Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  Algeciras was no Torremolinos or Fuengirola. It was a city of some size and the only deep-water port this side of Malaga. I checked into the Hotel Reina Cristina and went down to see the conserje at his desk.

  “I’m looking for a bodega,” I said.

  “On the waterfront there are perhaps thirty that—”

  “The one I’m looking for is run by a guy called Pez Espada.”

  “Pez Espada?” he repeated. “Swordfish, señor? I know of no such proprietor of a bodega.”

  “That wouldn’t be his real name,” I said, and took one of Governor Hartshorn’s ten-dollar bills from my wallet. “I was hoping you could enlighten me.” His stare moved from the bill to my face and back again.

  “But no, señor,” he said regretfully. “Truly I do not know. And if a man called Pez Espada ran a bodega in Algeciras, I would know.”

  “Okay. I’d like to buy some shares in smugglers’ contraband.”

  His eyes darted back to the ten-dollar bill. He said, his lips not moving, “I can arrange that for you.”

  “I don’t want you to. I want to do my own buying—at Pez Espada’s bodega.”

  He showed me his palms. “But I do not know—”

  “Then tell me what bodegas here in Algeciras might handle it.”

  He took the ten-dollar bill, studied both sides and let it flutter into a drawer on his desk. “Almost any one of them,” he said slowly. “You see the barman and tell him you are interested in a shipment of goods consigned from Gibraltar to Malta.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Sí, señor.”

  “You earned an easy ten bucks.”

  I started walking across the lobby. A woman seated on a chair and with her face hidden behind a copy of the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune said, “Ruy used to mention a man named Pez Espada to me.”

  She folded the paper. It was Tenley Hartshorn.

  “He did?”

  “Sure, lots of times. Pez Espada was Ruy’s teacher when Ruy was studying to be a bullfighter. Is he supposed to be a smuggler too?”

  “That’s the way I hear it. What else do you know about him?”

  “He owns a big bull-breeding ranch, or did, in Ronda. That’s about all. Some smuggler.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Following you, Mr. Detective. Andrea said you were coming to Algeciras. I missed the bus and borrowed her car. Knowing you were on my grandfather’s expense, the Reina Christina seemed the right place to look,” she said sarcastically.

  “And now that you’re here?”

  “Can I come with you—looking for Pez Espada?”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said.

  “Wait, please. It’s very important to me. You—you’re not that dumb. If Ruy is a smuggler, I want to know it. If that had anything to do with my father’s disappearance, I want to know it. If—” she moistened her lips “—you can show me Ruy’s not the knight in shining armor I always thought he was, maybe that would help me. Please can I go with you?”

  “You’d better not. Who knows what I’ll be walking into?”

  She retreated behind a forced smile. “Well, Andrea always told me not to be forward with strange men.”

  I left. At the door I turned and saw her staring after me.

  The first bodega I hit was a place called La Estrella de Algeciras. It was still too early in the afternoon to be crowded. A few fishermen were buying wine for a pair of sailors off the American Export liner, and a middle-aged cruise passenger, flanked by two other middle-aged cruise passengers who were giggling, was having her caricature drawn by a ferret-faced artist with a brown-paper cigarette stub pasted to his lips.

  I ordered a sherry at the bar and told the barman, “I’m interested in a shipment of goods consigned from Gibralter to Malta.”

  He did not look surprised. “How interested?” he asked.

  “Five hundred dollars American. A thousand, if I like the consignment.”

  “You would never see it, señor.”

  “The manifest, then.”

  “Nor that either. Unless it was two thousand. Or unless you were a steady customer.”

  “Well, I could go as high as two thousand—if a man called Pez Espada handled it for me.”

  “Swordfish? I know of no such man.” He seemed genuinely puzzled. “If a man who calls himself Swordfish was in this business that—interests you, señor, I would know it.”

  I believed him, and I was as puzzled as he was. I paid three pesetas for my sherry and headed back through the narrow barroom toward the door. The caricaturist had finished his sketch. “Señorita, you like a picture?” he said in English, facing the doorway.

