Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  I poked around the rest of the place. It was just a home, and a well-furnished one, in a cave. Unusual, but I wasn’t looking for that kind of unusual. There were standing closets in the two bedrooms, Maruja’s clothes in one and the Fuentes brothers’ in the other. Nothing had been packed. They’d left in a hurry, all right.

  Outside again. The sunlight by then was dazzling. I shaded my eyes and headed for the bigger cave, first stopping at the 220S, opening the trunk and taking a screwdriver from the tool-kit. With it I ought to be able to pry loose the staples holding the overhead door in place. But when I reached it, I found that wasn’t necessary. The lock was on the floor of the cave, opened. I picked it up, hooked it through the staple in the door and yanked up hard.

  The heavy door slid gratingly toward the roof of the cave.

  Light flared on in front of my eyes, blinding me. I groped for the Beretta, found it and drew it.

  “Drop the gun, Señor Drum,” a wistful voice said in Spanish. “We can see you and you can’t see us. There are three rifles trained on you, held by men who know how to shoot and who will shoot if they have to. Drop it!”

  The gun clattered to the floor. There was nothing else I could do. I still couldn’t see them, and with those lights shining on me they’d be able to see the nick where I’d cut my chin shaving.

  The wistful voice, of course, belonged to Sergeant Martinez.

  chapter sixteen

  The light came from the high beams of a Guardia Seat in the cave. Someone cut them, and while I blinked Sergeant Martinez stepped out past the fender of the car, giving me his Don Quixote smile but still managing to look unhappy.

  “You could have saved yourself the trouble,” I said. “Why didn’t you pick me up at La Atalaya?”

  “It is no longer necessary,” he said, wistfully and sadly. “There never was a denunciation—now. You are a free man—now.”

  I saw the rifles watching me—two on one side of the Seat and one on the other. “Then if I’m a free man, will you have those things pointed some other way?”

  He barked an order. The rifles were lowered.

  “I thought of your advice,” he said. He shrugged. “I followed it. What else could I do?”

  “What advice would that be?”

  “Rafael Jímenez. The cousin of Doña Maruja, who lives in Carihuela. Two agents of the Guardia went there. The fisherman Jímenez tried to stop them, but they examined his boat. It has a high-powered American engine. A Chrysler of three-hundred horses. My agents were not—gentle with him. He broke quickly. The Fuentes brothers, they used his boat. To meet the smugglers running contraband along the coast from Gibraltar. To highjack their cargoes.” He said with bitter accusation, “Not to help the little people, the poor ones who invest their pesetas, but to make them lose their money. I am a disillusioned man, Señor Drum. Sometimes the truth—”

  “Who were you waiting here for?”

  “Quién sabe? Americans and my own people, they are all in it. Rafael Jimenez broke down, as I have said, and cried in his fear and grief to the Virgin—and talked. The brothers, they run the boat. The brothers, they drive the contraband through the mountains to Ronda.” He laughed bitterly. “With agents of the Guardia passing them through all along the route, as everyone knew they were smugglers and all the world on this coast loves a smuggler. Smugglers! They were highjackers.”

  “Who else is in it?” I said.

  “The blind artist, Fernando. He handles gems for them. An American named Short in Torremolinos, who owns a souvenir shop. He sells the figurines where the jewels are hidden. He has been picked up, along with a list of his buyers. The dead man, Huntington. He was part of it too. As you said, he had been murdered. Why, I do not know. Jimenez did not know him, but the name meant much. Pez Espada in Algeciras and Huntington here, he said. Between them they ran the ring. Apparently Huntington wanted too much for himself, and Pez Espada objected. Huntington’s original investment was the boat. He refitted it and supplied the engine, though Jimenez never saw him. But Huntington had lived in Spain since the war, and he had many contacts. His job was to arrange for the disposal of the contraband all over my country.”

  “What happened to the Fuentes brothers? And Maruja.”

  Martinez shook his head sadly, wistfully. “Late last night I sent two agents. They had the misfortune to meet Paco at the bottom of the hill. They shined a flashlight on his face and he looked bloody and injured, and that deceived them. Both are now in the hospital at Malaga. The Fuentes brothers, the gypsy and their truck—all are gone.”

