Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Why should I show you?”

  “For a percentage. You name it.”

  “A third,” he said, “and the exclusive right to sell shares in your cargo.”

  “You’d have me all tied up.”

  “You do not operate on this coast without being all tied up.”

  “And I’d deliver my cargo to the Fuentes brothers?”

  He smiled. Diego almost smiled. “If you know so much, why ask me?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “that was Robbie Hartshorn’s trouble.”

  Again Tenley held her breath. “Quién?” said Pez Espada. “Who?”

  I repeated Tenley’s father’s name. If it meant anything to him, he did a fine job of hiding the fact. “I am sorry,” he told me. “I do not understand.”

  “Then forget it. Suppose I just invested—right now, tonight. Who’d be running the cargo from Gibraltar?”

  “A competent man. Or I would not be his broker.”

  “Would he mind competition from me?”

  “He is not the only captain for whom I am broker.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s what I’m after. There room for another?”

  “There is always room for a good man. May I see your seaman’s papers?”

  “They were lifted in the States. I had some trouble,” I improvised, “running rum from Puerto Rico to the mainland.”

  There was a silence. Pez Espada put his gun away. He broke the silence by saying, “Two thousand dollars.”

  “What for?”

  “An investment. Then you can meet the captain. Perhaps he’ll take you along. Then he’ll report to me, and then we can discuss further business.”

  “Perhaps my foot,” I said. “You tell him and he’ll do it.”

  “Perhaps,” Pez Espada said again, and waited.

  I slipped my shirttails out of my pants, unzipped a compartment of my moneybelt and took out a wad of Governor Hartshorn’s money. They were crisp new fifties, folded once the long way. I counted our forty and dropped them casually on Pez Espada’s desk. He didn’t touch them.

  “Where can I contact you, Señor Drum?”

  “The Reina Cristina.”

  “Await word from us there.”

  “Diego opened the door. When I reached the bar with Tenley, fat Estebán sneered at me. “Wipe it off your face, Fat One,” I said. “One of these days you may be taking orders from me.”

  “Cojones,” was his answer.

  Outside, Tenley asked me, “Are you satisfied with the way it went?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean you didn’t have much convincing to do. After showing you how tough he could be, the man with the nose seemed mighty eager to please. And—and apparently Ruy is a smuggler. Isn’t that lovely?”

  I ignored her remark about Ruy. “Listen,” I said, “I’m looking for your father, remember? Say he stumbled into something he shouldn’t have at the cave. Maybe I’ll find out what it was if I dig out the real relationship between Pez Espada and the cave in Fuengirola.”

  “Then you didn’t believe him?”

  “Of course not. He doesn’t know one damn thing about me. Why should he have offered to take me on?”

  “Then what—?”

  “He wants to get me together with this captain of his. I’m curious enough to want to know why.”

  “Be careful,” Tenley said, and squeezed my arm. “You and the cat.”

  chapter ten

  Nobody contacted me that night or in the morning. Tenley and I spent the morning on the breakfast terrace. She wanted to talk about anything that had nothing to do with what she really wanted to talk about. She was friendly and gay, but her smile was brittle. So we talked about this and that and once she started to talk about Maruja and Ruy. She stopped that in a hurry, but for the next hour she was holding my hand and making big green eyes at me.

  “Like some lunch?” I asked.

  She nodded, and we had it in her room—tuna steak, salad and a good white wine. We had a second bottle of the wine, and conversation flowed as freely. After a while Tenley went into the bathroom and changed into a bikini consisting of two polka dot handkerchiefs. She picked up the second bottle of wine. “Me for the terrace and some sun.” She was a little drunk and wanted to be more drunk than she was. Up-ending the bottle, she drank from it. Then she whirled and asked, “Do you like my body? He used to say he wished he was a painter so he could put it on canvas and have it all the time. I’ll bet he’s told that to.… Maruja too.”

  She went outside on the terrace, equipped with a towel and the bottle. Pretty soon she called, “Chet?”

  I wandered out there. She was lying face-down on the towel. The bottle was empty, the sun dazzling and the upstairs handkerchief of the bikini unfastened. I liked her body, all right.

