Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  “An hour at least!”

  “Ten minutes,” said Martinez implacably. “Sir.”

  “Ten minutes,” sighed Diaz de la Frontera.

  He told us to go downstairs and wait. I wasn’t wild about that, but it was his office. Even in just ten minutes there was plenty he could do.

  chapter eighteen

  The surly little man still stood in his half crouch before the duty-desk. When the day aged five minutes, a pair of Guardia with riot guns sauntered in from a back room and began to pass the time of day with Martinez’s two agents. Another five minutes, and another pair of Guardia with riot guns. They all lounged and slouched around, a couple of them smoking and one of them needing a shave. They didn’t look like any Buckingham Palace guards.

  Sergeant Martinez gave Diaz de la Frontera fifteen minutes. When he hadn’t come downstairs by then, Martinez scowled at me and started climbing up to fetch him.

  He got halfway and stopped. One of the fattest men I have ever seen stomped ponderously down the stairs. He filled them from wall to bannister. The green uniform stretched across his belly looked as big as a circus tent. He had three chins, each lower one wider than the one above it and each with its own dewlaps. He was smoking one of those twisted black cigars Spaniards like. Assorted silver braid and medals festooned his uniform.

  Martinez stood still, and the fat man kept coming downstairs. His belly bumped Martinez from chin to waist, and Martinez backed downstairs.

  “You!” boomed the fat man in a voice like Krakatau blowing its volcanic lid. “You, sergeant from Fuengirola!” he roared, making Fuengirola sound like the butt end of the universe. “You have no jurisdiction here. No authority here.”

  “Yes, my colonel,” Martinez said in a subdued voice.

  “I am not your colonel,” shouted the colonel, waving an enormous dimpled fist before his face. “Such a one as you would never serve in my command. To attempt to give orders to one of my commissioned officers,” spluttered the fat man in a mounting rage, “that is insubordination. I can have your stripes for it, sergeant. I will.”

  “But my colonel—”

  The colonel’s voice rushed over his words like a waterfall rushing over its brink. “You shut up! No words! No explanations! I am holding you for disciplinary action. Holding you! Before I’m finished, you’ll be patroling on a bicycle on the road past Estepona.”

  “If, my colonel, you will permit me to explain—”

  “Explain that,” said the fat man, and hit him in the face with a dimpled fist. Sergeant Martinez didn’t go down, but his knees buckled. The surly pickpocket’s puffed lips moved above his black and blue jaw, and a noise like a sighing hiccup issued from his mouth. I realized he was laughing. The fat colonel shouted some more. Martinez stood very straight and took it. Then the fat colonel squawked an order, and the four Guardia took their riot guns back where they’d got them and returned empty-handed. The fat colonel chewed them out for their slovenliness, for the sprouting beard one of them had, for their smoking on duty, for their compliance with orders that had not come from him. They grew pale listening, lined up like four little Indians in a row as he paced back and forth in front of them, fat hands clasped behind him above his enormous bottom, fat head turning on fat neck to spit his words at one or another of them.

  Then back to Martinez, “We’re holding you. We’re contacting Fuengirola. Who is your superior there?”

  “It is only a substation, my colonel. I am in charge.”

  “You are in charge?”

  “Yes, my colonel. I—”

  “You were in charge. I’ll contact Malaga. Madrid, if I must. My officers are not to be intimidated by.…”

  There was more of it, a great deal more, but never once was Pez Espada mentioned, or the Fuentes brothers, or blind Fernando, or any of the things that had brought Martinez up the mountain road to Ronda. He never got more than a dozen words in edgewise, and those only ineffectually and with effort. The fat man completely dominated him. Finally two of the Guardia marched him away, past the duty-desk and through a doorway. He looked back over his shoulder at me, wistful, apologetic.

  I glanced at the fat colonel. He was breathing hard, his dewlaps quivering. I didn’t know what I could do alone, but one of me was better than none of nobody. Slowly, casually, I started for the street door.

  “You, Englishman! Wait where you are!” bawled the fat man.

  I corrected him as to my nationality. That usually placates a Spaniard, especially in uniform, especially in the south. They hate the English for Gibraltar, which they think ought to be a Spanish rock guarding a Spanish sea. They like Americans.

