Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  I hit the asphalt road beyond the terminal, my knees still driving hard. Ahead I could see the light over the gate. Seventy-five yards, maybe a hundred. Just a few seconds, but this was the bad place. I’d be silhouetted against the light. If they felt in the mood for plinking at fugitive deportees, they might take some pot shots at me. Maybe Sergeant Martinez would pin a medal on them.

  With fifty yards to go, I ran off the road and across a lawn and through some hedges. I hunkered down behind the hedges, getting my breath. In a few seconds one of the Guardia came running past, and then the other. The second one ran at a crouch and had lost his hat. Both had their guns drawn. They rushed out through the gate. I heard footsteps pounding pavement, and then silence. What would I do in their place? I’d split up, one heading for Torremolinos, one for Malaga. There were only two. There wasn’t a third who could cross the road and search along the beach. Or, even if they decided on the beach instead of the road, which wasn’t likely because they knew a fugitive would make better time on pavement and might even get a lift, I could hug the shadows near the cliffs looming over the sand and still make it safely to Torremolinos.

  I trotted up to the gate and waited there a while. Maybe they figured I might let them pass me. Maybe one of them was lurking in wait out there. Beyond the cone of light I could see nothing. I stooped for a handful of gravel from the road-shoulder and tossed it through the gate. No response. I slipped out fast, crossed the road and a field that was furrowed and under cultivation and a screen of high rushes to break the sea wind, and then I was on the beach. A half-mile to my right, the cliffs began.

  It was four miles or better to Torremolinos. I started walking.

  chapter thirteen

  Midnight had come and gone by the time I climbed the stairs to the high terrace of La Atalaya, the Hartshorn villa. Nothing had changed, not even the inevitable expatriate party. Flamenco music wailed from hi-fi, every window except those in the bedroom wing was brightly lit and a woman even drifted out on the terrace when I arrived.

  This time I was lugging the memory of two hard nights instead of my B-4 bag, and this time I was winded. The woman wasn’t Nancy Huntington. This one was a studious-looking and not particularly sober blonde with frizzly hair.

  “I needed some air,” she told me. “Lordie-lord-lord, the way some people never stop yammering. Needed some air too, I’ll bet. Huh?”

  “What I need they put out in bottles. Is Tenley around?”

  “If so, she wouldn’t be in that auditorium they call a living room. She Hates the Expatriate Set—all with capital letters, please. Might be reading in her own room or downstairs talking with the maids, those who aren’t making up snacks as fast as those hungry mouths in there can gobble them.”

  “Which one would be Tenley’s room?”

  The frizzly-haired blonde said, “Did anybody ever tell you you had a sexy voice? You do, you know.”

  I said nothing. Idly I wondered how she’d made up her mind about that, since she’d done most of the talking. “I’ve got a theory about voices,” she said. “You can always tell how sexy a man is going to be by his voice. Take actors now. Louis Hayward, there was a bird who couldn’t act for beans in my book, but he had one helluva sexy voice. Or Orson Welles. I met Orson on the Riviera a few seasons back at Gabrielle Reynaud’s villa on the Cap. Your voice reminds me of—”

  A small, scrawny man with a bitter mouth stood by the open French doors at the end of the terrace. “There you are,” he said, “and running off at the mouth as usual about those sexy voices of yours. Amigo, did she tell you you had a sexy voice? A real sexy voice maybe like Orson Welles?” He told the blonde bitterly, “You try climbing into bed on a cold night with a sexy voice.”

  “Ah, Charlie,” she said.

  “Shut up and come on inside where I can keep an eye on your sexy ears. Though why the hell I bother, that I don’t know.”

  “Ah, Charlie,” she said again.

  “Shut up.”

  “What did I do? What did I say? I just—”

  They went inside whining at each other.

  I found Tenley in the large kitchen with a couple of old Spanish women in black dresses and white aprons making fancy little sandwiches, the kind you eat at one fast nibble and then wonder what they were and then say the hell with it and take a drink. Tenley was wearing tapered slacks and a red blouse with a scoop-neckline. The smile she gave me when I came in was worth flying three thousand miles for.