  She said nothing. I said nothing. I began to sweat in the sun and for other reasons. “What does a gal have to do?” she mumbled into the towel. She wiggled her hips a little and stretched her arms.

  “Don’t say it,” I said.

  “Do I have to say it?”

  “You have to mean it. And you wouldn’t.”

  “All right. I’ll say it. I’m light as a feather. Take me inside and put me on the bed and don’t close the shutters unless you’re a very low-class type—which you aren’t.”

  I went on sweating.

  “Come here. I dare you to touch me.”

  “What would that be doing,” I said, “except getting even on him for something you don’t quite understand.”

  “I understand all I want to. But I had to pick a man with moral scruples.” She buried her face in the towel and started to laugh. I went over there, crouched and touched her shoulder. She was shaking. She spun into my arms, sobbing. I lifted her and she clung to my neck and right arm, her head flung back, her eyes shut and tears trickling down her cheeks. Her breasts were firm and like ripe, red-tipped fruit.

  I carried her inside. She was right—light as a feather. I put her on the bed. She smiled up at me with her eyes still shut and the tears still coming.

  “Do it,” she said. “Do it to me now.”

  Instead I covered her with the sheet.

  “What’s the matter, don’t you want me?”

  “I want you,” I said in a funny voice. “You’re beautiful. I’d have to be a eunuch not to want you. What does that have to do with anything?”

  Then she really started to bawl, covering her face with the sheet. Her voice came through it, muffled, “If I.… want you.… and you want me, damn it, why do I still.… love him?”

  I stayed with her, sitting on the edge of the bed, until she cried herself to sleep.

  The call came a couple of minutes before five o’clock. By then I was stretched out on the bed in my room, chain-smoking and staring at the ceiling. I’d taken a long, ice-cold shower and was telling myself that and the fact that I was a noble son of a bitch more than made up for what I’d turned down in Tenley’s room. Telling myself that and not quite believing it, and then the phone rang.

  “This Drum?”

  I said it was.

  “MacPherson’s the name. Señor Manzanarez tells me I need a supercargo tonight.”

  “Señor who?”

  “Manzanarez. You kidding or something? Manzanarez the broker.”

  Which was what Pez Espada was called when he wasn’t called Swordfish. “Keep talking,” I said.

  “It ain’t my idea,” MacPherson said. “I need a supercargo like I need a hole in the brain-pan. But if Manzanarez gets the dough and puts it up, who am I to gripe? Well, the boat’s at pier three on Gib. Ask anybody there for MacPherson. My papers read Malta,” he said, and laughed. “They always do. I’ll be casting off at nine-thirty.”

  He hung up before I could say I’d be there.

  I looked in on Tenley. She was sleeping like a baby who had cried too much. I wrote her a note on Reina Cristina stationery, saying the contract had been made and I’d see her back in Torremolinos. I d
idn’t say when because I didn’t know when.

  The afternoon launch took me across the bay to Gibraltar. I showed my passport and climbed the hill and prowled the main drag, which looked shabby and rundown like any main drag in any British colonial port I have ever seen. About eight-thirty I made my way back down the hill to the harbor, where MacPherson and a boatload of contraband were waiting.

  Lights were coming on along commercial mall when I got there. A big four-engined turboprop took off from the nearby runway, Gibraltar’s one and only, that bisects the isthmus connecting the Rock with the Spanish mainland at La Linea. When its banshee whine had faded, the pier three watchman unclamped his teeth from the stem of a curved briar, scratched behind his right ear with the mouthpiece and said, “MacPherson, is it? And you’d be going to Malta?”

  “If that’s where MacPherson’s going.”

  He thought that was very funny. “That’s where MacPherson always goes, laddie. Or so he says. What’s your name?”

  “Drum.”

  “You’re expected. She’s over there, the Marbella Lady. Funny name for a boat that plies between Gib and Malta, now isn’t it?” He laughed and sucked at his pipe again.

  Marbella Lady was a forty-foot inboard cruiser with a flying bridge. She sat high enough out of the water to make me wonder if the contraband had been loaded yet.

