Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  His hearing would be good, probably much more acute than mine. I remained where I was, giving him time to fall asleep. Another fifteen minutes left the future, lingered a long minute at a time in the present, and became the past.

  I tugged at the shutters. They weren’t fastened. I climbed in over the sill and stood still. My eyes were as accustomed to the dark as they were going to get. I could see nothing, and I hadn’t come equipped with a box of matches. Slowly I groped my way around the room. My legs struck a table. I fingered its surface: a wooden mallet first, and then twelve statuettes, their metal skins cool, their legs upright on pedestals that felt like wood. I ran my fingers over them. They seemed to be figurines about a foot high. From their stance and the way their metal arms were extending to one side and the tiny sheets of metal dropping from those arms, I decided they were little bronze bullfighters. Who was it that had told me Fernando was a sculptor who knew his stuff? Andrea Hartshorn, I remembered, that first night. But what he had been working on, if my fingertips weren’t deceiving me, were tritely stylized figurines of bullfighters for the tourist trade.

  I decided to take one of them out the window with me and find some light to examine it by. I picked one up. Something scraped at the window and the shutters, which I had pulled closed, opened into the night. I crouched near the table. I wasn’t the only one snooping in. Fernando’s studio.

  The room was so dark that I couldn’t see the new intruder, except as more substantial blackness. But I could smell her, and there was no mistaking Maruja’s musky perfume. She’d been waiting outside, way off in the rushes probably, until Fernando was finished for the night. Had she seen me? No—otherwise she wouldn’t have made like a second-story man. I crouched there without moving. She came unerringly to the table, as if she could see in darkness like a cat. One of her legs brushed my shoulder lightly. It meant nothing to her; I was part of the furniture. Suddenly a match flared. I tensed. If she saw me then, and in a second she would, she might cry out. I stood up quickly behind her and cupped a hand over her mouth. She struggled against me, writhing. It was hard to hold her. She made a mewling sound, and I clamped my hand harder across her mouth.

  “They’ll hear us,” I whispered in Spanish against her ear. “Don’t struggle, Maruja. All I want is information. I won’t hurt you. Can I let go?”

  She nodded her head. When I released her, she struck another match. “You,” she said.

  “Uh-huh. Looking for the same thing you’re looking for.” I didn’t add: only you know what it is, and I don’t. By the light of the match I could see I was right about Fernando’s work—bronze bullfighters that might fetch five bucks a piece on the tourist market, if the tourists weren’t very discerning.

  The match went out. I said, “First you sell the stuff to him, then you come here to steal it back. You do that often?”

  She laughed softly, deep in her throat. “Never before. Why should I have done so before?”

  I took a stab, “Because he’s going to Ronda tomorrow?”

  “He’s finished if he does. And if he is finished, he won’t need these.” By these she meant the statues. I felt myself scowling in the darkness. The statues were small, but not that small. Even between them, Fernando and Maruja couldn’t have carried a dozen of the figurines back from Carihuela. Besides, this was Fernando’s studio. This was where he did the work. And there had been that clinking sound. Half an hour of it. Enough time for what?

  I picked up one of the figurines. It was light. Fernando, his wife had told me, worked in lost wax. The figurines would be hollow then. Half an hour would have been more than enough time for him to attach them to their bases. With what inside?

  “If you pull, it comes apart,” Maruja said. “You don’t know what is inside, do you? You don’t know, eh señor?” She struck another match. “Then look if you must.”

  I held the figurine in one hand and its wooden base in the other. I gave a yank, and they separated. The legs of the statue were close together, a single bronze unit in the close-step of a pasa doble. I poked a finger up their hollowness and felt a strip of tape inside the knees. Three small hard lumps were under the tape. I got a fingernail under its edge and pulled it off and then withdrew it. Maruja lit another match while I turned the tape sticky side up.

  The facets of three small diamonds reflected the light of the match up at me.