  Tenley Hartshorn was standing there, her big green eyes looking grave. She drew stares. Being Tenley Hartshorn, she would, and because she was used to it that made her smile a little. “No, thank you,” she said.

  I reached her. “Well, well. Looks like I had a tail. Pretty good one too. I never spotted you.”

  “Better not say that. I might cable the Governor, and he’d take your expense account away.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t mean to say that. It just came out. I want to be friends. And I still want to come with you.”

  I still would have said no, had there been any suggestion of hanky-panky or danger in that first bodega. But the barman had accepted my offer to invest in contraband so matter-of-factly, except for my mention of Pez Espada, that I saw no possibility of Tenley involving herself in anything more deadly than too many sherries. Besides, I was feeling sorry for her, and when you start feeling sorry for a beautiful girl, half her battle’s won.

  “I don’t want to drive back to Torremolinos telling myself I could have learned something and didn’t. Please?”

  So I shrugged and said, “Okay, what the hell. Make like my Girl Friday.”

  She smiled, and it wasn’t forced. She took my arm and snuggled up to me on the way out.

  chapter nine

  A private detective hitting the bars, even if they’re in Spain and called bodegas, is like a cop hitting the flats in search of information. After enough of it there is too much stale air, too many cigarettes, too many drinks you don’t taste, too many weary and unsurprisable faces over unsteady hands polishing the same glasses over and over with a dirty dishrag. Then one day you sit on the edge of an uncomfortable bed in a nameless hotel in a distant city, and you tell yourself: hell’s molten bells, a hundred thousand cigarettes and ten thousand shots of whiskey (or sherry) and flat feet and that hair is starting to go salt-and-pepper on you, buddy, and what do you have to show for it but a clever line of chatter and a lot of loneliness which it hides and not quite enough money in the bank to pay for a trip to all those places you never really saw because you were too busy hitting the bars (or bodegas) to collect your hundred bucks a day and expenses.

  I wanted to avoid that moment of truth. Tenley wanted to find out something about herself by finding out something about Ruy. We’re all of us human. I took her with me.

  She was a girl who could throw herself into fun the way a diver plunges off the high board. Under the circumstances I hadn’t expected that, and it surprised me. In the first bodega we hit together, gypsy dancers were stamping and clapping their disturbing flamenco rhythm. We had a couple of drinks, and before I dropped my question in front of the barman Tenley found the rhythm with her own hands. She clapped it out, softly and then louder, and pretty soon she was on her feet and dancing, her body very straight, just her feet moving, until the two men among the gypsies came over and, looking down at her gravely and with approval, stamped their slow, provocative dance around her. She had a pair of castanets then; I don’t know where she got them but she knew how to use them. She danced faster and the gypsies danced faster and the guitar kept pace and everybody in the bodega was smiling at her, even the gypsy women who were sitting this one out on hard chairs on either side of the old guitarist. Finally it was over, and one of the gypsy women shouted, “Olé! Olé!, gitana brava!�
��

  I dropped my question. The barman had never heard of Pez Espada. We got out of there. Tenley held my hand and squeezed it. I could feel a pulse throbbing in her fingers.

  In another bodega, where the answer to my question again was no, we met the same caricaturist who’d done the cruise-passenger’s portrait. He offered to do Tenley’s, but she shook her head, then suddenly smiled, stood up, gestured to her chair, took sketch pad and chalk sticks from him, reached into his breast pocket for the brown-paper cigarettes, stuck one between her lips, lit it, squinted through the smoke and began to do his portrait in bold strokes. A crowd gathered to watch. She caught the ferrety look on his face perfectly, finished the caricature off with a cigarette pasted to his lips and gave him the result. He stood up and bowed, not mockingly. Everybody applauded. The artist was impressed, they were impressed and so was I.

