Jeopardy Is My Job
Page 3
It was reasonable enough up to that point, but when I didn’t answer Paco said, “That is this time. This time it is words. But the next time I will not use words.”
I watched him leave, all two-hundred and fifty pounds of him. A gorgeous dish who was contemptuous of her parents and called it pity, a couple of English-speaking bullfighters, a threat as thinly veiled as a belly-dancer’s navel, I thought, mulling it all over, and not a clue as to the whereabouts of Robbie Hartshorn. Unless the cave that had Paco all hot and bothered was a clue.
I decided to find the cave.
chapter three
The only kind of secrets you can keep in a small Spanish town are the kind you take to the grave.
By the time it got dark, which was an hour after I left the iron bull ring, and by dint of visiting two bodegas and drinking white wine and eating grilled sardines fresh from the sea and heaps of clams no bigger than my thumbnail, I knew most of what there was to know about the Fuentes brothers and their cave. Most, not all. That is the trouble with a town that seems to hold no secrets. It is the one it does hold, or has no knowledge about, that can get you killed.
In the first bodega, an old monosabio—or wise monkey—who had dreams of wearing a suit of lights in Madrid and wound up raking the sand in the provincial bull rings and opening the gate and scurrying behind the barrier when the bull came thundering out, told me, “The cave of Fuentes? But of course, señor. All the world in Fuengirola knows the cave of Fuentes. One walks up the caretera three kilometers in the direction of Torremolinos. Then one takes the dirt track into the hills perhaps a kilometer more, and there on the left where a cactus as big as a house grows, one sees a burro-trail. Half a kilometer along the burro-trail, and one reaches the cave of Fuentes.”
“The brothers own it?” I said. “What do they do there?”
“They live there, señor.”
“Live there?”
“Claro. It is as I have said.”
In the second bodega, the barman told me, “Si, señor. It is as you have heard. The brothers Fuentes live in a cave not four kilometers from Fuengirola.”
“I thought only gypsies—”
“Gitanos? Sí, but others as well. There is a feeling of the heart here in my land that it is the things of civilization which have brought hardship and poverty to Spain. There was a time, señor, when the rest of Europe did not say Africa begins at the Pyrenees, but they say it now. Many feel this is because we try to copy the ways of Francia and Inglaterra. But living in a cave—oh, yes, that is very Spanish.”
The barman drew another wine from the cask for me. “The father of the Fuentes brothers, who was of an old noble family and a poet as well, but as poor as any gypsy—he died three years ago, señor—had a dream. We would return to caves, he said, we would leave the foolishness of big cars and telephones and ugly structures of steel and glass behind us, and we would think pure thoughts and our land would return to its time of greatness, when the conquistadores explored your land. Don Antonio, for that was his name, wished to gather a cave village of other poets and artists and men who make music, and live with them the simple life.
“But fate struck him down early, a thing of the lungs, señor, and there was just the one cave. Don Antonio raised his sons there, and as his wife was dead he took a gypsy woman to live with him. Her name is Maruja, and it is a joke for all the world to call her Doña Maruja, especially as—now that Don Antonio is dead—his ghost must haunt that cave. For electric lights have been strung, it has been quarried out to make many rooms, there are carpets from Morocco on the floor and running water and a telephone and a phonograph that blares music into the night, frightening the burros on the mountain, and furniture has been brought in to make the caves of Fuentes a very palace.… More wine, señor?”
“And one for you as well.”