  About a carat each, I decided. Nothing to make the owner of the Hope Diamond wish he could swap, but they looked well cut and if they were flawless they’d probably fetch close to a grand a piece. If each statue contained three of them, that meant there was thirty-six thousand bucks worth of diamonds on Fernando’s work table. If they’d come off MacPherson’s boat then the murdered smuggler had been holding out on me. His cargo like hell had been only cigarettes, not that you could sneeze at cigarettes at Spain’s black market prices.

  “And now?” Maruja asked me.

  “He wants to see who in Ronda?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Pez Espada?”

  “Seguro,” she nodded. “Pez Espada.”

  I remembered the tough little Spaniard, Diego, and his fat sidekick, Estebán. “I wish him luck.”

  “He will need it. Mucho suerte, the great fool. What are you going to do?”

  I thought of the two thousand bucks, Governor Hartshorn’s money, Pez Espada had taken off me as an investment in MacPherson’s doomed cargo. I slipped the tape and its three diamonds in my pocket. “Pez Espada owes me that,” I said.

  “It is all you wish?”

  It was all I wished. Quickly in the darkness, Maruja separated the other figurines from their bases and unfastened the tapes. She went to the window before I did. When she climbed through I followed her. She waited for me, politely. She was in no hurry to get away. She turned left away from the beach, toward the steel ramp and steps leading up to the Calle San Miguel that was called the Avenida Generalísimo Franco only officially.

  The ramp circled, climbing. At first the steps were a dozen feet apart, and then six, and then three. On one side of us were the blank façades of houses like those in Carihuela, on the other a stone wall no more than a yard high and beyond it a long drop down to the lower levels of the ramp.

  We had ascended side by side about halfway to the mill tower that gives Torremolinos its name when Maruja said, softly and almost pleasantly, “Paco. Kill him.”

  I whirled, peering into the darkness, feeling my spine crawl when I remembered the hold Maruja had on the Fuentes brothers and the size and strength of the picador Paco. If she told him to kill me, he’d go about it the same way he went about sticking el toro with his stopped pick.

  Nothing at first. I reached for Robbie Hartshorn’s gun, then changed my mind. As a bluff it would get me nothing in the darkness, and I couldn’t use it. One shot and the Guardia, who patroled the beach and the streets of Torremolinos all night, would come running. The next thing I knew, I’d be in Madrid en route home with three diamonds for the Governor but no answers and no missing son.

  All that went through my mind in a split second, while I was looking for Paco. Then Maruja moved away from me, and then I saw his big bulk come charging out of the deeper darkness of the buildings lining one side of the ramp. A twelve-hundred pound bull would have nothing on him, the way he came galloping. His reflexes were quick too. Though I side-stepped his crouching lunge, his shoulder took me in the middle, jackknifing me and sending me back toward the low wall across the ramp. My legs struck it and my back went up on it and for a moment I thought Paco wouldn’t even have to work up a sweat. But I teetered there, not going over to decorate the lower level of the ramp with the remains of Chester Drum, and then Paco’s momentum brought him to me. I planted both feet against his chest and shoved. I’d been right: he was big and he was fast, and as easy to knock over as a cross-country van.

  Still, I checked him, and he even moved back a foot, giving me time to climb off the wall. He swung wildly. I went in under that, not h
aving to crouch though I’m six-one, and planted a good one in his middle. It was supposed to bend him, setting him up for a shot at his long slab of a jaw. Only it didn’t. Again it stopped him, that was all. He took a breath and swung again and missed again. He swung hard enough to put his fist through a bull-ring’s barera. If he landed once, that was all it would take. He knew it and I knew it, and the unpleasant notion that my fists wouldn’t be able to stop him occurred to me.

  He swung a third time, missing a third time. I went under it again, in there trying again, and while I was planting the same right in his gut, with the same disappointing effect, though I’m nobody’s cream-puff, he brought his hand toward me again, backhanded after the follow-through, and this time he hit. I sailed back and landed on my duff against the low wall. He loomed there, as big as two picadors sitting one on the other’s shoulders and both on horseback. He kicked. I moved my head and he didn’t quite kick the wall down. But it shook, brother; it shook.

