Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  “We’re all going,” I said. “I’ll do the driving. Do I have to rope you again?”

  Ruy stared at the ground and didn’t answer.

  Paco said, “My little brother, he sits in front with you. I sit behind. He will remain docile, señor.”

  “That’s fine. What about you?”

  “I?”

  “Last night Maruja told you to kill me. It wasn’t your fault you didn’t.”

  He laughed. I didn’t laugh. He said, “Last night was last night. Tonight you have saved our lives. Tonight all I want is Pez Espada.”

  He was a thug and a highjacker and likely a killer, but he was a Spaniard with a Spaniard’s code of honor. I believed him.

  We piled in the way he had suggested. He sat on the edge of the rear seat, menacingly, behind his brother. Ruy stared at his lap. I started driving.

  chapter twenty

  I parked the Mercedes in a plaza two blocks up from the river gorge. Beyond the plaza the streets were too narrow, crooked and steep for the car. Twice, as we walked down one of them, our footsteps echoing on ancient cobblestones, a dark figure slipped out of a doorway, a furtive smalltime peddler offering us the detritus of the smugglers’ trade.

  “You wish fine Swiss watch, señores? Very good blocos, first-grade rubber of an incredible thinness? Cultured pearls from the Orient?”

  They followed us a few paces and then drifted back into the shadows. We reached the bottom of the steep street. Crossing it like the bar of a T was a narrow street paralleling the river gorge.

  “The third villa,” Paco told me, pointing.

  A row of what looked like one-story houses huddled with their backs to the very edge of the chasm. Narrow paths roofed over with arbors separated them.

  “There a back way in?” I asked.

  “In back they are very big, these villas,” Paco said. “Five and six stories and terraced gardens and steep stairs that go down and down until they reach the water.”

  “You armed?” I asked him.

  He looked at me scathingly. “If I had a gun, you think Estebán and Diego would have left us to burn at the ranch? They were armed señor. Not us.”

  “Wait outside with your brother” I said. “Keep him quiet—even if you have to sit on him.” Ruy had been broodingly silent on the drive back to Ronda. “I’m going in the back way. If anybody tries to leave the front, stop him. Okay?”

  “Con mucho gusto,” Paco said. His big, horse-like face smiled close to mine. “Police methods, eh, señor?” he said, enjoying himself. “I feel like a very agent of the Guardia.”

  I left them in front of the house. The windows in front were dark. The path along the side of the house smelled damply of exotic vegetation. Hanging vines brushed my face as I walked. Then I heard music—a sweet trumpet dominating a band in the swelling strains of España Cani. There was a large terrace in back, and big curtained French doors with light behind them. Small ornamental orange trees grew on the terrace. For no reason at all I went to the edge and looked over. There was another terrace below this one and a third below that—then blackness. A flight of stone stairs, almost as steep as an upright ladder, led down to the second terrace.

  The Beretta felt light and serviceable in my hand. They had no reason to expect trouble, not here, not tonight. They’d paid off the cops, hadn’t they?

  Then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t so sure. The fat colonel had broken up the possibility of a police raid, but instead of keeping me on ice until they cleared out of Ronda, he’d put me in the lockup only a few hours and then let me go. Why? Because there wasn’t a hell of a lot a lone American could do? But why take chances?

  Figure Pez Espada was calling the tune for the colonel. Did that mean he wanted me to drop in at the villa on the cliff—knowing what I’d find there and wanting me to find it? Or maybe it had been the colonel’s idea. He could hold me but he couldn’t kill me. Still, I knew too much, and Pez Espada wouldn’t rest easy until I took what I knew to the grave with me. Hold him, colonel. Hold the American, until we are ready. When we are ready, you will let him go, and he will come where, inevitably, he must come. And then we will kill him. Like that?

  I walked across the terrace to the French doors. The music had stopped. I heard footsteps, saw a woman’s shadow move across the curtained glass of the doors. España Cani filled the night with sound again. The woman was playing a phonograph.

  The door handle turned easily. The door swung in and the music was louder. I blinked at bright light, saw the five people seated in there and felt a little silly with the Beretta in my hand.

  It was a large room, its stucco walls festooned with the impedimenta of bullfighting. There were gold and red formal capes, and small crimson killing capes, the muletas, stiff with bloodstains, and swords in their scabbards, and ribboned banderillas in clusters of four, and a picador’s long stopped pick on hooks over the mantle and above that a stuffed and mounted bull’s head. There were a few dozen photographs of toreros in their glittering finery, all of them smiling gravely, all of them autographed to Sr. Manzanarez who had taught them this and that and who had afición.

  Of the five people sitting in that trophy room, none of them looking about to die of fright at my cloak-and-dagger entrance, only one was a man—and that one blind. The sculptor Fernando sat next to his North Country wife, who was telling him in low tones who had dropped in for a visit. Maruja, musky scent and all, stood near the phonograph. She turned the volume down and called me an unladylike name for what had happened last night, then turned the volume up, came over to me and said, “It is all over because you meddle, all over now and we must start as if from the beginning, elsewhere, because you meddle, and still you come here to meddle some more. What do you want here?”

  “I get the idea,” I said. “I’m a meddler. Go sit down somewhere.”

  “My boys will return soon,” she crowed. “When they do, you will wish you hadn’t meddled.”

  “I found your boys at Pez Espada’s ranch. Roped to chairs with a fire burning all around them.”

  “What is this?” Her eyes widened with surprise and fear. “What is this you say?”

  “Go let them in,” I said. “They’ll tell you.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “Front door,” I said, and she went.