  And Tenley, I thought. Tenley, too.

  “Pez Espada,” Martinez went on, “he left Algeciras before the Guardia there could arrest him. I had hoped he might come here. I had hoped Fernando Robles might.” He grinned at me, and this time the grin was only wistful and not at all sad. “I had hoped to snare something besides an ally in my little trap, amigo.”

  “Then try setting it in Ronda. Fernando’s on his way there—to see Pez Espada.”

  The wistfulness finally left his smile. He looked like a hungry wolf ready to pounce on its prey, his lips and jaw in a wide grin but his eyes flinty. “They have cost me my career,” he said. “Because naturally my complicity will be revealed—how I took money to permit the smugglers to operate along the coast. But if they were only smugglers.… if at least my conscience before God and my people had been clear.… but now it is of no importance. Of no importance.”

  “You going to Ronda?”

  He grew wistful again. “My last official act. I should call the Guardia station there, but I won’t do it. There is nothing they can do that I cannot, and it is only a two-hour drive through the mountains. I will get them, señor. And for a few moments, before better policemen than I take them in, I will make them wish they had not deceived me. This I vow.”

  “You’re not going alone,” I said.

  He misunderstood. “Naturally not. I have these two agents, and when we reach Ronda I can get more.”

  “I’m driving up there in the Mercedes.”

  He shrugged. “As I said, you are a free man. The road to Ronda is open. But if Pez Espada or the Fuentes brothers become desperate, they may be shooting.”

  So far as I knew, Tenley was up there with Ruy Fuentes. Martinez was right: Pez Espada wouldn’t be about to throw in the towel at the first sign of a green Guardia uniform or a winged patent-leather hat, not with one murder rap and maybe two hanging over his head. Neither would the Fuentes brothers. As for Martinez, he’d face the ruin of his own life easier if he could clobber the men who’d brought it about. Either way, and especially both ways, Tenley might be caught in the cross fire.

  “There may be shooting,” Martinez said again.

  “Why do you think I’m driving up there?” I said.

  chapter seventeen

  In Robbie Hartshorn’s powerful 220S I followed the Guardia Seat, impatient at its lack of speed, impatient at the slow way it accelerated off curves, impatient at the way it struggled up the steep mountain road once we left the coast to head north a few miles out of Marbella.

  The narrow, unpaved road climbed and twisted, corkscrewing up into the hills. At first there were only the cork forests and wind-stunted pines, but suddenly pulling out of a switchback I could see the whole sweep of the Costa Del Sol and the turquoise Mediterranean and, with a mist at its base, Gibraltar hanging like a mirage out toward the horizon. Then, higher, that view too was gone, and the sheer rock walls of canyons loomed on all sides. We passed no cars coming down, and except for an occasional shack where the patroling Guardia could rest, there was nothing to indicate that men ever passed this way. There are mountains far higher than those guarding Ronda; there may be wilder country. But in any part of the world that calls itself civilized there is no serpentine stretch of road like that leading to a city perched on a cliff like an eagle’s aerie.

  After almost two hours of that, the road straightened out. It began to drop gradually into a cool and wind-swe
pt mountain valley, and after the sheer canyons the vistas there seemed vast. Ahead of me, the Seat veered left around an outcropping of rock. When I followed it around the curve, I saw Ronda. Far in the distance on its circular cliff it looked like a fairy city on a giant toadstool. Its buildings were white and dun-colored. They seemed to have been carved from the rock of the cliff. And just when you thought the whole setup was too mathematically perfect to be real—the round city on its round cliff exactly in the center of its round valley called the Serena—you saw the chasm. It was the deep cleft of a river’s gorge, and it bisected the city. The windows of buildings on either side of the gorge stared across at each other. An old stone bridge spanned its awesome depths. You told yourself, hey, that damn thing must be eight hundred feet deep, and then the road was paved again and began to climb up from the floor of the valley of the Serena to where Ronda was waiting.