  “Ahoy, Marbella Lady,” I called. Nobody seemed to be aboard.

  The cockpit hatch opened, and a tall figure loomed. “Come aboard, Drum.”

  “Captain MacPherson?”

  He nodded. He was as tall as Paco Fuentes but as gaunt as a gallows. In the glow shed by the pier lights his face was all angles and hollows. The two deepest hollows hid his eyes. He was wearing an old yatchman’s cap crushed out of shape. I offered my hand to shake, but he declined it with a sour grunt.

  “She’s sitting pretty high,” I said in a friendly tone. “What are you running, a boatload of air?”

  “Hot air I don’t need from you, friend.”

  “So that’s the way it is,” I said. “I guess I don’t say pleased to meet you. I guess I put on my brass knucks Estepona last month. Can you use a rifle?”

  “Well what the hell did you expect?” he said. “I told you on the phone I got no use for a supercargo. Manzanarez wants me to take one, I play ball. I don’t have to like it. Where does your cut come from, friend?”

  “Didn’t Manzanarez say?”

  “Manzanarez said he was sending along a super on account of there’s been lots of highjacking along the coast lately. Christ, don’t I know it! I got my cargo lifted off Estepona last month. Can you use a rifle?”

  “Sure. What do you think Manzanarez sent me along for?”

  That was a mistake. MacPherson said, “In a pig’s ass. Manzanarez says we start shooting along the coast, we bring the Guardia. They’re paid off to keep their distance, unless we make like the Fourth of July. The rifles, they’re my idea, not Manzanarez’. So now I’ll ask you: what did Manzanarez send you along for, friend?”

  “Maybe he’s worried about you and your rifle.”

  MacPherson grunted again, sourly again. “Maybe. I told him. If I get highjacked I don’t get paid, and if I don’t get paid I been working for nothing. But get this straight, friend. If it happens tonight like it happened last month, and if you try to stop me, the first slug’s for you. It’s a Weatherby Magnum .300 and if you know your way around rifles I don’t have to tell you it can blow your goddam head off.”

  I said nothing. He asked, “Well, did he or didn’t he send you along to hold my hand in case of trouble?”

  “I’m thinking of making the run myself. I wanted to see the setup. That’s why Manzanarez sent me along.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  “I said I wanted to see the setup. Seeing how the possibility of highjackers makes your ulcer gnaw away at you, that’s part of the setup.”

  “Scared?”

  “Uh-uh. Curious. Also about the cargo. What is it?”

  “You could be customs.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Since when do the Gib customs people bother you? You’re not breaking any British laws. Besides, Manzanarez told you to reach me at the Reina Cristina, didn’t he? And I was there, wasn’t I? Leave your ulcer alone, MacPherson. It’ll dig a hole all by itself.”

  “What have you got to back up those wisecracks, friend?”

  I shrugged. MacPherson was a guy who had to make a conversation an argument, just as I was a guy who had to crack wise in front of a sourpuss. I said, “You can always decide to find out.”

  He looked at me a while and backed off. “I got enough worries as it is.”

  “What’s the cargo?”

  “Cigarettes,” he grunted. “American. Ships’ stores in waxed cartons. They’re a buck-eighty a carton aboard ship and at PX’s in North Africa. We get them for three-sixty a carton, we deliver them for six bucks a carton, and they sell in Spain for fifty-five pesetas a pack. That’s ninety cents, friend. I’m carrying six brands, three hundred cartons each. So my net ought to be forty-three hundred smackers minus operating costs, but it ain’t, not by a long shot. I usually put up cash for half the consignment, and Manzanarez sells shares for the other half. Then he lifts a third off the top of my half, and then I got to grease the Guardia’s palms. Me, I’m lucky if I come out of it with a stinking five-hundred clams.”

  “That’s not bad for a night’s work.”

  “Not unless the boss thinks you’re a troublemaker. And not unless—”

  “Manzanarez thinks you’re a troublemaker?”

  “Sure. I told you. He don’t like me to run the stuff armed. And he don’t like it, me telling some of the other boys to do likewise.”

  “You’re still in business. It’s still pretty good for a night’s work.”

