Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  My head ached and there was going to be a nasty bruise all up and down one side of my rib cage. I could feel it every time I moved my left arm. I stared out at the water, wished I hadn’t finished my pack of cigarettes, and waited.

  The next one to make his appearance was a cocky-looking boy in an old four-door Seat that lacked any sort of markings except a couple of fender dents. The boy got out, gave me a confident but not friendly smile and went to work shooting pictures from various angles with an archaic press camera that must have been an heirloom from the time of Primo de Rivera and a strobe light that looked brand-new.

  Finally taking off his patent-leather hat the boy asked me, “He was a Catholic?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “An American?”

  “Right. His name is—”

  “Why tell me, señor? I only take pictures.”

  As if to disprove that point, he got a tarp from the trunk of the Seat and rolled what was left of Stu Huntington in it. I helped him tote it to the car. My side ached and my head started spinning. I was suddenly very sleepy. We stuffed the tarp on the rear seat and climbed in front together. The boy had forgotten his camera and had to go back for it. Then we drove into Fuengirola.

  The Guardia substation was in a small building a quarter of a mile from the portable bull ring. I was given the freedom of a ten-by-ten whitewashed room. If I wanted to sit, there was a single hard chair. If I wanted to stretch out and catch up on my sleep, there was a bed with a flat spring and no mattress. There was also a small window, barred, and a door, shut and bolted on the other side. I stood at the window and heard a bus roar by in the direction of Gibraltar. A couple of flies buzzed me without any real interest and went back to climbing the walls for the night. A big moth fluttered hopefully but suicidally about the single small bulb dangling on its cord.

  Around a quarter after three on my watch, the door opened and a man wearing Guardia gray-greens but no patent-leather hat came in. The black leather holster creaked at his side as he sat on the edge of the bedspring and lit a cigarette. He was no youngster, but not as old as the guy on the bike. His sleeve was decorated with three stripes. He looked wistful and not tough at all. He looked like Don Quixote without the little pointy beard to give him style.

  In excellent English and conversationally he said, “What an awful experience to happen to an American tourist on his first day in Spain. I am Sergeant Martinez, Mr. Drum.”

  He stuck out his hand. I shook it and said, “I’m no tourist. I’m a private detective.”

  Sergeant Martinez gave me a wistful Don Quixote smile. “There is no such thing as a private detective in Spain. It is as I said. You are, you see, an American tourist.”

  “Okay, I’m a tourist. Do I still get to report a murder?”

  He stood up, went to the window and gazed out at the silence or listened to the darkness. “Clearly, I failed to understand. You said murder?”

  “Huntington was dead before that car crashed.”

  “He was?” Sergeant Martinez laughed a mild, wistful laugh. “Then where were you driving the body?”

  “I wasn’t driving. He was.”

  “A dead man?”

  “He was behind the wheel with a dent in the side of his skull. I was sapped and put in the car next to him unconscious, and then we went for our ride.”

  “You should not have driven so fast on such a road. The tires. It was a blowout, of course.” Martinez scowled. “What does ‘sapped’ mean?”

  “Hit over the head from behind.”

  “And where did this happen?”

  “The cave of Fuentes.”

  “You went to the cave of Fuentes with the dead man?”

  “No. I saw him earlier here in Fuengirola. Arguing with a man named Fernando. A blind sculptor who lives in Torremolinos.”

  “Arguing about what?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “But you knew they were arguing?”

  “I heard them and saw them, in a bodega. I didn’t hear the words.”

  “But Mr. Drum, you were seen in the Bodega Costa del Sol with the dead man earlier this evening. Last night, that is.”

  “Not me.”

  “You were seen driving off with him.”

  “I stood up and said, “Hey, wait a minute.”

  “Facts, Mr. Drum, are facts,” Sergeant Martinez said blandly but wistfully. “Why dispute them? Do you still insist Mr. Huntington was dead before the crash?”

  “Keep talking,” I said.

