Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  She was a gypsy, all right. Not only did she do exactly what she wished, but she said exactly what she wished too. An anthropologist I know in Washington, who works for the State Department, once told me a neurotic gypsy was as rare as a sunburned eskimo. “How could they be neurotic?” he had asked me. “They do whatever they want to do. They are like children without parents to punish them. They don’t know the meaning of frustration.”

  “Let’s talk about the cave,” I suggested to Maruja.

  “Yes, of course. The trucks and the Guardia. Clearly it is a garage and a smugglers’ depot. Paco and Ruy, you see, are smugglers. It is no secret in Fuengirola. Half the town knows it.”

  “Then if somebody stumbled on it,” I said, thinking out loud, “that would be no reason to get him out of the way or have him killed?”

  “Killed? But señor, of course not.” The idea had made her indignant. “Paco and Ruy are good boys. Possibly as a torero Ruy could have earned enough money for our needs. But since his injury.… was it not the most natural thing in the world to turn to smuggling? No one is hurt by it. No one loses, except the government tax collector. And merchandise which otherwise would not be available here in Spain is made available. Killed? Mother of God, señor! That is nonsense.”

  “Then why the gun?”

  She shrugged. “With what Paco and Ruy do no secret, what is to stop a thief from coming to the cave and stealing some of the contraband? Would not a merchant’s warehouse be guarded? Besides, as you have seen, the gun was not loaded.” She asked, “Are you a thief, señor? Is that your intention?”

  She was almost too ingenuous to be true, or wanted me to think she was. I said, “A man named Hartshorn came here a couple of weeks ago, to talk to Ruy. He hasn’t been seen since. That’s why I’m here.”

  Silence for a few seconds. In the dim light of the cave I hadn’t yet seen Maruja’s face clearly. Her eyes, though, were enormous, and her voice was deep, musical, very female and as unintentionally seductive as any voice I have ever heard. But now those big eyes narrowed and she hissed at me. “Hartshorn? Her father? That one’s father? The tall skinny one with no flesh on her bones who chases Ruy so shamelessly? This is who you talk of? Yes, señor. He was here. Borracho, muy borracho. Very drunk, and he wanted to fight. My Ruy was not good enough for his child, he said. Stay away from her, he shouted. Ruy remained calm. Finally he walked down the hill with Sr. Hartshorn. He was afraid the man in his drunkenness would fall and be hurt. He is drunk all the time like all of them, the foreigners of money, in Torremolinos. I do not wish to talk about him.”

  She flounced out of the cave. I followed her, and she said, not looking back, “Nor do I wish any longer to talk to you—since clearly it is of him and his skinny child you want to speak.”

  She was small, Maruja the gypsy: in spiked heels she might have been five-three or -four. She wasn’t wearing spiked heels. What she was wearing, in ascending order, was a pair of rope sandals, a dark green skirt and a bullfighter’s white shirt that was too big for her and might have belonged to Ruy. Her hair was dark and hung in two thick and glossy braids to her waist. Her hips hour-glassed out from that narrow waist, and she was still mad enough to flounce, making her pelvic sway more pronounced and very pleasant on the eyes.

  “Let’s forget about him and his skinny child,” I said. “We could talk about last night.”

  “Last night?” She stopped walking and turned slowly three strides in front of me. Her brows were thick and naturally arched; she arched them some more, looking her question at me, her big, dark eyes giving me a stare as ingenuous as her attitude had been. One memorable feature and you don’t forget a face; for Maruja those eyes would have been enough. But her lips almost made you forget them: full, sensuous lips against the smooth tan of her face, lips as red as the apple Eve gave Adam.

  I was staring—and staring too hard—at a very attractive woman. Three in one case, I thought; you sure know how to pick them, Drum: Andrea Hartshorn with her blonde good looks, a little the worse for wear, more than a little dissipated; her daughter Tenley, who wryly accepted her own beauty and the fact that men will be men; and now Maruja, as sultry as a summer storm, as uncomplicated as a sudden hunger pang. Or was she? What she did was stare back at me, frankly and with flattering interest, and that is as good a way to change the subject as any I know.