  That was when I scrambled to my feet and said the hell with it and drew the gun. It was a small, neat Beretta, and though it could drill a small neat hole in Paco’s head, that still wasn’t what I wanted. I held it by the barrel and when he uncorked one of his wild swings, each one closer than the last because I was slowing down, I let him have the butt against his mouth.

  He cried out, like a bull bellowing from an inept sword thrust, and sprayed blood at me. I smashed the Beretta against the side of his jaw. He sagged to his knees and wrapped his arms around my middle, almost bringing me down on top of him. I brought the Beretta down on top of his skull. He fell the rest of the way reluctantly, but he fell.

  Though he wasn’t out, he was all finished killing me for the night.

  I heard running footfalls. His bellow of pain had summoned the Guardia. “Next time,” he sobbed, trying to get up but unable to manage it, “I use my pick.”

  “Next time,” I told him, “I’ll try bullets.”

  Maruja crouched over him, gently touching his face. She looked up at me, letting loose a string of curses in Spanish that would have made an old monosabio, who had heard most but not all of them, blush from the knees up.

  I heard the Guardia trotting down from the direction of the Calle San Miguel. He blew his whistle as I ran the other way, back toward the beach. Then through the rushes and across the sand and down past the cliffs and finally up to the highway that ran back of Carihuela so I could return to the Hartshorn villa, wondering all the while why I didn’t stay home and pick up a retainer on an easy case, like busting up the Syndicate single-handed.

  chapter fifteen

  I found Andrea Hartshorn where I knew I’d find her in the morning, out on the terrace watching her own? private sunrise. I’d slept in my room of the guest wing of La Atalaya, the Beretta under my pillow, half expecting the Guardia to come there looking for me. But nobody ever found Poe’s purloined letter, did they? I’d told myself they did, eventually, and I’d almost decided to grab my shuteye out in the open somewhere, where I could run for it if I had to, but the next thing I knew the dawn was on its way and no hard, heavy Guardia hand had stirred me ungently out of sleep. So I shaved, showered, got into some clean clothes and went to find Andrea.

  After the sun burst up over the horizon and after she greeted it with solemn, ritual silence, she said, “I didn’t know you came back last night. The maids described a man who was in the kitchen with Tenley. It had to be you, Chet.” She smiled. “They think you’re handsome, even with a sprouting barba and with rumpled, dirty ropas as they put it. Where did you and Tenley go?”

  “Isn’t she here?”

  “No. She took the MG last night. Or early this morning, rather. I assumed you went with her.”

  “Not me.”

  Andrea scowled. “That’s funny. I—I’m worried about her, Chet. She’s usually self-sufficient and so damn capable and confident you think nothing can touch her. But lately she—would you know if she had a lovers’ tiff with Ruy Fuentes? Do you think she’s there now, in Fuengirola?”

  “He had an accident in the bull ring. She may have gone there to be with him, yes.”

  That interpretation of the situation seemed to make Andrea feel better. She nodded and said, “Tenley’s nothing if not loyal.” But self-pity dragged down the corners of her mouth. “Out of loyalty she came back here to Robbie and me, back from Switzerland, and we didn’t deserve it. Lord knows we haven’t been the world’s best parents to her. She could have gone back home to her Grandfather and.… don’t mind me. It’s one of those blue mornings. I need a drink. I always need a drink.”

  “I need transportation,” I said.

  She looked her age in the dark, long shadows of early morning. Her eyes were pouched and her mouth bitter. She tugged at my sleeve. Her fingers were trembling. A couple of ounces of Fundador neat, I thought, feeling sorry for her, would cure that.

  “Please don’t go yet,” she said. “Please have a drink with me. I’m not like Tenley. I’m not self-sufficient. I hate to be alone.” She had no image of herself at all. She could be as solitary as a cat or as communal as a bee, depending on whether liquor and her need for it lifted her or dropped her. “This is going to be one of those bad mornings,” she said. “Do you think you’ll find Robbie? Tell me about it over a drink?”

  “I’d better go,” I said.

  She sighed. “You can have Robbie’s car. It’s the Mercedes Benz 220S parked in the carport downstairs. I’ll get you the keys.”