  “Am I glad to see you,” she said. “When I woke up and found your note, I started imagining all sorts of things—none of them good.” She flushed then, remembering our last moments together. “Did you.… did we.… do anything?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I guess it runs in the family. I was looped.”

  “I was noble,” I said. “I tucked you in, that’s all.”

  She looked relieved, but a little wistful too. “You’re a nice guy, Chet.”

  “I’m a fugitive,” I said, and then told her what had happened. She listened with mounting impatience, as if she had something to say and wished I’d finished so she could spit it out. “Next time,” I told her, “they’ll probably put the nippers on me and deliver me to the border in a sealed van. Is there a gun in this house? Did your father have one?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did. Not that he ever used it. It was a Beretta he took off an Italian officer during the war. He was very proud of it. What do you want a gun for?”

  “I’m going back to the cave. Why does anybody want a gun?”

  “She’s not at the cave,” Tenley said quickly.

  “Who? Maruja?”

  “She came here about an hour ago.”

  That surprised me. “Maruja was here?” I asked stupidly. “You mean at La Atalaya?”

  “That’s right. She came looking for Fernando Robles. They went off together.”

  The blind sculptor and the gypsy woman, I thought, getting no message out of it. Then Tenley said, “I intended following them, but a noisy drunk cornered me on the terrace and began chewing my ear off. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, they were gone. What would Maruja be doing in Torremolinos, Chet? The way I heard it, she never left the cave.”

  “Sometimes she did. She’s got a cousin who lives in Carihuela. The highjacking boat could be his.”

  “I’ll never believe Ruy had anything to do with highjacking—or murder.”

  “You been back to Fuengirola? How is he?”

  She looked away. “I don’t know. I wanted to see him. I got cold feet. I couldn’t face him and Maruja, not after the last time I saw them together. What are you going to do?”

  “Borrow your old man’s gun if I can, then go looking for Maruja’s cousin.”

  “You’re like a bulldog,” she sighed. “Sometimes I wish you’d never come to Spain. Sometimes I’m afraid of what you’re going to find.”

  “Anything specific in mind?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m so confused. Ruy would never.… he’s so gentle.… he’s no criminal. Wait here. I’ll get the gun.”

  While she was getting it, I popped a dozen of the tiny sandwiches in my mouth. A few minutes later, with the Beretta in my belt and my shirttails out, I was heading down the outside stairs. Tenley called after me softly, “Chet? About the gun?”

  I waited. “My father always said it would make a—a fitting suicide weapon. He’d had to kill the Italian officer, you see. It was the only time he saw action in the war. When he was drunk he often said he felt like a murderer. Sometimes he used to fondle the gun, almost lovingly, and Andrea had to take it away from him. It would be fitting, he said, almost as if the Italian, his victim, came back to murder him. He used to say that’s why he took to drinking.”

  It wasn’t enough reason. It never is. I started thinking of a command post near the Elbe River, and a white-blond kid in Hitler’s final desperate army who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. I hadn’t been exactly a graybeard. I
’d had four years on him. He’d loomed out of the night, firing once, getting my left arm above the elbow. I let him have my bayonet in the chest and I had to plant my combat boot against his ribs and lean all my weight on it to get the blade gratingly out. There were fifty million of us, I thought, in every country’s uniform, and some of us got killed and most of us did the killing. It wasn’t enough reason. It never is.

  Midway on the beach between Torremolinos and Montemar, a smaller more exclusive watering-place for the expatriate set, the little whitewashed houses of Carihuela huddled on their narrow, crooked streets. It was still just a fishing village, a stubborn anachronism whose every street seemed to end on the water, bordered on one side by high cliffs and on the other by a steel-and-glass hotel that was the last word in Miami Beach modern, complete with tile tennis courts, a spotlit swimming pool and a doorman in white livery who could direct the Caddies and Mercedes Benzes around the big circular driveway in fourteen languages.

