Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  I lay on my right side, opened one eye a little and heard a band in the square playing España Cani, a patriotic song and a bullfighting song as Spanish as an authentic flamenco and almost as stirring. They had a pretty sweet trumpet down there. I listened contentedly, telling myself it was the music that had awakened me, until I smelled the garlic.

  There was a sigh next to me on the lumpy mattress as I rolled over on my back. The garlic smell grew strong enough to scare off the Evil Eye. Hair tickled my cheek. Something soft and firm at the same time, which only could have been a woman’s breast, brushed against my left arm.

  “Querido,” smiled Concha, “I thought you would sleep, and sleep, and sleep.”

  I sat up. She tugged at my arm, but not very hard. “Scram,” I said. “I told you I understand. I didn’t say I was interested.”

  “No comprendo,” she said in a husky voice. She tried to draw me down. Beyond her on the back of the room’s single chair I saw her black dress and the frilly white apron and nothing else. Concha was a girl who could get ready to perform her services, if you wanted them, in jig-time.

  “Dress yourself,” I told her in Spanish, “and go mop some floors. I came here to sleep.”

  “Truly, Querido? You do not mean that.”

  She glanced at the door—too anxiously. I was suddenly wide awake. I got up fast, grabbing her elbow and yanking her off the bed. She was as naked as the truth every detective hopes to find. Again she glanced at the door, nervously.

  “Get going, sister,” I said. “With or without your dress. It’s all the same to me. What I ought to do is throw you out the window.”

  Her smooth shoulders slumped. She looked crestfallen and contrite. “I make beeg mistake. If you weesh it, I go.”

  She went to the chair and picked up her dress. But instead of slipping into it, she grasped it firmly with both hands and ripped it from collar to hem. Then, while I stood there in my shorts gaping, she let go with a scream. It would have done a howler monkey, that can be heard for five miles, proud.

  There was a sound at the door, as of a key being inserted in the lock. Concha, still naked, her face still in repose as it had remained during the scream, hurled herself at me. She screamed again, breathed garlic at me and clawed my face with the sharp nails of her left hand.

  That was when the door opened.

  The small, dirty-collared and yellow-eyed clerk had been waiting in the wings with Sergeant Martinez. On cue they entered. Concha flung herself on the bed, sobbing. The clerk was drunk. Sergeant Martinez removed his winged patent-leather hat, gave me a wistful smile and then a reproachful scowl.

  Concha, sobbing, recited, “This man called me, to prepare a bath he said. I came along the hall. The door was open. I entered. He shut the door. He was not dressed, except as you see him. He attacked me. I screamed.”

  “Fortunately for you,” I said, “Sergeant Martinez happened to be right outside in the hall.”

  Sergeant Martinez said, “Conchita, compose yourself and repeat what you have said.”

  She repeated it, word for word, while Sergeant Martinez smiled his wistful smile at me again. We both knew, of course, he would get away with it. There wasn’t any doubt. There never is, in Spain, not if the Guardia Civil decides to lean on you.

  The repetition of Concha’s speech, without sobs, was to give the clerk the cue he’d failed to pick up. He was staring drunkenly and lecherously at Concha’s bare plump posterior.

  “Señor Lorca,” Martinez asked, “she is a good girl?”

  On cue this time, Lorca said, “Other chambermaids I have known would perhaps, for money.… accommodate a rich American.… but never Conchita, the daughter of my sister-in-law’s cousin.”

  “Then if she says he attacked her, you believe this?”

  “Clearly,” Lorca agreed. He couldn’t get his eyes off Concha. “It is a thing I am sure of.”

  “Then you would make an official denunciation of this man?”

  “Since he tried to attack the daughter of my sister-in-law’s cousins, it is my duty.”

  “And you, pobrecita?” Martinez asked Concha.

  The poor little thing sniffled, “If it is my duty.”

  It was her duty. Lorca brought her a new dress, and she put it on. I got dressed.

