Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  That should have warned me, but I was playing it by ear. I followed MacPherson aft, my hands raised.

  “Hijos de la gran puta!” he shouted. “You can board.”

  Instead, very close, the machine gun roared and chattered deafeningly. It was set up on their foredeck, not fifty feet from us now. I dove for the deck and shouted a warning to MacPherson—too late. I could see the angry orange path of tracers disappear into his body. He danced wildly backwards, crashing against the cockpit bulkhead. He actually made it to his feet once. The tracers found him again. They stitched into his neck and head. Glass shattered behind him. He went down a second time. He would have to wait for Gabriel’s trumpet to rise again.

  The night was suddenly silent, except for the lapping of water against our lapstreak hull. Since diving for the deck, I hadn’t moved. The other boat drifted closer, I could hear voices, and they weren’t shouting.

  “You think both of them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They were talking Spanish.

  “Give them some more to be sure.”

  The machine gun roared, very close. They didn’t want our cargo. Or maybe they did. What difference did it make? The main thing they wanted to do was kill us. Wood splintered all around me. I told myself as soon as the machine gun stopped I would get up and dive overboard and stay under as long as I could, swimming, and then surface for air and then go under again and swim again.

  But first there was the fear. I could smell it in the stench of cordite, they were that close. I could taste it in my mouth. I could feel it on the deck-planking, wet with MacPherson’s blood. I could feel it too whenever wood splinters flew close to my face or against it. All I could do was wait. They were riddling the boat. I was sure they would get me. For no reason at all I thought of Tenley Hartshorn. She would have been magnificent in bed.

  The machine gun cut off. I was drenched with sweat and shaking. I was as limp as MacPherson’s bullet-riddled body. There was a thump, and another. They were fending off from us. It was dark then. The moon had drifted behind clouds again. I heard a thud, and the cruiser rocked slightly. A big man had jumped aboard. He missed me in the darkness, but he would be back. Faintly I could see him as he moved forward to MacPherson’s body. He crouched over it, grunting. Then he started coming back. The way he held one arm out in front of him probably meant he had a gun. I couldn’t be sure in the darkness. He was big enough, but not fat: he could have been Paco Fuentes. I couldn’t be sure of that either.

  He came close. His shoe prodded me. He wouldn’t be sure either, not unless he examined me, not unless he felt for a pulse or listened for a breath. I had MacPherson’s blood on me, but with MacPherson he could have really told. MacPherson must have been hit by fifty slugs. Half the bones in his body must have been smashed.

  The foot prodded me again. He might just decide to shoot. Why bother examining me? They weren’t stingy with ammunition, were they?

  I grabbed his leg and yanked as hard as I could. The gun went off. He shouted. I rolled and got to my knees and still rolling went over the side. I went under. The water was cool. I floated down in darkness until pressure hit my ears. Then I drew my legs up and removed my shoes, and then I started swimming. Toward shore? Away from it? I didn’t know. I’d lost my sense of direction.

  My lungs began to feel like lead. I had to surface, and when I did, gulping at air, I saw moonlight. I was only a couple of dozen yards away from both boats on the shoreward side. The machine gun chattered. Tracers knifed into the water five feet from my head, ricocheting and whining away. I surface-dived and stayed under and really swam.

  That goddam moon was going to kill me. It was there again when I came up for air a second time. Their engine was throbbing. They were moving dead-slow toward shore. They knew that was the way I had to go. I heard the stitching and saw the tracers. They were too high, over my head. I went under again.

  The third time I surfaced I was almost a hundred yards from them. The moon was playing hide-and-seek: gone now. If I did a crawl or a butterfly I’d move faster, but they might see me beating the water to froth. Still, I’d make better time on the surface as long as there was no moon. I settled for a sidestroke, with only my head out of the water. I swam at an angle toward shore with a couple of lights guiding me. They were heading straight in as slow as they could run, idling and drifting every once in a while. They passed fifty yards alongside of me. And then the moon appeared.

