was hoarse, his throat dry with the dust of his journey. I mixed him a highball and he threw back his head and took it down at a draught. Then he resumed in quick staccato sentences.
“I had no money, you see. I tried to borrow it that night. But everybody was afraid of my father. Our only chance was money. So I crossed the border before morning. Before I could be stopped. I had just enough money to carry me to Los Angeles.”
“I collected six thousand dollars the evening he arrived,” Anton interrupted. “I have five thousand still.”
“Five thousand American dollars,” Ignacio insisted. “They should be enough. For we have all the facts now. I left some friends behind to make inquiries. One man saw all that happened from a dark window opposite the stage-door but was afraid to open his mouth until to-night.”
“But your dollars persuaded him,” I said to Anton.
“Five hundred of them,” he explained.
“This man,” Ignacio resumed, “saw a closed motor-car without any lights turn into the street and stop just beyond the stage-door. The sergeant of police was standing on the opposite side of the road and took no notice. The stage-door-keeper was in the doorway and seemed to be on the lookout. Two men, neither of them in a uniform, got out of the car and one spoke to the door-keeper, who at once went back into the theatre. The two men left the door of the car open and planted themselves erect against the wall one on each side of the door, making themselves small. In a few minutes, a boy with a glittering cloak loose upon his shoulders ran out eagerly and looked disappointedly up the street. The two men sprang upon him from behind and the boy screamed like a woman — screamed once. For one of the men gagged him and bound his arms to his side, whilst the other stooped and tied his feet. The boy was flung into the car, the two men jumped in afterwards, and the car whipped out of the street in a flash. The police sergeant all this while had never moved. He was there, of course, to see fair play,” said Ignacio, with the most mirthless smile that ever distorted a face. “The boy was Margarita.”
“But the man who saw the attack couldn’t have followed the car,” I objected.
“No. Someone else saw the car stop, saw someone or something carried quickly into a house.”
Ignacio named the street, a sordid little alley in the worst quarter of the town, and gave the number of the house, the notorious number which all over the world explains the business carried on behind the door. Then he sprang up.
“We are going now with our money to the Comandante.”
Anton de Hoyos got up at the same time and reached for his hat.
“You too!” I exclaimed.
“Yes.”
One look at his face showed the futility of any argument.
“Very well, then. I too,” said I. “I can at all events ensure that you will see the Comandante.”
The Comandante, however, showed not the slightest reluctance to receive us. We were taken into his office and within a few minutes he joined us, a big dark man with a heavy black moustache and quite charming manners.
“Senor Consul,” he said, shaking me by the hand; “and Senor Ignacio, and — you have, I see, a friend with you.
“Anton de Hoyos,” Anton himself said quietly.
The Comandante blinked. But in a moment he had recovered all his ease.
“There was a time, Senor, when you did not altogether approve of us. But that was all long ago,” he said with a friendly wave of the hand. He bade us be seated and asked how he could serve us. I admired Ignacio immensely that night. He neither mentioned himself, nor his father, nor the witness at the dark window, nor the sergeant of police. He stated the fact of Pilar de Hoyos’ disappearance and the address at which she was detained, and blamed no one but the rabble which a town like Marazan invites.
The Comandante listened with a grave and troubled face. At the end he said, “I will give an order,” and he left the room abruptly. When he returned he said:
“This is a very abominable affair and it will be best for all of us, except Senor Peacham, who is in no way concerned, and for the young lady, that as little scandal as possible should be provoked. The order I gave was that the house should be quietly surrounded and no one allowed to leave or enter it. I shall see to that myself, and as soon as I am sure that every outlet is guarded, I will call for you two gentlemen at your hotel” — this, of course, to Ignacio and Anton— “and we will search the place together.”
Ignacio leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed, and all the fatigue of the last four days took him into its possession. He who had told his dreadful story with the dispassion of a lawyer could now only falter out a few poorest words of thanks. Anton de Hoyos drew out his money-case. The big sheaf of yellow-back notes bulged from it.
“There will be expenses, Senor Coronel,” he began, and the Comandante stopped him there.
“No, no, my friend, there will be no expenses. Put up that roll, and in half an hour at your hotel.”
He conducted the two men to the door and as they went off turned anxiously to me.
“Senor Consul, such an affair could only happen, as Ignacio says, in a town like this where the rogues of all nations run for cover. I beg you not to blame us all.”
I protested that I blamed no one. The Comandante shook me by the hand with an air of great relief and I left him to his preparations. I could do nothing more. I went back to my house — but I was a trifle uneasy. I didn’t understand the Comandante refusing all that money. It didn’t seem natural to me...
Ignacio and Anton never reached their hotel. They were intercepted by a Captain and a guard of soldiers, conducted to the barracks, stripped of everything but their clothes and hustled into a cell. At half-past twelve the Captain fetched them out. He had an order, he said, to transfer them to the little town of Cristobal forty miles away over the mountains. They were to start at once, without food and without blankets. There would be no need for either, you see. For this time the Law of Flight would function. They were taken in a carriage to the outskirts of the town and thence made to march. It was bitterly cold and as soon as morning broke the Captain halted them in the midst of a desolate country. It was the very spot to justify the Ley Fuga, for parallel with the road on which they were and only three hundred yards away ran the road on the other side of the frontier. Who wouldn’t take a chance?
Ignacio did the moment the escort stopped, and was shot dead through the back before he had run twenty yards. Anton for his part did not move. He had no wish to live, but as the Captain’s pistol swung round on him he turned sideways to the shot instinctively. The bullet tore through his clothes and ploughed the surface of his chest, stunning rather than wounding him. He fell to the ground and the Captain, stepping up to his feet fired again, this time at his head. But Anton’s head was tilted back and again the bullet glanced, covering his face with a mask of blood but doing him no mortal hurt. When he came again to his sen
ses the sun was up. He crawled painfully and slowly to the other road. He was just in time. For as he collapsed at the side of it he saw a fatigue party with spades approaching along the lower road from Marazan.
V
This is the story which George Peacham told me on the Magdalena River. I disembarked at Calamar and going by train to Cartagena, took a passage on one of the Fruit Steamers to New York. A year later business took me to Los Angeles and I met Anton de Hoyos. A deep scar ran straight up his forehead from just above the eyebrow and made a furrow in his thick white upstanding hair. He was still conducting his printing business and making quite a success of it. But he was a secret, broken man, very difficult to talk to, and his eyes seemed to brood always upon an irreparable horror.
THE KEY
MATTIE DRIVER SAT on a bench under the palmetto trees of Alicante fingering a solitary peseta in one of his pockets. It is a common saying that no one can really starve in Spain, but Mattie had an uncomfortable suspicion that unless he could rub his one peseta into two and then those two into four, he was shortly going to disprove that saying. It was such a wonderful morning too. It was an affront to the simple sybaritism of Mattie Driver that he should be uncomfortable on such a morning. The month was June. The sunlight sparkled on the sapphire of the Mediterranean and made the stone pavements a blaze of gold; under the palmetto trees it was cool and pleasant; and on the landward side of this avenue, that very good Club and those very good restaurants deployed their invitations. It would have been so pleasant to have eaten his breakfast in one of them, and thereafter to have helped the sun down the sky with discourse to each new-comer of the stirring and calamitous events which had hurled him out of Morocco and flung him up like a string of seaweed on the beach at Alicante. But Mattie Driver had just one peseta in his pocket, and no amount of turning and returning would make it into two. Another miracle, however, happened.
A voice spoke behind his back.
“Hombre!”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 821