  But nothing was going to placate the fat colonel. Maybe he really was worked up over the treatment Diaz de la Frontera had received; maybe he had a fat colonel-sized investment to protect. I never learned which. He bawled me out in a mixture of Spanish and English, his face getting redder and redder, his voice louder and louder. I was a meddler. I was a fool. I was a stranger in Spain with no business but to see the sights and buy a ticket in the shade at a bullfight. Did I not know this? Surely all the world knew it. What I waited for, almost with a sense of detached interest, was for him to thrust his fat hand out and ask to see my passport. I didn’t have my passport. The Guardia in Fuengirola still had it. In Spain, especially if you are in trouble, you do not wander around without identification.

  He never asked for it. He didn’t have me searched either. The casual touch of a hand would have uncovered the Beretta in my belt. All he wanted to do was put me on ice. Merely to sock me for having helped give Diaz de la Frontera a hard time? To give Pez Espada the chance to do whatever he had come to Ronda to do, now that Rafael Jímenez and the American named Short were talking? The latter seemed more likely. Leaving truckloads of contraband behind, even if half the Guardia was on the take, seemed no way for Pez Espada to establish his innocence.

  Compared with the one in Fuengirola, the Ronda lockup was a de luxe suite in a luxury hotel. The cell they locked me in had running cold water, a dirty and foul-smelling blanket on the bedspring and a rusty, battered bucket for sanitary purposes. It also had a view out over the plaza to the white church. I stood at the barred window and watched half a dozen urchins admiring Robbie Hartshorn’s Mercedez Benz. The same two American tourists posed the kids there and snapped their pictures of the contrast: five thousand bucks worth of car and kids who didn’t have a peseta among them.

  Noon came. The door opened, and I was given a tin plate of cold, greasy beans that had been cooked in rancid olive oil. I dozed off for a while. When I awoke, the shadows had lengthened in the plaza. I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock. Siesta, and the plaza deserted. I heard laughter in another part of the building. The rest of the cells in the lockup block were empty. I stared at the walls and the bars. I scratched my leg and kept scratching it and realized there were lice in the blanket. I threw it off the bed and sat on the bare bedspring, still scratching.

  You should have argued with the fat man, I told myself. Told him you were working for the governor of Maryland, which you were, or some damn thing like that. Put the fear of Uncle in him. Lockup thoughts, while the afternoon grew hot and hung like a five-hundred-watt bulb over my head. Then, as it became cooler, I knew arguing would have been a mistake. Let him dish it out. Take it. I couldn’t have done anything else. If I’d got all hot and bothered, to match his being all hot and bothered, he might have decided to have a look at my passport. But my passport was in Fuengirola. Then they’d have really thrown the key away.

  Five o’clock. Siesta over and the crowds thronging the plaza. The same kids, or a fresh batch of them, poked around the Mercedes. Nobody took their picture.

  At sundown they came for me, two Guardia I hadn’t seen before. They opened the cell door, and one of them walked with me and one behind me as we went along a hall and down the stairs. Finally, the pickpocket was gone. They hadn’t taken him to the lockup, or Sergeant Martinez either for that matter. I won
dered what had happened to them. I didn’t see the fat colonel. I didn’t see Diaz de la Frontera. I was escorted to the street door and through it.

  “You are free to go,” one of the Guardia said in English. “The colonel says to tell you if you do not leave Ronda before dark,” he added, the words heavily accented and hard to understand, “you are being in bad trouble.”

  “It’s almost dark now.”

  “Before dark, hombre.”

  So I went obediently over to the Mercedes. That impressed the Guardia. They hadn’t known it was my car. Come to think of it, it wasn’t. An afternoon in their lockup, and already I had an inferiority complex.

  I drove fast for three blocks, hit a labyrinth of crooked streets, got lost, found a wide plaza in front of the bull ring, that was the oldest one in Spain, parked and asked the uniformed guarda-coche who was dusting off the windshield of a Citroen if he knew the way to the Manzanarez ranch. He knew, and he told me.

  It was probably too late, or the fat colonel would have kept me on ice overnight.