  I went under and kept swimming. Up again. The moon was still there. They were closer to shore than I was, and they must have realized they had gone too far too fast. They began to circle. I treaded water, waiting for my breathing to return to normal. Fatigue follows fear: the body squandering its resources too quickly. I was suddenly very tired.

  They circled too far to the left and came slowly around. I floated on my back. The moon disappeared behind a cloud again and I went into my sidestroke, only my head above the surface, left arm thrust forward and right arm thrust back and scissors kick and then bring the left arm in and glide and start all over again. The lights stayed where they were. I had a long way to go. But the longer it took them to spot me, the less likely it became that they would.

  The moon was out again, and no clouds near it. I treaded water and looked for them. They had returned to MacPherson’s boat. I swam on my back, sculling and then doing an easy, back breast stroke and watching them. After a long time the boats drifted apart. The throb of their engine was faint. MacPherson’s boat looked wrong. It seemed lopsided. After a while aft and starboard it seemed to rise out of the water. The prow went under. After that it sank quickly. The fishing boat with its powerful engine headed east along the coast toward Torremolinos.

  I swam shoreward, changing my stroke every few minutes. A muscle bunched up in my left shoulder and I had to turn over on my back and float. I was closer though. I could hear the gentle lapping of the surf. All of a sudden, without any doubt, I knew I would make it. And once I knew it, it was easy. It seemed only a few minutes after that when I dragged myself up on the beach. I couldn’t stop panting and my knees were rubbery. The wind was cold. I stripped my sodden clothes off and sat down behind a rock on the beach, and then the wind wasn’t so bad.

  My head hit the sand. I stayed there. The rest of the world spun off into orbit.

  chapter eleven

  “Clever. Real clever,” croaked a tired old voice like the cawing of the seagulls that had come to watch. “MacPherson they had slated for death, and then you poked your proboscis in. Why not take care of both of us at once? You paid them two thousand bucks to have yourself killed.”

  I groaned and sat up. I felt as if I had run a three-minute mile—on my hands. Every muscle in my body was stiff and my throat hurt where the tough Spaniard had chopped at it with his fingers. My mouth was gritty and tasted like rotten fish. I gazed around. The gulls took off over the water. Outcroppings of rock, like the one I had slept behind, poked up from the sand of the beach. Behind me was a cliff like the one the Lancia had gone over. When was that, thirty-six hours ago? It didn’t seem like more than six months.

  A shadow moved over my face. I wasn’t alone. The sun was low and the big shadow belonged to a small burro and two small boys shyly peering at me from the other side of the rock. They were up with the dawn collecting driftwood. The baskets hanging down the burro’s scrawny flanks were almost full.

  “Good morning,” I said in a cheerful croak, and they retreated behind the rock again. I reached for my clothes. They were still wet. I spread them out on top of the rock, said, “Don’t go away,” and walked down the beach into the sea. I waded some and swam a little and returned dripping to the beach. The boys and their burro were still there. I found some change and sodden peseta notes in my trouser pocket. “Can you get me some coffee and something to eat?” I said. “Churros maybe?”

  One of the boys nodded gravely. He didn’t take the money, he just held out his hand for it. When I gave it to him the two boys and the b
urro paraded off down the beach toward Fuengirola.

  I leaned against the rock, turning my face to the sun. Not only had the machine gun killed MacPherson, I thought, but first it had surprised the hell out of him. It wasn’t the way the highjackers operated, but still he had recognized their boat. Which meant that their mission last night was not merely to lift his cargo but to kill him. He was armed, and Pez Espada hadn’t liked that. Not only was he armed, but he had tried to talk the other contraband-runners into carrying weapons. Pez Espada had liked that even less.

  Why? He sliced his one-third off the top of what MacPherson and the other captains made, and he sold shares to pay for that part of their cargo they couldn’t afford. He made a profit there too, charging whatever commission he would charge. But investing in smugglers’ contraband was like investing in stocks—you could sink your money into Lunar Gold Mines, Inc. and watch it skyrocket to a fortune or watch it plunge off the bottom of the board, leaving you with certificates that might or might not make pretty wallpaper. The same with contraband. If highjackers lifted the cargo, you were clean out of luck. Not only wasn’t there a profit, but there was a total loss. Better luck next time, pal.