  Sergeant Martinez wasn’t the only Guardia living off his winged patent-leather hat, and once he decided—sensibly—to get reinforcements, we learned that.

  We parked both cars in a plaza near a small white church. The bells in their tower bonged ten times, the sun was strong but the air cool. Two cowled nuns left the church and crossed our path. Sergeant Martinez doffed his hat. A pair of early-rising tourists, each armed with the inevitable camera, stopped to take our picture: Martinez and his two Guardia agents in their green uniforms and patent-leather hats and the pair of nuns, with the scrubbed white church as a background.

  “Hey, buddy,” one of them asked me, “will you like step off to one side? You spoil the picture.”

  I like stepped off to one side, while Martinez and his sidekicks had their pictures taken. Then we crossed the plaza and climbed some steps and went in under the sign that said Toda por la Patria.

  Because Ronda was the center not only of bull-breeding, horse-breeding and mule-breeding, but of the Spanish smugglers’ world as well, it was a large Guardia station in the biggest building on the square. Green uniforms came and went, patent-leather hats were clapped on and taken off, boots glistened and stomped on tile floors. A surly-looking little man with a black-and-blue jaw and a torn shirt and puffed lips was slouching before the duty-desk. The sergeant behind it paid him no attention at all. Then another sergeant came down the stairs to the left of the desk, took one look at the little man, sauntered casually over to him and, swinging from the shoulder, hit him open-palmed as hard as he could in the left ear. The little man fell down and stood up, and the sergeant hit him again and he fell down again. Then the sergeant called him three or four choice Spanish words and stamped his heel on the fallen man’s groin. The little man screamed and rolled into a ball, clutching his private parts.

  “I know that one,” Martinez told me as the sergeant sauntered just as casually out. “He is a pickpocket. He used to work the férias and bullfights along the coast until we chased him. That was after his last time in prison, and apparently he is back to his old tricks, this time in Ronda. We do not like pickpockets. They discourage the tourists.”

  The little pickpocket stood up, crouching in pain. Aside from that, he waited there as if nothing had happened to him.

  As we went up the stairs, Martinez told me, “I have a friend here. Lieutenant Velasquez, a good man. He will believe this of the highjacking when I tell him. He will give us what help we need. Out of Ronda there are but three roads. If we block all three, and if we send a task force to Pez Espada’s town house on the river gorge—”

  “Doesn’t he have a ranch for bull-breeding? Wouldn’t that be in Serena, outside the city?”

  Martinez smiled calmly. “He sold his ranch, years ago. To an American who—” Suddenly Martinez’s eyes narrowed and he stood still on the stairs. “The American, he was this man Huntington. They could be using the ranch.”

  “They’d almost have to use it,” I said. “They’d need a place to store the contraband they drive up here from Fuengirola. If they stored it inside the city, they’d have to pass the Guardia check-points going in and out.”

  “Something that is done, in Ronda, every day.” Martinez sighed. “I know what it is like to take money from smugglers.”

  “But wouldn’t it be easier outside?”

  “Yes,” Martinez admitted. “It would be easier. I will ask Velasquez what he thinks.”

  But when he reached the top of the stairs and the floor of offices there, he didn’t ask Velasquez that or anything. Velasquez, they told him, had been transferred to Valladolid. We saw a man named Diaz de la Frontera instead. He was a young, shiny-faced man in a lieutenant’s uniform. He had large front teeth, like a rabbit’s. He used them to munch on his lower lip while he listened gravely to our story, his small, wide-spaced eyes searching my face and Martinez’s as if he expected to find more truth there than in the words we spoke.

  When we finished, he said in a high voice, “But this man Manzanarez, that you call Pez Espada, is well-known in Ronda; one of our leading citizens, though the last few years he has lived much on the coast in Algeciras. He is known and respected in Ronda, as was his father before him. Their family used to breed the finest fighting bulls in all Spain.”

  “But now they don’t?” I asked.

  He shook his head mournfully. “No señor. Five-year-olds it used to be. But now the bulls are removed from the ranches to the bull rings at four and even three years, and the younger Manzanarez, that you call Pez Espada, decided this was not a running of the bulls, it was butchery. He sold his ranch to an American—”

  “Who breeds what?”