  The only trouble was, I had nowhere else to go.

  chapter nineteen

  At dusk the great black vultures of the Serena rise on the thermal up-drafts of the valley and soar effortlessly, wings unmoving, to the heights of Ronda on its cliff. Bats emerge too, fluttering like wet black paper from tree to tree. By then the last tourists, those who aren’t staying overnight at the Hotel Victoria, have long-since started back down the road to the coast. To drive the roads into and out of Ronda at night, when darkness cloaks the unbanked curves, the potholes and the giddy abrupt hills, is to take your life in your hands.

  I left the city on the road that dropped southward to the coast at Marbella. Six kilometers through the Serena, the guarda-coche had told me. Half a kilometer before the road begins to climb up through the mountains, preparing to swoop down from this tierra on the very heights of the world to the coast, you will see a narrow track on the right. That is the way to the ranch where the Manzanarez family used to breed the best fighting bulls in all Spain.

  With the last faint daylight still in the sky, I found the turn-off. It was unpaved and narrow. Centuries of melting snow rushing down from the heights had eroded its surface, scarring it with gullies, pitting it, making it treacherous with fallen rocks. The Mercedes bucked, rumbled, skidded and slid. I had to hold the wheel tight with both hands, peering intently at the headlight beams to pick out and avoid the worst of the ruts and rocks.

  Five minutes like that, and then I saw headlights ahead of me. They were coming fast, far too fast for that road at night. If I saw them, they had to see me. I slowed down. They didn’t. I leaned on the horn. They kept coming. There wouldn’t be room for both of us.

  To left and right the road-shoulder fell away steeply for a few yards before leveling off among boulders and big cacti. I leaned on the horn again. Suddenly I realized we were in a drag race. They weren’t going to stop. They wanted the right of way hard enough to fight for it.

  I cut may speed to twenty, then to fifteen, then ten with the Mercedes in second gear. Between their headlights I could see, with the Mercedes’ lights on it, the figure of a smiling, scantily-clad girl skating—the emblem of a Peggaso truck. Smiling, with a spotlight on either side of her, she skated slantwise at me. With how many tons of truck behind her?

  When she was almost in my lap I braked hard and swung the wheel to the left. Something struck the rear fender of the Mercedes glancingly and it wobbled on the shoulder of the road like a drunk in a barrel at an amusement park. Then it picked up speed going down the incline, and then I was breaking and dodging boulders. A final slewing skid and I came to a stop, gently nudging a boulder half the size of the car. I got out. I saw the taillights of the truck. It might be heading for Ronda. It might be heading for the coast. Pez Espada behind the wheel? Or fat Estebán and the tough little Spaniard, Diego? The Fuentes brothers? Whoever they were, they were in a hurry. A little detail like a moving car blocking the road wasn’t going to stop them.

  I climbed into the Mercedes, sawing it back and forth among the rocks, tires squealing, dust flying, engine groaning, until I was facing the road. All in a sweat, all in a lather, but when I mounted the shoulder I realized by then they’d have hit what passed for the highway that ran down from Ronda to the coast. Had they turned south into the mountains or north across the Serena? I sat there with my night thoughts: next time win your drag race, buddy. Next time, if they’ve got four tons of Peggaso behind them, use a Sherman tank.

  Then, to my left, I saw a glow in the night sky. That was where the ranch was, and the glow could only be a fire. I turned left and drove fast. The glow flickered and pulsed brighter.

  It was a long, low building crumbling slowly and picturesquely to ruin, the stucco walls cracked and scabby in the firelight, the front door hanging open on one hinge, a pile of bricks among the cacti in the front yard that might once have been a chimney struck by lightning, the glass in the windows broken and reflecting flames inside. There was a large outbuilding to the left, its barn doors yawning wide, and beyond that a corral, the fence-posts still standing but most of the rails down. If Manzanarez hadn’t bred bulls for a number of years, and apparently he hadn’t, the hard Serena winters had done their work. And the fire, in a night, would finish it.

  Smoke roiled from the door, tongues of flame licked hungrily out the windows. A beam gave way inside and a crack appeared under a window to the left of the door. Part of the tile roof fell in.