  But what if the highjackers took their orders from the broker? In this case, cigarettes. They’d sell for their ninety cents a pack and the profits would find their way back to Pez Espada or Manzanarez or whatever his name was, and there’d be no payoff to the investors. The cargo had been lost, hadn’t it? Pez Espada would pocket the profits himself.

  He couldn’t do it too often, not unless he wanted to be called the unluckiest broker in Algeciras. If that happened, the investors would find themselves another middleman. But he could do it often enough to make a fortune, and he could get away with it if other highjackers, having nothing to do with Pez Espada, lifted other cargoes every now and then—which probably happened.

  But I wasn’t interested in other highjackers. I was interested in Pez Espada. He had a nice game going, and MacPherson could have spoiled it, so MacPherson was murdered. I was poking around it and I had mentioned the Fuentes brothers and their cave, so I went on the same ride MacPherson went on. But half of Fuengirola knew the Fuentes brothers were smugglers. Then why all the fuss and bother?

  I touched my shirt spread out on the rock. It wasn’t dry, but it was dry enough. I got dressed, all but shoes. I didn’t have any shoes. All the fuss and botther was because the Fuentes brothers weren’t smugglers. They were highjackers—working with or for Pez Espada. And if it was assumed they were smugglers, that would be the best cover in the world. Everybody on the Costa del Sol loved a smuggler. Half of them invested their pesetas in contraband, through brokers like Pez Espada, and it was an easier way of turning a buck than taking a flyer on the loteria nacional. But highjackers they wouldn’t love. Every time a cargo was lifted it was a total loss to the investors. Tough luck, chico. You can always ask about a consignment to Malta the next time you’ve scrapped together a few pesetas.

  Had Robbie Hartshorn stumbled into that setup the way I had? If so, the Governor was wasting his money: by now Robbie Hartshorn would be a floater somewhere in the Mediterranean.

  The boys and their burro came back along the beach. They had a jar full of hot coffee and half a dozen warm churros on a stick for me. I drank the coffee and ate four of the doughnut-like churros, giving the remaining two to the boys. Their burro mournfully watched us eat.

  I traced a design in the sand with my bare toe. What I could do now was take my story to the Guardia, but how the hell would that help? Sergeant Martinez had warned me off. He was on the take. Whether he thought he was being paid by smugglers instead of highjackers was an interesting question, but letting him lift my passport for delivery at the border if I brought my story to him didn’t seem the way to find out. Or could I wait until Maruja was sent to her cousin’s place in Carihuela, then see who or what turned up at the cave. But so what? No doubt Pez Espada and his cronies would show up, and we’d already met, thank you. Or I could go back to the cave today and see the eighteen hundred cartons of cigarettes for myself and maybe learn something or other about the oddball relationship between Ruy Fuentes and Maruja. Tenley might or might not like what I learned.

  The trouble with all of that was it wouldn’t necessarily get me any closer to the mystery of Robbie Hartshorn’s disappearance. Money or sex, I’d told his wife. Looking for him, I’d messed with some of each. Either way the trail always led back to the cave of Fuentes. Unless I wanted to cable the Governor that except for throwing away two thousand bucks of his money I’d reached dead end, it looked like I’d have to pay another visit to the cave.

  Hope for the best this time, I thought. Maybe this time they won’t greet you with a death-ride or an attempted rape on the part of Maruja.

  I walked barefoot along the beach into Fuengirola. There was still the day to kill. If I hit the cave too early I’d find Paco at home. If I waited until he headed for the iron bull ring in late afternoon I might find the injured Ruy alone with Maruja.

  Money or sex—or some of each? They are both what make the planets spin, I thought, and yawned, and stretched and turned to look far down the beach at the tiny dots that were the two boys and their burro. The way to kill the day, for someone who had spent the night before as I had spent it, was to drag myself to a hotel and crawl into a room and commune with Morpheus. I was no growing child and didn’t need eight hours of sleep a night, but more than the hour and a half I’d had would be nice.