  Two more Guardia were in the hall. We all went outside and through the square, that was crowded now in mid-afternoon. I was flanked by the two Guardia. In badly wrinkled shirt and slacks and needing a shave, I must have looked sinister. Every pair of eyes turned to watch our little procession as it left the square, went along the street to the Guardia substation and up the stairs there and under the sign that said: Toda por la Patria.

  chapter twelve

  I never laid eyes on the official denunciations made by Sr. Lorca and Concha, but they must have been beauties. If a foreigner is denounced in Spain, and it happens to some of the cut-ups among the expatriate set on the Costa del Sol, he is usually granted a couple of weeks to clear out. I wasn’t given any time at all.

  Back I went into the small whitewashed room. Through its thick door as the afternoon became evening I heard voices and comings and goings and the ringing of a telephone and a hunt-and-peck typist at work. Somewhere along in there Sr. Lorca’s voice and Concha’s went away, and other voices, male, took their place. I heard laughter too, but it wasn’t very encouraging.

  At seven the street was crowded with aficionados leaving the iron bull ring—an occasional loud voice quickly swallowed by the shuffle of many feet. You are subdued and in no mood to talk when you have seen the running of the bulls.

  By eight the fiesta in the square had started up again. There was music and singing and shouting and fireworks. The main room of the Guardia substation had become quiet. Just when I decided they had forgotten all about me, the lock turned and the door opened and Don Quixote minus his beard smiled in at me. “We have your reservations,” he said.

  “Where am I going?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Well, not to the Alcazar, I guess.”

  He laughed. He could afford to. His side had won. Why get into a stew?

  “Iberia Airlines from Malaga to Madrid at ten-forty. The two o’clock Air France flight from Madrid to Paris. What you do after reaching Paris is your own affair.”

  “As long as what I do doesn’t get done in Spain.”

  “You are finished in Spain.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t complain,” I said. “Being kicked out isn’t so bad. It’s better than what happened to Stu Huntington. It’s better than what happened to an American contraband-runner named MacPherson. They shot him inside the three-mile limit, by the way. He was murdered in Spain. Naturally you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Naturally you never heard of anyone named Pez Espada.”

  “It is as you say.”

  “Or Señor Manzanarez?”

  He shrugged. Looking at him, I thought both names had meant nothing to him. He seemed puzzled.

  “Would I have banged my head against a brick wall if I hadn’t been denounced, sergeant? Is Robbie Hartshorn dead?”

  “I wish, señor, somebody could inform me. It is my job to find him.”

  “Sure. It’s also your job, as you see it, to take your cut from smugglers who run their contraband up the coast from Gibraltar.”

  “Señor,” Martinez asked with reproachful erudition, “don’t you know the story of El Cid, the national hero of Spain, who stole from the rich to give to the poor?”

  “A Spanish Robin Hood. Uh-huh. So what?”

  “Suppose the little people along this coast could profit from the activities of these smugglers, by investing in small percentages of their cargo in advance. It is such a terrible thing that is being done?” Martinez smiled his Don Quixote smile. “Of course, if you repeat what I have said to anyone, I would deny it. But suppose, just suppose, the poor are made a little less poor by this smuggling. Suppose it means
milk for a sick child or meat on the family table once a week. Suppose it means a doctor’s fee when a doctor can make the difference between life and death. Suppose—”

  “Suppose,” I cut him off, “you weren’t dealing with smugglers who bought their cargo in Gibraltar, part of which the little people you were talking about invested in. Suppose you were dealing with highjackers. Suppose you’d been duped, sergeant.”

  “Highjackers? I do not understand the word.”

  I explained. “They lift the cargo from the smugglers, sergeant. Having made no investment at all, they sell it in Spain. And since it was a total loss to the runners of contraband, it’s a total loss to the small investors. No milk, no meat, no doctors, no difference between life and death. Suppose that’s what the Fuentes brothers have been doing, right under your nose?”

  He started to smile again, but took a look at my face and changed his mind. He made clubs of his hands and raised them toward his face and stared at them. He said softly, “You’re mad.”

  “You could check on a bodega in Algeciras called La Perla. It’s run by a guy named Manzanarez and known, to a few people, as Pez Espada. He’s a contraband broker. He knows which cargoes are worth lifting and which aren’t. He knows how often he can get away with it. Suppose he passes the word along to the Fuentes brothers who, let’s say, own a fast cruiser disguised as a fishing boat. They use it to lift the smugglers’ cargo. Your little people never have a chance.”