“Don Antonio always believed that if we would fight the ways of all that Francia to the north and of Inglaterra on its island in the sea, we must first understand them. So he took upon himself the education of his boys, and as he was a great scholar himself, he taught them French and English also. But still, they were strange wild boys, as in their youth they rarely saw anyone but Don Antonio and the gypsy woman Maruja. And all the world says when they decided on the fiesta brava as a way of life, that was what killed Don Antonio, not the thing of the lungs. But Maruja was pleased, as the fiesta brava meant money. She is still young, Maruja; she was only fifteen when Don Antonio brought her to the cave ten, perhaps eleven years ago. She cried when Ruy Fuentes was trampled by a bull the same year his father died, some say more for the son than the father. Since then she has been seen no more in Fuengirola, though because she sings in the night one still knows she lives in the cave of Fuentes. And, amigo, all the world laughs behind the back of an American woman, the tall dark one who truly has afición, for though she loves Ruy Fuentes, it is clear that if the gitana Maruja so much as crooks her little finger, Ruy will come running—and not as a son to his foster-mother. But then, the gypsies have strange powers.… Another vino bianco, señor?”
How much of what he had said was truth and how much could be explained by the fact that the Spanish are the most voluble people in the world, I didn’t know. When he began to talk of a flamenco dancer who would perform at the bodega later, I asked for my check and paid it after he toted it up in chalk on the surface of the bar.
As I was leaving, Stu Huntington and the blind sculptor Fernando entered the bodega. After the fun and games between their wives last night, I was surprised to see them together. But though the blind man’s face was impassive and his hand rested on Huntington’s forearm out of necessity, his companion’s eyes were stony, his face was red to the hairline of his gray crewcut and his jowls were quivering with anger. They passed me, and there was no flicker of recognition in Huntington’s eyes. I lingered in the batwing doorway. They sat at a table and leaned across it and argued in low tones. The tables on either side were occupied. Eavesdropping is as much a part of a detective’s work as planting his elbows on a bar and listening to a barman who talks a blue streak, but there was no way I could do it here without being obvious. I shrugged and went out.
After I turned left at a prickly-pear cactus that was as big as a house, the burro-trail climbed steeply. On my right the foothills of the Sierra Tecada Mountains rose black against the moonlight. I smelled the smoke of cooking-fires and on the step-like tiers of the hillside saw the red fire-glow at the entrances to gypsy caves. On my left the hill dropped away sharply; far off I could see the white cluster of buildings that was Fuengirola in the moonlight, and the dappled reflection of the moon on the Mediterranean. In one of the caves someone was plucking a guitar and singing. The melody had Africa and the Levant in it, and a thousand years of gypsy wandering. It sang with a strange affectionate sadness of hunger and hardship and death.
The burro-trail was wider than I had expected, ten feet across, but unpaved and seamed with the twisting, dry beds of streams that already had run out of water by late spring. Along with the mournful gypsy music they reminded me that Spain was a harsh, hard land where only the very rich among men, or the dishonest, and only the carrion-eaters among animals, ate well.
I began to wonder how I would tell the cave of Fuentes from the others dotting the hillside when I heard a car behind me. I got off the road and crouched against the flank of the hill, waiting. The car roared closer, the sound of its engine as incongruous on that burro-trail as a Spanish accent at a meeting of the D.A.R. Then I saw it, a low-slung sports job pursued up the steep trail by its own cloud of dust. There had been a sports car just like it, a sleek Lancia that would clip you for eight or ten thousand bucks, parked outside the second bodega in Fuengirola. The top was down then and it was down now. In the moonlight as it sped by I saw Stu Huntington behind the wheel and blind Fernando beside him. I decided for no reason at all that they would lead me where the Fuentes brothers lived. Then I was choking in their dust, and then I started walking again.
The burro-trail ended there. Ahead loomed a rocky slope that even a mountain goat would have shunned. At the end of the trail gaped a small cave entrance, and ten yards below it a much larger one. A burro brayed nearby, its startlingly loud hee-haw resounding in the mountains.
Big cave or small? Chester Drum, spelunker, scowled, and rubbed his nose, and scratched his head, and listened to the unseen burro bray again, and said, “Don’t give me the horse-laugh, brother,”—and heard a motor grind, cough and kick over with a roar. Not the Lancia; it was bigger, and the sound came from inside the large cave.