  “Because if he was, and if you were seen with him in Fuengirola earlier, and if indeed the night before you were seen with his wife on the terrace of La Atalaya in Torremolinos, and if she is a woman known to—well, if she were Spanish and a Catholic she would have much to confess to her padre—”

  “Spell it out,” I said.

  “If Huntington were dead before the crash, if he were murdered instead of the unfortunate victim of an automobile accident, if anyone wants to stubbornly insist he had been murdered, we need look no further than this room for our suspect.” Martinez said all that to the window. He turned on me to ask, “What were you doing at the cave of Fuentes?”

  “Governor Hartshorn of Maryland sent me here to find his son.”

  “In the cave of Fuentes?”

  “In orbit around the moon if that’s where he happens to be.”

  “We of the Guardia Civil will find the missing man. That,” Martinez said stiffly, “is our job.”

  “Like getting to the bottom of a murder is your job?”

  “Like investigating an accident is our job.” Martinez snickered, managing to make that sound wistful too. “You American tourists. Spain, the land of mystery. Our Moorish blood, the mountains everywhere on a landscape whose bones protrude like those of dead prehistoric animals, the gypsies, the forlorn wail of a flamenco and the brave bulls feeding the poor after their moment of truth on the sand of the arena. Please, Mr. Drum. Things happen here much as they happen in your country. Accidents too. Will you be content with that?”

  I said nothing.

  “What led you to the cave of Fuentes?”

  “The last anyone knew, Hartshorn was on his way to see Ruy Fuentes.”

  “Why, Mr. Drum?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Very well, don’t. After all it is as I have said. You are no detective here, but only a tourist.”

  “Yeah, I know. And I was involved in a messy car accident and my driving companion died and if I’m a good boy you might let me stay in Spain a while longer—say, long enough to pack my bag.”

  Martinez looked hurt. “But no, Mr. Drum. Either you insist foolishly it was murder, and for example see my superiors in Malaga, in which case we investigate you and everything about you and probably have you followed and possibly have you denounced; or you recognize an accident when you see one, as a witness who incidentally was not even in the car, and you are perfectly free to enjoy Spain however you wish. The choice is yours.”

  “If I do it your way?”

  “I told you. You are free to enjoy Spain. But then in all truth I would strongly urge you not to return to the cave of Fuentes.”

  I didn’t ask why. I thought I knew why. He smiled wistfully and I smiled, not wistfully, and said, “Okay, I won’t go jousting with any windmills.”

  “You know our literature?” he asked, pleased. “Then perhaps you know The Four Horsemen as well? War, plague, famine and death? Spain is a hard land, Mr. Drum, and of the four horsemen in the end it is only one that matters: death. But of course, death no longer matters to its victim. Keep that in mind: death no longer matters to its victim.”

  “You mean regarding Huntington?”

  “Regarding all the world. It is a truth we of Spain understand.”

  I was impressed. I have been threatened with guns, knives, forty-watters, blunt instruments and cement boots, but that was the most erudite threat I’d ever received. He had me, though, and the thr
eat wasn’t necessary. If I made noises about murder, I could be kept on ice until the bureaucratic wheels went around and around, or maybe regarded as a suspect in the frame he’d started to nail into place before we’d even met. Either way, the best I could hope for was a one-way ticket from Malaga to Madrid and from Madrid to points west. That wouldn’t help Huntington; Martinez was right: nothing would help him. But that wouldn’t find Robbie Hartshorn either.

  “Pues, señor?” Martinez demanded. “Lo que digo o lo que Vd. dice?”

  “Huh?” I said innocently. “I’m sorry. I don’t have enough Spainsh to read a menu.”

  “A pity. I asked: your way or mine?”

  I said, “It was an accident, sergeant.”

  “I’m delighted to hear that, Mr. Drum. I like you, but I hope we never have to meet again. You understand?”

  I said I understood. I didn’t say it was inevitable that we’d meet again, but that was what I thought.

  “Adiós, Mr. Drum.”