  “Guapo!” she cried delightedly. “Oh, but he is guapo! Very handsome and virile-looking, but not a pretty face, I do not like pretty boys. Did anyone ever tell you you have the face of a bullfighter, an old veteran who has slain many bulls and who has felt the horns brush close against his suit of lights. But you are too big, of course. Not ponderous, but still very large. You must be strong, very strong. I can sense it. And guapo? Señor, you delight me.” Maruja the gypsy placed her hands on her hips, cocked her head to one side, arched her brows at me and laughed. “But I embarrass you. For a gypsy it is natural to say what she thinks, and when a woman sees a real man … there are so few of them.…”

  “Look,” I said. “Finish the eulogy, and then we can get back to last night.”

  “Clearly, he is embarrassed. What means this eulogy?”

  “Don’t know the Spanish word. Forget it.”

  “This is all you have to say?” She frowned thoughtfully. “Señor, if you slept with a woman, would you be giving a gift or taking one?”

  With any woman but Maruja there would have been one sure way, if that was what you wanted, to get back to business in a hurry: by calling her verbal bluff. But Maruja being herself, I should have known better. I would learn. I said lightly, “Why not try it and find out?”

  She looked at me gravely. “What is the hour?”

  It was four-thirty, and I told her.

  “Then still two hours before the running of the bulls is over.” She moistened her lips. “Would you wish it? I am ready.” To prove that, she closed the gap between us, cried out wordlessly, stood up on tiptoe, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. Her lips were hot, mobile and alive. Her body squirmed and then nestled. She made a purring sound. Suddenly I had all her weight in my arms. She kissed my chin and the side of my jaw; her tongue touched the lobe of my ear; she kissed my neck. A pulse lurched and throbbed there, where her lips touched.

  “Stop biting me,” she mumured against my ear. I hadn’t been aware of biting her. Probably I had. I can be stirred. “Stop biting me. Ruy will see the mark of your teeth. He would be furious.”

  That did it. Money or sex, I had told Andrea Hartshorn. But if half of Fuengirola knew the brothers Fuentes were smugglers, how could money be the answer? Which seemed to leave sex. Maruja and Ruy, who she’d cared for since he was a boy? Tenley and Ruy? The missing Robbie Hartshorn and Maruja? He was a pretty virile-looking lad too, and when Maruja offered you her gift you’d have to be an octogenerian monk to refuse—if you took your vows seriously. Maruja and Robbie, and then Ruy breaking it up? Was that what had happened to Robbie Hartshorn?

  I disengaged Maruja’s arms and placed my hands on her hip-bones to lift her away and set her down on her feet. Back around my neck went her arms. It was like trying to rid yourself of an octopus, so finally I said, “Look, there’s Ruy.”

  She jumped away from me. Except for us, of course, the burro-trail and hillside were deserted. Still, Maruja pirouetted, the green skirt swirling around her thighs, and cried, “Ruy? Where are you? Ruy!” When she got no answer, she whirled back to me. Her eyes were wide and her lips parted. Emotions chased each other across her face: surprise, fear, remorse.

  The way she looked took me back more years than I wanted to admit, to a memory I wanted to forget. I’d put up my shingle and waited for the world to flock to the door that said CHESTER DRUM, Confidential Investigations. There were a couple of cases, nothing big, and a lot of sitting at a battered old desk and waiting for the phone to ring. The one kind of work, I had told myself there at the beginning, I would never do was divorce work. But the cases did not come and the office ren
t had to be paid, and the F.B.I. doesn’t pension off veterans of a single tour of duty. I knew a guy named Sammy Green who ran a middle-sized Washington agency that made a specialty of divorce work. He used to kid me about being too lily-white to handle his kind of case, and one day over drinks he booted one in my direction. I was hungry enough and disillusioned enough to accept it with thanks. That was the one and only divorce case I ever handled. A surgeon named Burnett or Burdett or something like that was suspicious of his wife. She was earning some kind of advanced degree at Georgetown University, and had to spend weekends out of town to collect data. With one of Sammy Green’s photographers along, I tailed her. She was collecting dates, not data, all right. That weekend it was a captain from Andrews Air Force Base. She met him at a motel. I waited for the right moment and, with Sammy Green’s photographer on my heels, busted in the door. The woman sprang out of bed just as the flashbulb went off. The same emotions that crossed Maruja’s face had crossed hers: surprise, fear, remorse. Momentarily the surgeon’s wife and the gypsy were sisters three thousand miles and all those years apart.