I poked my nose in there. I took three steps and heard the rattling idle of the truck’s engine smooth to a loud purr as an expert hand adjusted the choke. I took three more steps and headlights sprang blindingly on in front of me. The easy idle became a roar. The truck began to move. Fear slid down my spine like a pellet of ice when I thought the truck might be wide enough to fill the width of the cave. Then I bared my teeth in something like a smile. By hugging the left wall of the cave, I’d have room to spare. It was just as well: who’d hire a long, flat private detective?
The truck rumbled by. I breathed its fumes and saw a high cab and a six-wheeled truck-bed, canvas-covered. I watched its taillights recede. If the driver hadn’t seen me in his headlights, I decided, he’d be too nearsighted to tool a big rig down the mountain trail. Which meant he had seen me, and that meant whatever he was doing here was not the sort of thing to make him stand on his brakes and leap out of the truck with a tire iron in his hand by way of greeting an unexpected snooper.
That was what I thought. But then I heard a sound behind me, as of a shoe dislodging loose rock, and I had time to pivot halfway around before the roof of the cave slammed down like a punch-press, fragmenting the night and my incorrect deduction.
chapter four
Sterling Moss would have envied me.
They had installed night-lights at the speedway in Indianapolis, and all the lights had coalesced to look like a big fat full moon, and there I was sitting in the bucket-seat of my Lancia so far ahead of the pack that another car wasn’t even in sight. Not only that, but look ma, no hands.
Maybe I wasn’t driving though. It was a two-man racer, and a big figure sat hunched over the wheel to my left. That put me in what they call in the trade the suicide seat. The wind of our slipstream rushed by. We were really zooming along. Suicide seat? Ha-ha, that was a good one. My partner was hunched over the wheel as if his life depended on it, and his hands were glued at ten and four o’clock. He was a driver who knew his business. He wouldn’t wrap us around a tree.
But he might wrap us around a rambling, spreading, thick- and twisted-limbed cactus as big as a house. Now, who had said the prickly-pear was as big as a house? Didn’t remember, didn’t know what that damn thing was doing here, but: “Swing around it, you sap,” I said, and my voice sounded like a laryngitic cat mewling in an echo chamber. “You’ll pile us up.”
The cactus got bigger, as cacti will if you are approaching them at something like forty miles an hour. I nudged my partner with an elbow. His right hand slid off the steering wheel and hung limply between us.
“Hey!” I said, and leaned over to turn the wheel hard left myself. My driver’s other hand left the wheel and he slipped sideways toward me. We missed the cactus and went bucketing along. My head began to ache suddenly as I came out of my racing-car dream of glory. The driver was leaning against me, a dead weight. I tugged at his hair to get a look at his face. His hair was short-cropped and sticky—sticky with blood. His face was Stu Huntington’s except for a large dent high up on the right side where his temple had been. He looked as if he had been kicked in the head by a horse. Like most people who have been kicked in the head by a horse, he was dead.
Then I snapped out of it. I was sitting in a car, Stu Huntington’s Lancia, with a dead man, Stu Huntington, behind the wheel. We were not supposed to get very far. It was a miracle we had got this far. The road was more than a dirt track, but no superhighway. The grade was steep now, ten degrees going down. No shoulder bordered the left side of the unpaved road. It skirted the edge of a cliff and it was a long way down, almost vertical, to the Torremolinos-Fuengirola highway. Beyond that, the sea. Where, after going off the road and smashing flat on the highway, we were supposed to wind up.
I leaned over the dead man and gripped the wheel. My hands were shaking. His head fell in my lap. His leg was in the way. I couldn’t find the brake pedal.
Our headlights swept the cliff edge. I yanked the wheel hard. We swerved and skidded, tires whining, rocks clattering under the fenders. I tromped my foot in the direction of the brake-pedal. Same no luck: his leg was still in the way. I had no room to maneuver. He held down a bucket-seat and I held down a bucket-seat, we were a big corpse and a big man, and that was that. It wouldn’t help to cut the ignition. Rolling free we’d probably pick up speed even faster than in high gear. If I could reach the brake, or even the clutch-pedal to brake us down through the lower gears.…
I couldn’t reach that either. Try getting around a dead man in the front seat of a little sports car some time.