  Later, in another bodega, we were dancing a slow pasa doble on the small, crowded floor. They never gave me any medals at Roseland, but I don’t have two left feet. Tenley danced close, looking up at me dreamily. I could feel the rhythm in her slender, lithe body. With her in my arms on a crowded dance floor I was my generation’s answer to the ageless Fred Astaire, and I knew it would be that way for anyone dancing with her.

  “There anything you can’t do?” I asked.

  She’d had her share to drink but seemed to be holding it. “You mean like with the artist and the gypsies?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Too many boys I’ve dated would think that’s in poor taste. They’d get a sick smile pasted on their faces while pretending to enjoy it. Nuts to them.” She said nothing about Ruy. “But you’re different. I can enjoy myself with you, and all of a sudden I want to.” She smiled up at me dreamily again. It was her answer to Ruy and Maruja.

  By the time we reached a bodega called La Perla, shortly after ten that night, Tenley had—in her words—a man-sized buzz on. She wasn’t looped, but skidrow bums with empty bottles of Sneaky Pete had been soberer. In the last few places I’d ordered clams and shrimps for her, and tried to taper off her drinking. There was an end-of-the-world frenetic quality about her that really socked me.

  La Perla wasn’t crowded. Dinner hour in Spain arrives indolently after the paseo, and on a warm summer evening the paseo lasts until ten o’clock. A couple of drunks at the bar were arguing over a lottery ticket; except for them and the barman we had the place all to ourselves.

  I asked my question, which evoked the usual mild interest, and when I was told I couldn’t see the manifest on my investment under two thousand dollars, I said I’d go that high if Pez Espada was the middleman.

  The barman was fat and had a scar to one side of his mouth that puckered like a dimple when he smiled his lazy smile. “Who, señor? Say that again.”

  “I’d go to two thousand or even higher if Pez Espada was the guy who handled the dinero.”

  “That is what I thought you said. Will you wait, señor? For favor?”

  I said I would wait. The barman lumbered through a curtained doorway at the rear of the bodega.

  “Think you struck paydirt?” Tenley asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Suddenly I’m scared.”

  The curtains parted and the fat barman stepped through. “If you will come this way, señor?”

  “Stay off the sauce,” I told Tenley. “It will only give you Dutch courage and a hangover.”

  “I’m all right now.”

  I got up and walked back past the drunks to where the barman was waiting. He parted the curtains for me and followed me through them to a dim hallway lit by a single naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. At the far end was a door.

  “It is not locked,” the barman said behind me.

  It wasn’t. I started to open it. I should have been thinking of Pez Espada, but I was thinking of Tenley.

  Something exploded against the base of my skull and white lights danced a flamenco in front of my eyes. I lurched a step. My head butted the door open. I went to hands and knees on a cool terra-cotta tile floor. Bile in my throat made me gag. I looked along the tile with interest but no great enthusiasm and saw the legs of a chair, the legs of a man and the legs of a desk. I dragged myself toward the chair. Maybe it would be a nice chair and help me get back on my feet. The door shut behind me. Footsteps. That would be the barman. The place was full of legs.

  “Get up,” a voice said in Spanish.

  The barman got hold of my left arm and helped me. He sat me roughly in the chair. Either it groaned or I did. The barman stood behind the chair. A man I had never seen before stood to my right. He wasn’t big, but he looked tough in that grave and untheatrical way only a Spaniard can look tough. The chair was facing the desk, behind which sat a man, middle-aged and middle-sized, gray-haired or sandy, neither big nor small-boned, not very fair-skinned for a Spaniard and not particularly dark for anyone else, a man as nondescript as any old whitewashed wall in any old whitewashed town along the Costa del Sol—except for his nose. It was a long nose, a very long nose almost like Cyrano’s, and it tapered the way a nose usually doesn’t. I thought it would quiver when he spoke, and it did. He said, “Tell me what you know about Pez Espada.” His voice was any man’s voice. His Spanish was neither Castilian nor Andaluz.

  “That’s easy,” I said. “One look at you is all anybody needs. You’re Pez Espada.”

  “I could hurt him again,” the barman suggested behind me.