  I hit the beach at the cliff end of Carihuela. A fat Mediterranean moon greeted me, and the winking eyes of the lights of a string of fishing boats about half a mile offshore. At the far end of the beach, the tall tower of the luxury hotel, all lit up, looked like an electronic phallic symbol. A few of the ungainly boats weren’t out that night. They’d been drawn up on the sand on wooden runways, and fishermen sat under their prows near small olive-wood fires, mending nets. Spain is nothing if not stylized: every boat, every fisherman, every net stretched on the sand, every fire on the beach looked the same.

  The first five fishermen never heard of Maruja. Their responses were stylized too. They looked at me, then glanced over their shoulders at the big hotel, assuming I had come from it and wondering what had brought me out of its sterile twentieth century world to a beach eroded by sewage ditches and backed by shanties where in the darkness pigs snuffled in the garbage heaps for their middle of the night snacks and where, lit by an occasional fire, the fishermen worked the night through because they preferred darkness to the heat of the day.

  The sixth fisherman, more than halfway across the beach, gave me the same no answer. He was sitting crosslegged with a teen-aged boy, both of them mending a net. “No, señor,” the man said. “Never have I heard of this gypsy Maruja.” He waited gravely for me to go away, not impatient and not unfriendly, but as closed as a clam. But the boy looked at me with interest.

  “Many gypsies live in Carihuela,” he said. “Many others visit here.”

  “Enough, chico,” grumbled the man, and then I knew I was getting the silent treatment from all of them. If they knew Maruja and Maruja’s cousin, and in a place as small as Carihuela probably they did, why should they tell me? A foreigner in the middle of the night, who came snooping around for no reason they could see?

  I stood there, waiting. The boy kept looking at me. The man shrugged and picked up a wineskin, holding it out at arm’s length and squirting a hissing stream of wine into the back of his throat before biting off the stream and dropping the skin. It looks easy but isn’t. You need plenty of practice before you can do it without squirting wine all over your face. I’d had the practice, long ago, with a girl I knew in Washington whose father had been the American consul in Barcelona. She used to pass a wineskin around at parties and squeal with delight at all the wine on all the surprised faces. My eventual facility with it had led to pleasanter things, as if that was the way she tested her men. Who needs a sexy voice?

  I wondered if I remembered the technique. It seems easy until you have had enough, and then, when you try to stop the flow of wine, that’s when it gets sloppy.

  “My throat is dry as the sand,” I said gravely in Spanish.

  A looked passed between the man and the boy. Spaniards are hospitable, but they’re not above having a laugh at the expense of a foreigner. “Forgive me, señor,” said the man. He passed the wineskin to me and waited expectantly. The boy smiled a little in anticipation.

  I raised the skin, titlted the nozzle down toward my face, parted my lips and squeezed. The wine, acid but earthy, jetted into my throat. I held the stream, steady and hissing, a few seconds more than the fisherman had. Then I bit it off cleanly, turned the skin up and returned it gravely to its owner. “Gracias, señor,” I said. “Your wine is excellent.”

  “I thank you for saying so. It is from the vines of my uncle who lives in Churriana.”

  “Commend him for me.”

  “As you say, señor.” He smiled a grave Spanish smile. He was pleased with the way I had handled the skin.

  “Adiós.”

  “Adiós.”

  I started walking off, in no hurry.

  “Señor? A moment. Is this not the best of all ways to drink the good vino tinto?”

  “If the wine’s good, any way’s good to drink it.”

  “Who was it you said you wished to find?”

  “A gypsy woman called Maruja, who lives in Fuengirola. Or her cousin who lives here in Carihuela.”

  “It has just returned to my memory, señor. A man, a fisherman in the village, has a cousin who is a gypsy from Fuengirola. He is called Rafael Jimenez.”

  “Rafael Jímenez, that is right,” the boy said.

  They told me how to find Rafael Jimenez’s house. I left the beach with a silent thanks for the American consul’s daughter.

  chapter fourteen

  The houses were connected, their doorways opening on the unpaved street with no intermediary sidewalk or stoops. Most of the doorways were blocked by nothing more substantial than heavy hanging curtains, and the continuous wall of adobe façade was white as bone in the moonlight. Distantly I heard the metallic tears of a flamenco guitar sobbing its tragic song into the night.