  I told him to give my regards to Sancho Panza. He laughed wistfully.

  chapter six

  If you are a private detective by trade and an international private detective by predilection, you can subscribe to some mighty peculiar journals. The most peculiar one, which got stuffed through the mail-slot of my office door in Washington once every three months, was something called The Financial and International Black Market Guide. Few people know of its existence. It is published on Wall Street by a mysterious gent named Axel Spade, who charges fifty bucks for half an hour of his time if you want a personal interview and a hundred and fifty bucks for the four quarterly copies of his magazine. Financial ministries, brokerage houses and international crooks make up most of Spade’s subscription list. He has agents all over the world and, sifting the information they send him, he tells his clients and subscribers what they have to know to keep them in business.

  If a nation’s currency is going to be devalued, somehow Axel Spade finds out before anyone else. If one of the big international cartels is going to split and spin off a multimillion-dollar company, Spade gets wind of it before the directors. If you’ve sold a shipment of arms illegally to a rebel government in Indonesia, foolishly getting yourself struck with Indonesian currency, Axel Spade will supply the information on what steps you have to take, usually illegal ones, to convert your useless fortune into hard currency that the boys at the Union Bank Suisse won’t laugh at. If you want to know what’s a good bet to be smuggled where, Axel Spade will tell you. He has committed crimes, technically, in four dozen countries, by acting before the fact with his advice. None of these crimes is sufficient to have him extradited from the United States. Axel Spade has committed no crime in America. He is a cautious man and he loves his adopted country.

  When I left the Guardia substation in Fuengirola, I was thinking of Axel Spade and his magazine. About a third of each issue is devoted to what Spade calls The Smugglers’ Newsletter. About a third of that third is devoted to Spain, because except for the international traffic in heroin, which is almost nonexistent in Spain, the big Iberian country is smugglers’ haven. Every black-market item from cigarettes to jewelry to automotive parts will find you an eager buyer in a land where importing duties are prohibitively high, and importing duties are prohibitively high in Spain.

  The usual route, Spade has written, is from Gibraltar to the Andalucian coast by fast boat, from the coast to the mountain town of Ronda by burro-train or truck, depending on the size and weight of the contraband, and by any convenient kind of transshipment from Ronda to all parts of the country.

  Though they double as rural and small town police, the chief job of the Guardia Civil is to guard against the entrance and transshipment of contraband. Like cops anywhere, some percentage of the Guardia probably could be bought. Such as, I thought, my wistful friend Sergeant Martinez. What would a murder investigation, with the cave of Fuentes as a focus, mean to Martinez? Why should it get him all hot and bothered, unless he had something to lose—such as his cut for keeping the boys in patent-leather hats off the backs of smugglers who operated out of the cave of Fuentes only a few hundred yards up from the sea?

  I had a few things to go on, more than hunches: Martinez’ repeated concern about the cave and his warning to me not to return there, the truck which had raced out of the bigger of the two caves and the sapping and death ride I’d been given because I’d seen it, and the fact that Robbie Hartshorn had disappeared after visiting the cave. All that and Axel Spade’s newsletter too.

  I saw Martinez in my mind’s eye and smiled his wistful smile back at him. I decided to visit the cave again, but not yet. First I had to crawl under a blanket and pull about ten hours of sleep in after me. The obvious place to do that was where I had dropped the B-4 bag, at the Hartshorn villa in Torremolinos.

  By the time I caught the predawn bus that ran the nine miles from Fuengirola to Torremolinos on tires as bald as Yule Brynner’s pate, it was almot dawn. I got off just past the railroad tracks, walked a hundred yards or so and scowled up at the sixty-three steps leading to La Atalaya. A rooster greeted the morning with raucous optimism as I started to climb.

  Andrea Hartshorn was waiting for the dawn too. I found her leaning her elbows on the terrace wall and gazing out over the red tile rooftops of Torremolinos toward the Mediterranean. She was wearing a black nightgown and one of those short, quilted bed-jackets with big buttons that nobody ever fastens. The dawn breeze whipped her blonde hair about her head. She was smiling slightly, expectantly. She looked as eager as a kid about to see her first parade.