  A man’s voice bellowed with fear—that terrible, final fear of death by bright fire.

  The sound of his voice drew me toward the door. The heat hit me like a wall, and then I was inside.

  The fire had started in the left wing of the ranch-house and though smoke had reached the main hallway, flames hadn’t. I stood there, choking in the smoke, my eyes watering, waiting for his voice again.

  “Where are you?” I shouted in Spanish.

  This time he only groaned and coughed. I heard a scraping sound, wood moving heavily over tile, to my left. There was an archway there, smoke billowing from it, flames darting.

  Then I saw him. He was big, and he was roped hand and foot to a chair, and he’d managed to overturn it and was dragging himself, chair and all, an inch at a time across the tile floor. He’d reached the threshold under the archway. I went to him through the smoke and got hold of the chair and dragged it across the tile to the front door and outside. I felt a muscle knot low in my back. He weighed a ton.

  He was Paco Fuentes. A spark smouldered in his hair. The breeze outside fanned it and suddenly his hair began to burn brightly. He screamed. I beat the flames out with my hands. I could smell his burned hair. He hadn’t been hurt, though. The scream was of fear.

  He began to groan. He couldn’t see me. His eyes were puffy from the smoke.

  “Anybody else in there?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Who else is in there?” I shouted.

  When he still didn’t answer, I hit him. He was over on his side, still roped to the chair. A sliver of bloodshot eye stared up at me.

  “Ruy,” he said. “Ruy is inside.”

  I went back for him. I was going on reflexes then. A man is in a burning house, roped, helpless. You’re the only one who can help. You look at the smoke and the fire, and the sweat of fear stings your eyes. But you go.

  Bright flames danced at the archway. I ducked through and felt nothing special, just the heat all around me, just the smoke searching for my lungs. One try, I thought, as long as you hold your breath. The house was going. Something cracked, something else thudded and roof tiles crashed at my feet.

  “Ruy!” I shouted.

  I heard him then, a whimper. It led me through the smoke, and I could see him. He hadn’t been able to overturn his chair that he was roped to, as his brother had done. He sat there, eyes swollen shut, head bowed in the smoke. No flame had touched him yet, and at first that didn’t make sense. If whoever was drivin
g the Peggaso had set the fire, and if part of its purpose was to incinerate the Fuentes brothers, why not set it where it would get them in a hurry? Then, dragging Ruy’s chair out, I knew. Because it might have got to the ropes that bound them first. This way, smoke-poisoning first and then if the ropes burned through it wouldn’t matter.

  I reached the archway and backed through it, dragging him. Then out of the house and far enough away to be safe. Was Paco far enough? I looked, and saw that he was. Ruy shouted hoarsely. I lurched over to him. His pants were starting to burn. I rolled him while he yelled, and kept rolling him till the fire was out. Then I sat for a long time and drew my knees up and thrust my head between them and breathed and listened to the thud of my heart and with mild tangential interest watched the flutter of my fingers. Behind us, bright in the night, flames wreathed and then enveloped the long, low building.

  “Pez Espada,” Paco said hoarsely while I unfastened the ropes that bound him. “His villa in Ronda. On the cliff, near the bridge of stone. You say you have come for the pretty Americana with afición. She is there. I will show you the way. Take me there.”

  Ruy, who was already free, glared down at him. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “We can’t return there now,” he added in Spanish. “Not with the American.”

  Paco glanced at his right hand. The skin was puckered and blistered. “This was an execution, my brother,” he said in Spanish. “Ordered by Pez Espada and carried out by Estebán and Diego. I want Pez Espada. I want him for this.”

  “Before, when they roped us, when they poured kerosene for the fire, you blamed me.”

  “As you say. I blamed you. How could I do otherwise? If you had not sided with the new American, the one who has replaced Huntington, foolishly because of the girl, because—”

  “Shut up, shut your mouth!” Ruy cried, and ran, staggering, unsteady on his feet, for the car.

  I got there a stride after he did and kept the door from shutting. He already had his hand on the ignition key. I struck it aside. He tried to fight me, and though I was weak and a little sick to my stomach from the smoke I’d inhaled, he was very much weaker. I pulled him from the car.