  I picked up a pair of rope sandals in a shop on a narrow street heading up from the beach to the caretera. The farmacia next door supplied me with razor, soap, toothbrush and paste. Other shops were just opening for business, their proprietors moving in that slow, sleepy way Spaniards move in the early morning when they know the day is going to be hot. They reminded me how bone-weary I was, as if I didn’t already know it.

  The hotel I found held down one corner of a square that had been strung with colored lightbulbs and crowded with stands and tents for the fair that followed the portable bull ring from small town to small town. A pair of Guardia were nosying around, and helped themselves to sardines that already had been grilled at one of the stands. A bootblack in his blue smock approached me, asked “Limpia botas?”, saw my rope sandals, shrugged and went looking elsewhere.

  I entered the hotel lobby, that was dark and cool and had a tile floor and a big stuffed bull’s head over the clerk’s desk. The head had been cleverly done. The bull’s tongue protruded and it seemed to be frothing at the mouth.

  “I’d like a room for today,” I told the clerk.

  “You mean now, this morning?” He was small and not at all dapper. He wore a dark blue jacket and no tie. His shirt collar was dirty, he needed a shave more than I did, the whites of his eyes were yellowish and red-flecked and he almost tripped over his shaking hand shoving a bottle of wine out of sight behind the desk.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’ll be checking out late this afternoon. What I want is some sleep now.”

  He smiled. I smiled and waited while he looked me over. He said, “All the world has come to Fuengirola for the running of the bulls.”

  “I’m sure they have, but do you have a room?”

  “The price,” he said, still looking me over, “is three hundered pesetas—in advance for someone who wishes a room only by the day.”

  He kept drumming on the desk with his hand, over where he’d hid the bottle. I paid and he said, “If I may have your passport, señor?”

  I’d forgotten that little detail about the passport. In Spain you don’t just register at a hotel, you register through the hotel and by means of your passport with the police. For a moment I thought of Sergeant Martinez, but then I shrugged. By local standards Martinez was a bigshot: it would be several cuts beneath his dignity to fill out tourist cards. Some Guardia clerk as sleepy as I was would scrawl a few words on a card, to show I had spent the day in a hotel in Fuengirola, the card would find its way, after normal
Spanish delay, into a musty file, and that would be that.

  My passport was sodden. It was one of the old, paper-covered green books, renewed, and the green dye had run on the pages. The clerk handled it distastefully, swapping a key on a metal plaque for it.

  “No luggage?” he said.

  “Not this trip.”

  “Conchita!” he called. “The maid will show you to your room, señor.”

  She wore black, and a frilly white apron. Though her mustache needed a bleach or a trim or both, she was too young and too pretty to be wasting her time mopping floors in a dive like this one—unless, as seemed likely by the way she wobbled her pelvis along the hall ahead of me, she performed other functions, payment naturally in advance, on request. She showed me to my room, opened it with her own key, entered ahead of me, pulled the cord that raised the shutters, turned and smiled close to my face so I could get a whiff of the garlic she’d eaten for breakfast, and asked, “You weesh fleet?”

  “Do I wish what?”

  “Fleet.” She made a spraying motion with her hands. “For to keel flies. Fleet.”

  I told her no thanks, I wouldn’t bother them if they wouldn’t bother me.

  “You weesh anything else, you call for Concha. Anything, señor. Is why I am here. Americanos del Norte I like. You un’erstan’?”

  I said I understood. She went to the door reluctantly, swishing her tail like a mare. I shut it behind her and looked at the room. It contained an ancient brass bed with what would be a lumpy mattress, a beat-up dresser with a cracked glass top, a wooden chair and some hooks on the wall instead of a closet. There was a chipped sink in one corner, big enough to soak your head in if you didn’t have thick hair. I closed the shutters, having first looked out on the square with its tents and stands, stripped off my rumpled clothes, crawled under the covers and fell asleep the way you shut off a light.