  “I heard you coming,” she said out of the side of her mouth, not turning her head. “Just a minute. It won’t be long now.”

  So I got next to her, planted my elbows alongside hers and looked where she was looking. The water was pink and gold, though the sun hadn’t risen. I waited. Andrea Hartshorn sighed. All of a sudden a flash of light flamed at the horizon and streaked across the water. It came as quickly as turning on a blowtorch, and the rim of the sun, pink and swollen, followed it. Andrea Hartshorn sighed again.

  “It beats electricity,” I said.

  She just stared.

  “So that’s what they mean when they say the dawn comes up like thunder out of—”

  “Please don’t talk about it. You’ll spoil it,” she said, a little sharply. “I come out and see it every morning. I don’t want to share it with anyone.”

  I could have said she hadn’t invented sunrise or something bantering like that. But her intensity got to me: she really wanted that sunrise all for herself. Silly? Some people are like that, and she was a gorgeous dish, so while she looked at the sun I looked at her, and I thought: sunrise and sunset and storms in the mountains and the wonderful wet smell of a forest and the pulse-beat of a city and good music and a walk in the rain and turning to watch your footsteps appear like magic in virgin snow behind you and a roll in the hay—all those things someone who loved her would want to share with her, and if she thought she had a lock on sunrise and you carried it far enough, maybe that was why Robbie Hartshorn put away his quart and a half a day. But then, why did she go and do likewise?

  “Learned something last night,” I said. “Not much, but it’s a place to start.”

  She whirled toward me as if awakening abruptly from a deep sleep. “You did? I think that’s—What on earth happened to you?”

  “Does it show? I haven’t had a chance to break any mirrors.”

  “Your suit’s all torn. There’s blood on your forehead.”

  “Please don’t talk about it,” I said lightly. “You’ll spoil it”

  She laughed, but it took a little effort. “I like you better when you’re not trying to be masterful.”

  I asked, “What did they take away from you when you were a little girl?”

  Then she really laughed. “That’s the conclusion my analyst finally made me reach, Mr. Drum. But that was a long time ago, and it didn’t help.” Mocking herself with a bright, bitte
r smile, she went on, “I was a wide-eyed, trusting kid of five, see? I had a bedroom all to myself just down the hall from my folks’ room. Then along came a pink and squealing kid brother, and they turned my room into a nursery and moved him in. I guess it was a tall, skinny house. I had to move downstairs, just down the hall from the housekeeper. I felt rejected, my analyst said. If there’s something now I like, I have to keep it private, secret, all to myself. Anybody tries to intrude, he’s like my kid brother.” She stopped smiling. “I’m as solitary as a cat. I never should have got married.”

  That wasn’t the way she had put it yesterday, but her own special sun had just risen on a new day, hadn’t it? She asked, “What did you find out?”

  “Robbie saw Ruy Fuentes all right. Ruy lives in a cave with his brother and foster-mother, a gypsy named Maruja. Robbie visited them there.”

  “You learned all that in one night? Why, that’s wonderful. It’s more than the Guardia’s been able to do in two weeks.”

  “Mrs. Hartshorn,” I said, “did Robbie ever take a flyer in smuggling?”

  “Smuggling? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t have had to be a smuggler. In Spain you can buy shares in smugglers’ contraband same as you can buy stock shares in New York. You just have to know the right people.”

  “If Robbie ever did anything like that, he never told me. We certainly don’t need the money.”

  “If he did, would he have told you? Or does he like to have his secrets too?”

  “Like a—a private sunrise?” Andrea Hartshorn smiled. “You don’t know Robbie. He’s just the opposite. Everything he does, he has to tell me. He’s like a little boy that way. Maybe it’s one reason I love him.”

  We both stared at the water. I yawned, hurting my left side. “Could I get some shuteye?”

  “Forgive me. You have been out all night, haven’t you? One of the maids took your bag into the guest suite. It’s yours for as long as you stay. And Chet? I—I want to thank you for reporting what you’d learned to me.”