  The climax of my one and only divorce case came back to me now as I saw Maruja’s face. But if she thought Ruy had returned unexpectedly, why did she look as if her hand had been caught in the extramarital cookie-jar? Ruy wasn’t her husband. For ten years she had been a mother to him.

  “You lie,” she accused me. “Why did you pretend Ruy was here?”

  Instead of answering her question, I asked one of my own. “Last night you had some visitors from Torremolinos, didn’t you? Here at the cave?”

  She shrugged. “Last night Paco and Ruy say it is time for me to visit my cousin, who lives in the fishing village of Carihuela. I spent the night there, with my cousin. It has happened before. I like my cousin.”

  “What do you mean, it happened before?”

  “They have business, Paco and Ruy, with a man from Algeciras who sells shares in smugglers’ contraband. Sometimes they go there, but sometimes he comes here. If he does, I go to the house of my cousin in Carihuela.”

  “You mean all they do is buy shares? Then what’s the truck for?”

  “I don’t understand, señor.”

  She might or might not have understood, but either way I was puzzled. Buying shares in contraband was exactly like investing in stock. You have nothing to do with the product, except to put cash on the line to purchase some of it in Gibraltar. Then, when the consignment is sold, you reap your share of the profit. But if that was the extent of the brothers Fuentes’ involvement, what were they doing with a truck and a warehouse behind a wooden wall in their cave?

  “Are they smugglers, or do they just invest?”

  Maruja had gained her composure back. She gave me an innocent look. “There is a difference?”

  I let that ride. If she was pretending ignorance, there was no point in explaining what she already knew, and if the distinction really didn’t mean a thing to her, I’d only confuse her by explaining. I asked, “You know the man from Algeciras?”

  “Never have I seen him, señor. But the boys make jokes about him. They call him Pez Espada—Swordfish—as he has a nose like the beak of a swordfish. He owns a bodega on the waterfront in Algeciras. It is no secret. Half of Algeciras knows of his activities in smuggling.”

  If what she said about Paco and Ruy here in Fuengirola and Pez Espada in Algeciras was true, the movement of contraband along the south coast of Spain was the world’s worst-kept secret. As for Maruja herself, she was answering my questions—and they were the sort of questions that could put Paco and Ruy behind bars—without batting an eye. It almost seemed that the smugglers wanted their operations known, and even if they greased the palm of every Guardia from here to Algeciras, that still didn’t make sense.

  Suddenly I took a stab. “This Pez Espada, was he here the night Robbie Hartshorn came up the hill?”

  Maruja scowled. “But no, for then I would have been at my cousin.… Wait, I remember. I went, but my cousin was not at home. I returned on the bus, señor. I did not see the man with the nose like a swordfish’s beak, but he may have been here. It is usual when I am sent to my.…”

  Her voice stopped dead. A car was coming up the hill. We stood together silently and stared down the burro-trail until we saw an ancient station wagon with rotting wooden paneling come bouncing along the trail, its engine laboring.

  “That is the coach of Dr. Gomez,” Maruja cried, and started running down the trail. The wagon came on. She held up one hand and then had to fling herself out of the way. She ran after the wagon in the cloud of dust its tires spun from the parched earth.

  The wagon stopped a dozen feet from me. A small bald man got out of the front, went around to the back and opened the tailgate. I stuck my nose in behind him just as Maruja ran up. She took one look inside the wagon and wailed. Two monosabios from the bull ring were squatting in there next to a stretcher on a rack, looking as stolid and poker-faced as monosabios always looked. Kneeling at the head of the stretcher and talking softly to the man who lay there was Tenley Hartshorn. She had a smile on her face now, but you could see it took effort. She was pale. There were tears in her green eyes.

  The man on the stretcher was Ruy Fuentes. A dark stain was seeping through his tight torero trousers.

  “I can walk,” he said gravely, and started to rise to prove it. One of the monosabios pushed him down.

  Tenley said, “Please, Ruy. Don’t.”