  Pez Espada shrugged. “Not yet. Perhaps not at all. You have already demonstrated that he comes in here with no rights and no hopes except the rights and hopes we grant him.”

  “But if he has fear now, and if I can increase that fear.…” the barman suggested hopefully.

  “Shut your mouth, Estebán,” the tough-looking Spaniard growled. “The señor is talking.”

  The señor said, “You are American? Or English? But who you are, or what you want with Pez Espada, that we do no know.”

  I told him my name. I said he was right the first time: American.

  “Let me see your wallet.”

  “Why should I? I come in here to invest in some contraband, and first I get slugged from behind and then the fat boy here makes some threats which, incidentally, will earn him a broken arm if he tries to carry them out. Would you like to count my teeth too? I’m not selling anything, Swordfish. I’m buying.”

  “Why buy from me?”

  “I was told you were reliable as they come.”

  “Yes, and who told you that?”

  “In a bodega in Torremolinos they told me.”

  Pez Espada smiled a little and said, “Hurt him again, Estebán.”

  I stood up fast, pushing the chair back. It caught the fat man in his fat gut, and he bent over it. I judo-chopped the back of his neck. He and the chair fell down, making a racket they would have heard across the bay in Gibraltar. I saw a blur out of the corner of my eye. The tough Spaniard was moving, and moving too fast for me to stop him. What he did was get hold of my hair and yank my head way back and with his free hand jab two outthrust fingers at my Adam’s apple. I grabbed my throat. I couldn’t breathe. The chair on the floor or the fat man, or both, tripped me. I joined them on the tiles. When I could breathe again, a little, it was like inhaling the flame of a blowtorch. I started to get up and heard running footsteps, light and click-clacking on tile: a woman.

  Tenley leaned over me and said something indignant. I was still concentrating on the difficult job of breathing. The fat man sighed and stirred himself. Then he saw me and reached out for me, but grabbed Tenley’s leg instead. She tried to shake loose and wound up kicking him in the head, not hard. He yanked at her leg and she fell heavily. Then I kicked the fat man in the ribs, hard. He screamed like a woman and clutched his side. One of the drunks from the bar looked in through the doorway, a foolish grin on his face. The tough Spaniard just stared at him and he left in a hurry.

  I helped Tenley to her feet and set the chair upright. She sat on it. The tough Spani
ard shifted his stance to face me menacingly, light and ready on the balls of his feet.

  “That’s enough,” Pez Espada said. He hadn’t moved from the desk. Why bother? Now he was holding a revolver in his hand.

  The fat man got up, listing like a ship with a hole in one side under the waterline. “The bar,” Pez Espada told him. “Possibly there are customers. Possibly you’ll be able to handle them.” The fat man swayed to the doorway and through it, clutching his side. The tough Spaniard shut the door after him.

  “What will the gun get you?” I asked Pez Espada.

  “Except for the fat one and Diego here, only a handful of people call me Pez Espada. Is that not true, Diego?”

  “Is true, señor,” said Diego.

  “One of them told you about me,” Pez Espada went on. “I wish to know which one—and why.”

  “Hell,” I said, “I was trying to make a contact. I’ve got some money. I want to invest it in contraband.”

  “You could have done that almost anywhere in Algeciras. Why come to me?”

  “Because I’d want to know what I’m buying.”

  “But you’d be buying nothing. Only investing.”

  I said, “Like Paco and Ruy Fuentes only invest?” Tenley held her breath.

  Pez Espada looked at Diego, who shrugged. “You interest me,” Pez Espada said. “But I cannot believe the brothers Fuentes told you about me.”

  “I can’t believe their business is only buying shares of contraband—not with the truck they run out of Fuengirola.

  He didn’t want to talk about that, but he picked up my lead. “Then you also wish to—more than invest?”

  “Now you get the idea. If you set them up, I figured you could set me up.”

  “You have a boat?”

  “I can get one.”

  “And a Gibraltar export license?”

  “I can get one. I’d have to see how it works.”