  “Why, nothing, señor,” said Diaz de la Frontera. “Rarely is he seen on the ranch. I heard he was killed in an automobile accident on the coast. Que lástima! Such a pity!”

  “Pez Espada didn’t think so. Neither did the Fuentes brothers. Pez Espada had him killed, and the Fuentes brothers did the killing.”

  Diaz de la Frontera’s shiny face turned a faint shade of pink. “That is what you say, señor, but we here in Ronda have known Señor Manzanarez too long to believe—”

  “What was he doing in Algeciras, lieutenant?”

  Diaz de la Frontera smiled a shiny, baby-faced smile. “That is his business. If as you say he was breaking the law, that is the business of the Guardia in Algeciras. Not ours here in Ronda.”

  “Under the cover of agenting the kind of smuggling you don’t frown on, he was setting up smugglers’ cargo to be highjacked,” I said.

  “You have made that accusation already,” he said. “You haven’t proved it to my satisfaction.”

  “But to mine, lieutenant,” Sergeant Martinez said. He was staring out the window at the white church with his hands clenched stiffly at his sides.

  “I say we cannot bother Señor Manzanarez with such accusations.”

  Martinez turned slowly. “I say we must.”

  The younger man said, a little crisply, “May I remind you, sergeant, that I am a commissioned officer in the service you dishonor with your disrespect for my uniform?”

  “And may I remind you, lieutenant,” Martinez shot right back, looking like Don Quixote for the first time since we’d entered the office, “that I wore this uniform while you were still running around with a bare bottom—sir?”

  “I say we cannot bother—”

  “I say we must. Sir.”

  “Listen, lieutenant,” I pointed out. “We’re here because we think we can prove it. I can and will testify that Huntington was murdered in Fuengirola. I can and will testify that the American MacPherson, also murdered, was carrying six brands of cigarettes, three hundred cartons each. Unless I miss my guess, you’ll find them on Pez Espada’s ranch.”

  “Huntington’s ranch, señor. Pez Espada sold it.”

  “Good for him. We also have the confession of an American named Short, who disposed of the smuggled gems. We also have the confession of Rafael Jímenez, whose fishing boat, powered by a motor Huntington supplied, did the highjacking. But go ahead, lieutenant. Live off your patent-leather hat another d
ay or two. Use your head. They’ll give you a medal for cleaning this up. You’ll find another smuggler to feed you dinero.”

  “Is that an accusation?” he demanded in a high, angry voice. “Who are you? By what authority do you come in here … how dare you come in here and accuse me of complicity … if Sergeant Martinez wishes to disgrace his uniform … but you, a foreigner with no authority.…” The more he spoke, the madder he got. His small eyes narrowed until they almost shut. His shiny face, the plump cheeks looking like polished apples, was shinier with sweat. His speech was almost incoherent.

  Sergeant Martinez said wistfully, “We can go ourselves to the ranch. It is true, as the lieutenant may perhaps wish, that we may not return alive. But if we do, and if we find what is to be found there, and if I make a deposition that the lieutenant not only failed to help a fellow Guardia agent but in fact hampered him—”

  “I can order your men to remain behind,” Diaz de la Frontera threatened. The two Guardia agents were waiting downstairs.

  “Yes, sir. You can. I can put that in my deposition as well.”

  “I can have you charged with insubordination,” fumed Diaz de la Frontera.

  “Naturally, sir. My deposition—”

  “That is enough of you and your deposition.”

  Diaz de la Frontera glared. Martinez smiled wistfully. Franco beamed down paternally at them from the wall.

  “I will go with you,” Diaz de la Frontera said at last.

  “With a car full of Guardia agents,” Martinez said.

  “Armed to the teeth,” I said, “so Pez Espada gets the idea he’d better not fight. There’s a young girl with them, lieutenant.”

  He rubbed his hands together. He mopped his sweating face. “A car … half a dozen agents … riot guns. All that will take time.”

  “Ten minutes,” said Martinez.