The Lancia had a floor shift. It was low and to the right, in fourth gear. I got a grip on it. Then I had to turn the wheel to avoid the cliff edge again, and the dead man leaned against me harder. I caught a glimpse of the speedometer. It was pushing fifty—far too fast for this road, even with a racing driver behind the wheel. We had no kind of a driver at all. I grabbed the stick again and pushed hard toward the dashboard. The stick vibrated in my hand and there was a whining, grinding, scraping sound. It would be hell on the gear box, but I could worry about that later—if there was a later.
As the lower gear took hold, I felt the Lancia lurch. The speedometer needle jiggled down to forty and hovered there. I worked the gearbox down to second the same way. The Lancia bucked as if it had hit a wall, but that cut our speed to thirty and then to twenty-five. Those four-speed racers are geared to lose speed downhill in second. Maybe we’d make it. Far ahead and below us I thought I could see the white ribbon of the highway bathed in moonlight. The dirt road was fairly straight the rest of the way, though steep, but in second gear on the highway with nobody’s foot on the gas we’d quickly come to a stop.
And then we blew a tire.
It was inevitable, the way the rubber had been punished running over sharp rocks in the beds of dried out freshets on the road. I clung to the wheel. It bucked and squirmed under my hands like a living thing, and I had to contend with Stu Huntington’s dead weight sitting where I should have been sitting. The Lancia fishtailed in a wide slewing loop like a skier executing a Christie stop. Headlights to cliff edge again, not a very high cliff now, but more than high enough for the purpose.
The car tilted. I could see nothing. Dust enveloped us blindingly. For an awful moment I wondered if, after all, Huntington was still alive. Because I knew I had to leave the Lancia in a hurry. But no: he had to be dead. The dent in the side of his head was as big as my fist, and deep.
I fumbled with the door handle on my side and yanked it open. The car began to nose down as its front wheels left the road, it was that close. I leaped as far as I could. I didn’t want to get clipped by the rear fender.
Feet-first I hit the ground, staggered two steps on a wildly bouncing treadmill, lost my balance and went down. Then I was out of the cloud of dust and rolling, and then I heard a crashing, splintering sound, and then I saw the moonlit sky and the earth, the sky again and the earth again, and the earth slammed the breath out of my lungs and the sky wouldn’t give it back to me, and I was pulled and pushed and jumped on and pummeled and my mouth filled with dust, sand and pebbles.
I came to rest against a rock. I sat there, trying very hard to breathe and learning how di
fficult it can be. After a long time I got up. I was quaking like a leaf in a gale, but my legs held me up. I staggered in a little circle, and then a bigger one, until I found the direction I wanted, which was downhill. I made it to the bottom of the road, where it joined the highway. A short way up the pavement toward Torremolinos, a man straddling a motorbike with his feet on the ground was staring down at something. I went over there, not on the double.
The Lancia had left one fender and one wheel on the highway. What was left of Stu Huntington had been thrown clear, and it was what riveted the man on the motorbike’s attention. The rest of the car had plowed through the flimsy guardrail and over some rocks into the sea.
The man on the motorbike stared and stared. When I reached him I swayed and touched him, and still looking at what lay in the road he said, very softly, “Mother of God,” and was quickly and rackingly sick.
chapter five
They were really in a hurry that night—for Spain.
An hour after we had gone over, the Guardia sent a creaky old man along the road from Fuengirola on a bike. He wobbled to a stop, saw what was to be seen, solemnly removed his winged black-patent-leather hat, stood with head bowed, remounted his bike and asked me, “You wish a doctor?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I added on a slightly belligerent note, “This man was murdered.”
“Yes,” the creaky old man said in his creaky old man’s voice, “clearly it was a terrible accident.”
I stared at him. My Spanish is not that bad. He shrugged and began pedaling back toward town as fast as a kid who had spent the day on his bike doing nothing, enjoying every minute of it and in no hurry to get home.