  Then I heard brisk footsteps. I drifted into the shadow of a curtained doorway, waiting, remembering I was a fugitive, holding my breath. A Guardia came by in his winged patent-leather hat, confident and cocky. That was all I needed. They probably had my description by now all down the coast from Malaga to Algeciras. The Guardia stalked up the street, a sten gun slung on his shoulder. I waited, and didn’t quite jump a foot when a man called out in his sleep on the other side of the curtained doorway.

  Rafael Jímenez’s house was the fourth from the corner, this street. When I reached it, the guitar was fainter. The doorway was curtained. Beyond the heavy hanging I heard voices, a man’s choked with anger, a woman’s placating but caustic. They were speaking Spanish.

  “I’m telling you that is too much money,” the man said. “Where is my profit? I take risks too.”

  “We all take risks, Fernando,” the woman said, and I recognized the throaty purr of the gypsy Maruja. “I take risks, my cousin Rafael takes risks, my boys do. We all take risks. And you have been telling me the same thing for an hour.”

  “Was it for this Huntington was killed?”

  “You know why Huntington was killed.”

  “I know that now, after he is dead, you ask too much money.”

  “It is not my idea, but his. The new one.”

  “Then tell him I won’t pay. I refuse to pay that much.”

  “Very well. Then you don’t get them.”

  There was a silence. Fernando said, “Take me back.”

  “Very well,” Maruja said again, indifferently.

  “No. Wait. This one time I will pay what he demands. But only this one time.”

  “That,” Maruja said, “is between the two of you.”

  “I will see him,” Fernando said threateningly.

  Maruja laughed. “Then see him. Argue with him. Don’t argue with me.”

  “In the morning I’m going to Ronda.”

  “He won’t like that.”

  “I don’t like what I have to pay. Take me back.”

  “To La Atalaya?”

  “No. My house.”

  “The money first.”

  I heard a chair scrape back, then footsteps beyond the curtain. I moved silently to the next doorway and flattened myself in its darkness.


  A few seconds later Maruja and Fernando came out. His hand rested lightly on her arm. They started walking. I didn’t have to follow them. I knew where they were going. I gave them five minutes and made my way through the narrow Carihuela streets to the highway and along that back to Torremolinos and down the Calle San Miguel, that nobody called the Avenida Generalísimo Franco though officially that was its name, and down the steps at the end of the street to the sculptor’s house.

  No sounds there, except the faint rustling of the night wind in the rushes back of the house. I waited a few yards off in the darkness, wishing I had a cigarette and wondering if Maruja had come and gone, wondering if North Country would be home from the shindig at La Atalaya yet, and if home, sleeping.

  Then I heard a clinking sound from the back of the house, steady, rhythmic, not very loud. I gave Maruja another five minutes, but she didn’t show up. If she’d returned up the steps, I’d have passed her, but she could have gone back to her cousin’s place in Carihuela along the beach. I decided to do some more snooping.

  What I forgot was that the object of my snooping was a blind man. The back of the house, facing away from the moonlight, was dark. I could barely make out two windows on ground level. The steady clink-clink-clink came from one of them. Fernando could have been hard at work on a bronze to turn Rodin’s ghost green with envy, but he was a blind man and he wouldn’t need any light to do it.

  Thirty minutes dragged themselves by like weary and blindfolded picadors’ nags, battered and scarred and wishing they were on the way to the glue factory instead of waiting for the sound of the bull’s hooves and the feel of its horns. Along the beach, a dog yipped. All of a sudden the clinking sound stopped. The shutters of the window opened then and Fernando’s head appeared there. I was all of two feet from him. He leaned on the sill, took a few deep breaths of the sea air, yawned, stretched, seemed to stare straight at me, yawned again, ducked his head back and pulled the shutters in after him. Then I heard footsteps in the house, receding. That would mean Fernando was going to bed.