  MacPherson was still unhappy. He said, “Not if you got to worry about highjackers it ain’t.”

  We were running in a smooth black sea about two miles off the coast on an easterly course. In a calm sea, Marbella Lady could make fifteen knots. By two-thirty that would have put us off Fuengirola. For four and a half hours I’d had nothing to do but listen to MacPherson’s morose account of his line of work and to the throbbing roar of the big inboard engine. But at two-thirty MacPherson cut our speed to half and said complainingly, “Wouldn’t you know it? Clouds I can do without. We lay off running lights, we can use a moon.”

  There was no moon. There were no stars. A solitary light showed on shore occasionally to let us know the world was still there. We could see each other faintly in the glow from the instrument panel.

  “We heading in?” I asked. “Where do we land?”

  “Nowhere. We stand off shore and get met by a couple of skiffs.”

  “Where?”

  “What’s the dif where?”

  “We ought to be close to Fuengirola,” I said.

  “Know the coast, huh?” MacPherson said grudgingly.

  “Who picks the stuff up, the Fuentes boys?”

  He seemed genuinely surprised. “Fuentes? I never heard of them.”

  Running at half speed, Marbella Lady turned in a wide arc toward the coast. MacPherson lit a cigarette. Then, because at half speed Marbella Lady ran quietly, I heard it. The roar of another powerful engine off somewhere in the darkness.

  MacPherson heard it too. He cut our own engine, and Marbella Lady drifted in the night. Somewhere ahead of us a light burst dazzlingly on the darkness. A big searchbeam probed across the water toward us, low, touching the calm sea with gold. It swung starboard and then came back. It held us. The roar of the engine grew louder.

  “Christ, it’s them!” MacPherson cried.

  “Can you outrun them?”

  “I tried that,” he said bitterly, “last month. They can make twenty knots and they got that light. But last month I didn’t have my Weatherby. Last month I hove-to and they shut their light and came aboard and took the stuff. I never even saw their go
ddam faces.”

  MacPherson laughed nervously. “This time we got a surprise for them.” Whatever his surprise was, he was in no hurry to spring it. The light was close and coming closer. He said, “You told me you could handle a rifle. Now prove it.” He left the instrument panel and returned with a bolt-action Weatherby rifle. “Here you go, friend. Shoot out that goddam light. The minute you do, that’s when we start running.”

  I went out on deck with the Weatherby. A faint offshore wind was blowing. The sea was flat and calm. The light grew bigger, brighter. I worked the rifle bolt, drew the butt of the stock against my shoulder, took a breath and held it, and fired. The Weatherby roared. It had a kick like a hopped-up burro.

  The light splintered, fragmented and was gone.

  Marbella Lady’s engine sprang to life. MacPherson shouted something. We turned fast and I almost pitched overboard. Then we were running straight. I returned to the cockpit. MacPherson was pleased with himself. He was chuckling.

  “You knew how to use it all right,” he said.

  And then a big fat Mediterranean moon peeped out from behind a bank of clouds.

  Seconds later there was a chattering, bursting roar behind us. I whirled to stare out the open door of the cockpit. MacPherson began to curse.

  They had a machine gun, and they were using it—tracer bullets and all. The tracers made quick leaping arcs low across the water. Too far to port, and then closer and then on target.

  MacPherson cut the engine a second time. “Christ, we can’t mess with that,” he said.

  We were drifting. The machine gun’s busy chattering roar stopped. So did the other boat’s engine. I could see it in the moonlight as it drifted up. It looked like a high-powered fishing boat, ungainly and ponderous, the kind they said out of the southern Spanish ports. It had two masts but no rigging. It didn’t need rigging. With its big engine it could overtake a swift cruiser like Marbella Lady.

  When it drifted close, a voice hailed us in Spanish, “Walk aft! No weapons! Hands high where we can see them!”

  MacPherson obediently put his hands up and left the cockpit. The machine gun had ripped his courage to shreds. I couldn’t blame him.

  “Just take it easy now,” he told me. “All them bastards want is the cargo. A machine gun,” he mused. “Christ, they never had a machine gun before.”