  Martinez began to relax. “The Fuentes brothers own no such craft. If, in fact, anyone in Fuengirola did, I would know of it. Fuengirola is only a village, señor.”

  “Torremolinos is bigger, and close. That’s where the highjackers’ boat was heading last night. They’ve got dozens of fishing boats pulled up on the beach at Carihuela.” An idea hit me then, and I went on, “Dona Maruja has a cousin in Carihuela, doesn’t she? Maybe they’re keeping it in the family. Maybe the boat belongs to him.”

  “I still say you are mad. Why should I believe what you tell me?”

  “Why don’t you look into it? I can’t—now.”

  For a while Martinez said nothing. He sat on the bare bedspring and stared between his knees at the floor. “What they have been doing is no evil thing,” he said at last. “I have not been dishonoring my uniform to turn away and let them do it. Mother of God, man, I’ve known Ruy Fuentes all his life, and his father before him. Ruy is a good boy. He would not do such a thing as you suggest.”

  “Was it his idea to send Concha to my room at the hotel?”

  “Your passport. It came with some others. It was wet. The duty non-com was puzzled, and brought it to my attention. I called Doña Maruja, and she said you had been to the cave again. I did what I had to do.”

  “Sure. Was covering up Stu Huntington’s murder something you had to do?”

  That was the right question from my point of view but the wrong one from his. He clammed up on me. He took a pack of Bisontes from the pocket of his uniform blouse and lit one. He tossed the pack at me. I had a smoke. A few minutes later one of the Guardia poked his head in through the doorway to say, “El coche, sargente. Está aquí.”

  “The car for the airport,” Martinez told me, and we went outside together into the noise of the fiesta.

  Malaga Airport shared a pattern of runways with the military airbase on the coastal littoral midway between Torremolinos and Malaga. The terminal building was low and rambling, its tile roof and restaurant patio lit by floodlights, its observation deck lit by baby-spots.

  We drove through the gate in the high cyclone and barbed wire fence about an hour before flight time. For company I had the two Guardia who had escorted me from the hotel. The older one looked bored and indifferent. The younger looked very satisfied with himself. I decided he was the one who would accompany me on the flight to Madrid to see that I boarded the Air France plane. It wasn’t every day a provincial cop got as far as the capital.

  If this had been anywhere but Spain the rest of what happened wouldn’t have happened. The older cop or his young sidekick would have produced a pair of nippers, I’d have been handcuffed to one of them on the ride and handcuffed to the one who went with me to Madrid, and that would have been that. But this was Spain, and while tourism may have been a fun thing for the Americans toting their cameras and Fielding’s Travel Guides in and out of the airport, it was serious business to the boys who had to balance the Spanish budget. Anything that smacked of a police state, especially as it applied to an American, even if a rumpled and beard-sprouting American, would be as welcome as a black-widow spider in a love nest.

  So look, ma, I started thinking as the car pulled up near the baggage platform and we got out, no handcuffs. It was just an idea, but as such ideas will, it nibbled. We entered the terminal building through a side door and past a creaky guard who looked old enough to have earned his sinecure as a veteran of the Spanish American War. He wore high leather boots, crossed leather bandoliers on his gray uniform blouse and a high-crowned sombrero with the brim rolled and the chin strap secured under his wattles. At his side was a holster that might have been stuffed with cobwebs. He saluted the Guardia, and they saluted him. He gave me a gravely bored look, as if every night two or three deportees passed through the door he guarded. Maybe they did.

  Inside, a uniformed dispatcher who seemed to be expecting us gave the older Guardia some forms to fill out. The younger one motioned me to a bench along one wall of the small room and sat down next to me. The minute hand on a wall-clock jerked forward two minutes, as if it had been asleep on the job and suddenly remembered what it was supposed to do. From an amplifier on the wall a woman’s voice blared the arrival of an Iberian Airlines flight from Barcelona, and pretty soon I could hear the plane’s engines as it taxied up outside. The minute hand of the clock jerked again, kicking into the past two minutes of the time Governor Hartshorn was paying me for.