  It took her ten minutes to get them. When she returned, her eyes were bright and she smiled at me. I could smell the Fundador. “One set of car keys for one enterprising private eye,” she said, giving them to me. “You’d make a good remittance man, Chet. You always seem to have something to do with your time. That’s the trouble with us, with all of us here. Sometimes I feel like screaming, listening to the seconds drag by.”

  Liquored up, she wanted to talk even more than when she’d needed a drink. “I once dreamed an hour fell on me. It was on the biggest clock in the world and it just fell off and pinned me. I couldn’t move it. I kicked and clawed at it, and I knew if I didn’t get it off I’d be forever under that one hour. Did you know that people sometimes die in their sleep because they have dreams too horrible for their subconscious minds to stand?” She said stonily, “You’re not listening. You have only contempt for me, don’t you? I guess nobody really likes anybody else. We all just make believe, and it’s easier that way.” She sobbed. “I feel so naked sometimes. I know I’m no good, and I know everybody can see it. Except with Robbie. We were always so good together. We were the only people in the world who understood each other. There was no time for anything else, not even Tenley.” She grabbed my sleeve again. “Please don’t go yet.”

  I felt embarrassed for her, standing there in the early morning with one of the world’s beautiful views as a backdrop, whitewashed walls and tile roofs and fat palms and the blue sea and the gulf curving off toward Malaga nestling at the foothills of the high Sierra Nevadas crowned with snow, and she in a whisky-jaded world of confusion and self-pity and that special alcoholic boredom that, if you’re neither careful nor lucky nor rich, can lead to a padded cell.

  “I’ve got to get going,” I said.

  She called after me, “You want to know something? I hate this goddamn sunrise. Every morning, and I hate it. Isn’t that a laugh? I actually detest it.”

  Her bitter dissatisfaction followed me down the long flight of stairs like a terrier nipping at my heels.

  Eyes wide open, I drove right into it.

  The 220S was gun-metal gray and handled beautifully. For no reason at all, I opened her up on the corniche drive to Fuengirola. She whispered along, a dream of a car, hitting eighty on the short straightaways between hairpin bends, taking the curves as if on tracks, rumblingly absorbing the shock of potholes as if they weren’t there.

  I left the highway and drove up into the hills, telling myself Tenley first, because if she didn’t watch out she
could be one of the lost ones like her mother. Maybe I couldn’t help that but I could try, and maybe what Ruy Fuentes did or didn’t do wouldn’t matter either, but it was all inside Tenley—as it is all inside all of us—waiting to give her joy or to make her suffer. And after Tenley, the mountain city of Ronda, where Spain’s fighting bulls are bred and where smugglers—not to mention highjackers—transship their cargoes, because that was where Fernando was heading for a showdown with Pez Espada, and when the fireworks go off truth rears its sometimes ugly head, so maybe I’d learn what had happened to Robbie Hartshorn.

  His 220S came to a purring stop outside the caves of Fuentes. As I got out I wondered why he hadn’t driven there himself. He’d taken the bus, Andrea had told me. Because he hadn’t expected to return? It didn’t make sense. Because he’d been too drunk to drive? But why wouldn’t he have waited, unless it was urgent?

  I went into the smaller cave first. It had a door, the door wasn’t locked and the furniture looked as if it belonged in a big villa on a high hill. “Hello?” I called. “Anybody home?” The light approach, the casual entrance, but I remembered Paco and my hand was on the butt of the Beretta. No answer. There were four rooms, one of them a dining room. Dishes on the table, not cleared yet. Service for two, and a pot of cold paella that still smelled good. In the sink, service for three, and that meal had been paella too and it had been eaten. The dishes there were scraped but not washed. Figure it out, Drum. Three: that would be Maruja and the Fuentes brothers, and they ate, and then Maruja and Paco went off, together, to La Atalaya for Fernando and then with him to Carihuela. Which left Ruy. Then paella for two on the table. Meaning Tenley had arrived? I decided she had, only they hadn’t eaten. Not that they didn’t want to. Something had snatched them away from the table in a hurry. What? I didn’t know what.