  They removed the stretcher from the wagon and carried it toward the smaller of the two cave entrances, the bald little man leading the way, Tenley on one side and Maruja on the other. Ruy raised his left hand tentatively. That was the side Tenley was on. She grasped his hand.

  “Pobrecito!” cried Maruja. “Qué pasa? Qué pasa?”

  The bald little man, who was Dr. Gomez, said, “Gored, señora. But not deeply and nothing vital was pierced. A day or two of rest.… the boy is lucky.…”

  “Pobrecito, pobrecito,” wailed Maruja. She leaned over Ruy. The monosabios had to stop walking. She kissed his cheek. His face turned toward her. Their lips brushed and then clung. Ruy let go of Tenley’s hand, and she stared stonily at the top of Maruja’s head. The gypsy woman dropped to her knees and stroked his cheeks and arms. The kiss was a long one and not motherly. Finally Maruja stood up. They were at the entrance to the cave. As if seeing her for the first time, she stared at Tenley.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. “You have no business here.”

  “Maruja,” Ruy pleaded, “the girl is my—”

  “The girl is a foreigner and a whore.”

  Tenley lurched backwards as if she had been struck. “I’m staying with Ruy,” she said, and her voice broke.

  “No,” Maruja said. “I did not help his father raise him so that he could fall into the arms of a foreign whore. You will leave.”

  Ruy got up on one elbow. His eyes met Tenley’s. She was biting her lip to keep from crying. “Let.… Ruy.… decide,” she managed to say. She looked pathetically young and vulnerable.

  Pain or pity, or both, twisted Ruy’s lips and made him shut his eyes. “Tenley, Tenley, please try to understand. Tomorrow I will see you. Or the next day. Now you must go.”

  “Ruy, I’ll never.… if you don’t.… please, Ruy.…”

  “You must go now,” Ruy said.

  And Tenley did, reeling down the trail like a drunk. She could have hurt herself that way. I trotted after her and overtook her. She was crying and running blindly. I took her hand and slowed her down. “You could take a nasty spill.”

  “I don’t care.” But she walked at my side and didn’t try to run any more. “I never want to see him again.” After a few more steps she said, “Yes I do. Oh, I do.”

  We reached the bottom of the hill. “God,” Tenley said. “What kind of hold does that woman have on him? A mother, I could fight that. Or a lover. But both.… in the same person?”

  I felt sorry enough for her to say, “You may be maki
ng too much of that. Could be they have something to hide. That’s why they didn’t want you inside.” Not that I believed it for a minute; they’d let the doctor and the monosabios inside the small cave, hadn’t they?

  “I saw what I saw,” she said bitterly, “and I got told off. Nobody—least of all Ruy—tried to hide that.” But she was curious enough to ask, “What are they trying to hide?”

  “Same thing your father may have stumbled on. That they’re smugglers.”

  “Smugglers? Ruy? You’re crazy.” She bristled in defense of him, “He’s so honest he wouldn’t steal a—a churro if he was starving. Ruy a smuggler! You’re crazy.”

  “Tomorrow I may see just how crazy I am.”

  We waited for the bus to Torremolinos. It was a long wait in the heat of late afternoon. The bus driver had a seat in the sol at the iron bull ring. Tenley Hartshorn had nothing more to say. I offered to buy her a drink, but she wasn’t having any.

  Finally we rode back to Torremolinos in the crowded bus. Everybody was talking about the banderillero who had been gored.

  chapter eight

  From Algeciras you can look across the bay and see the rear view of the Rock of Gibraltar, the view nobody knows unless he’s been there because it hasn’t been immortalized by an insurance company.

  I got there the next day, taking a bus the seventy-odd miles along the coast road, past Carvajal and Marbella and the cork forests between Marbella and Estepona and La Linea which is the Spanish town at the base of the Rock. A big American Export liner, white as a ghost, was anchored in the bay. Its cruise passengers, who had come ashore on tenders, paraded through the streets of Algeciras with their cameras, dark glasses and bright cruise clothing. They clung together in self-conscious groups, fending off the beggars and peddlers who would sell them everything from a Swiss watch to the Rock itself. A lone American sightseer in a foreign port is as rare as a Southern Methodist with cirrhosis of the liver.