  I began to feel frustrated and angry. What I have to sell is time, whatever brains I come equipped with, and enough guts to do what has to be done in a world neither the Governor nor I had made. Time was passing, whatever brains I own had been enough to uncover the highjacking setup but not enough to learn what had happened to Robbie Hartshorn, and my intestinal fortitude, such as it was, hadn’t earned me a thing this trip. Now I was being thrown out of Spain, and if I caught the first jet from Paris to New York and the first plane from New York to Washington, tomorrow I could be sipping mint juleps with the Governor and telling him, sorry old boy but it looks as if we don’t get to find out what happened to your son. Well, the hell with him. He was a drunkard anyway.

  The minute hand jerked again. The Guardia finished filling out his papers. A dark and pretty ground hostess came in, and he stood against the wall staring at her speculatively and scratching his belly.

  Look, ma, I thought again, no handcuffs. But both Guardia wore pistol holsters, and theirs wouldn’t be stuffed with cobwebs.

  At ten-fifteen the dispatcher spoke to the older Guardia, who looked at me and nodded. The young Guardia stood up. I got after him and he took my arm in a grip as easy to break as the news I would have to break to Governor Hartshorn.

  We all went through another door to a gravel path skirting the dining patio on the tarmac side of the terminal building. A crowd of tourists were milling behind a chain to our left, as tourists do when they are waiting for a plane on which the seats haven’t been assigned. When we passed them I heard voices speaking English.

  “Why don’t they let us board?” a woman asked her husband querulously. “That’s our plane out there, the Viscount.”

  “It’s still early,” he said.

  “But if it’s our plane. Look at this mob! There won’t be enough seats to go around. I’ve heard how they sometimes over-book, and then you’re just out of luck if you.—”

  “It’s still early,” the man said. He was embarrassed.

  “Well, when they let that chain down you just grab my hand and run. Hear, Hector?”

 
; “Okay, okay already,” Hector said.

  We passed them. The woman said, “They’re boarding now.”

  “They’re police,” Hector said.

  “Does that make their tickets any better than ours?”

  “Please, dear,” Hector said.

  I heard a clanking sound. Hector’s wife had unhooked the chain from its stanchion and dropped the loose end on the concrete apron bordering the gravel path.

  “Eloise,” Hector said.

  Footsteps crunched on gravel behind us.

  What the Guardia had intended avoiding by getting me aboard early was the walking race that develops when a planeload of anxious tourists are told their flight is ready. I’d seen it happen at a dozen airports: a ground hostess usually leads them out, setting a brisk but dignified pace. But then the tourists, thinking of window seats in any plane, thinking of forward seats in a pure jet and aft seats in a jet-prop like the Viscount, really start stepping out. And when they do, the ground hostess would have to be a Wilma Rudolph to keep up with them.

  It was happening now. Eloise and her reluctant husband overtook us. A spry old number carrying a raincoat slung over one arm overtook us. A young couple half-trotting hand in hand overtook us. By the time we had covered half the distance to the Viscount, we were caught up in the walking race.

  A pair of floodlights from the roof of the terminal building gleamed on the Viscount’s sleek silver skin. There were lights on poles at the edge of the patio behind us, but it was quite dark on what now had become a racecourse and pitch dark to right and left. Darkness, and passengers walking hard on their heels, not quite running. The Guardia couldn’t go for their guns, not unless their lives depended on it. Robbie Hartshorn’s life, if Robbie Hartshorn was still alive, might depend on my getting away from them.

  The younger Guardia was still holding my arm. Two fat German women in tweedy suits too hot for the climate stomped by. I started walking faster, as if the race was contagious. The Guardia didn’t like that. If we couldn’t board first they wanted us to board last, after the game of musical chairs inside the Viscount. The one holding my arm yanked back on it. I helped out by stopping suddenly and driving my elbow into his middle. He squawed and bent and let go of my arm. I sprinted off as fast as I could into the darkness, doubling back toward the far end of the terminal building. That was the most direct route to the gate. They’d know I had to head for it. It was the only way out. I had to beat them there.