  Nancy Huntington, stocky and not dressed in widow’s weeds, was the fourth. She was wearing a strapless cotton dress and a mantilla on her hair and a single strand of pearls around her thick throat.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her.

  But all she said was, “Oh, put that gun away, you horse’s ass.”

  Tenley came over to me. She was number five. She tried to smile, and her ripe red lips trembled instead. “You said something about a fire, Chet. Is Ruy all right?”

  I said that he was.

  “Thank God.”

  North Country watched us. Nancy Huntington stared contemptuously at us. Tenley licked her lips, looked at me and then away. She was pale. “Did you come here looking for me?”

  “And Pez Espada.”

  “He’s gone. For good I think. And I’m perfectly safe. You shouldn’t have bothered. You shouldn’t—”

  “Shouldn’t have bothered?”

  “I can take care of myself. Please, will you listen to me? Will you get out of here? Right now? That’s all I ask.” She came close to me and said very softly, “Remember how it could have been in Algeciras? I—I’ll go with you if you want.”

  I thought she’d learned the truth about Ruy, that he was in as deep as his brother, as Pez Espada, and wanted to give him time to get away. The words came to my lips automatically, “Because of Ruy?”

  Her tongue darted again, nervously. “Ruy? Yes, of course. Ruy. That’s it. Did you save his life? I—I’m very grateful to you. I’m just asking you this one thing.” I was looking down at those green eyes of hers over the high, wide-spaced cheekbones. She was gorgeous. “Please, Chet. Please go away.” She sounded like a sma
ll child, intent and pleading: play the game the way I want and I’ll be your best friend.

  Nancy Huntington chortled in her whisky-voice, “Why don’t you tell him about my lover, Tenley? Why don’t you tell him that?” There was a bottle of Fundador on the table near where she sat. She poured and drank, and smirked at us. She was drunk, not drunk enough to fall off her chair, but too drunk to do anything but sit there heavy and flaccid while she said, “Why don’t you tell the big detective man how come Stu was killed? Why don’t you tell him how I was used? Used and abused by that horse’s ass you call—”

  Tenley, crossing the room swiftly to her, leaned down and slapped her face hard. The glass of Fundador flew. Amber liquid splashed in Nancy Huntington’s eyes. Yelping, she knuckled them.

  “Shut up, you’re drunk,” Tenley said. “Shut up.” She turned to me. “What if I told you I had conclusive proof my father is dead? You came to Spain to find him, didn’t you? So if he’s dead.… will you go away, please?”

  “If you don’t tell him,” Nancy Huntington threatened, “I will.”

  I stood there watching them. You walk into a movie theater in the middle of the picture, and the plot’s involved and the actors say things at each other, simple words for their twelve-year-old audience, and with feeling, but until little fragments of what they say and do begin to form the logic of a story line, it’s as if they’re speaking a foreign language. I’d had that odd, disoriented feeling since entering Pez Espada’s villa. The only thing that seemed to make sense was Tenley’s assertion that her father was dead. It had seemed likely all along. But how had she found out?

  “Let’s hear it,” I said.

  “Hear it? Hear what?”

  “Your father.”

  “This I have to hear,” Nancy Huntington said. “This is going to be good.”

  Before Tenley could answer, Maruja, Paco and Ruy came in. They were walking side by side, woodenly.

  Pez Espada, with a gun in his hand, walked behind them.

  chapter twenty-one

  “Put the gun down, Señor Drum,” he said. “You cannot possibly shoot me without hurting one of them. I would have no difficulty shooting you.”

  I saw his face over Maruja’s shoulder, just a face, any face in a crowd, except for the nose that had given him his name. But I saw the uncertainty in his eyes, the desperation, and the whiteness of his hand that clutched a short-barrel .32 revolver. He’d use the gun, all right. His left eyelid twitched. He’d use it for any reason or for no reason at all. What did he have to lose that he hadn’t already lost? Besides, the fat colonel had set me free knowing I’d come here. If he was in deep enough with Pez Espada, he’d cover murder for him too.

  I set the Beretta down on the phonograph cabinet. Reluctantly, but I did it. Pez Espada’s interest swerved away from me. “Where is he?” he asked Tenley.

  “Downstairs.”

  “Drinking?”

  “Downstairs,” Tenley said again.

  Pez Espada shrugged. “I offered you all the chance to begin again,” he said. “Here. Here in Spain, Alicante on the coast and the hills behind it. I have my contacts in Alicante. It could be the same as before. But no,” he said, smiling bitterly, “you had to listen to a drunkard who—”

  “I will work with you in Alicante,” Fernando said.

  “—could only think of fleeing, of leaving everything we had built together behind. Why? You great fools, didn’t you know why? Because the building of it, the slow making of contacts, the artful smoothness of buying and then, instead of smuggling, highjacking our own cargoes—all that meant nothing to him. He hadn’t seen it grow. He walked right into it, ready-made for him. When it began to crumble, why should he care? We have a fortune in contraband, he said. We can take it down to the coast, ship it to Morocco, he said, and everything we make will be profit. And you wanted to do it his way.”

  “Not I, señor,” Fernando said. “Why do you think I came here? When Maruja told me what he would charge for the diamonds—”

  “The diamonds,” said Pez Espada slowly, “are a sideline. Three, four times a year, and so easy to carry. We don’t need a highjacking boat for the diamonds. No peasants and shopkeepers invest their pesetas in the diamonds. They are contraband before they even reach Gibraltar. The diamonds are carried as an accommodation to you. A man could bring the diamonds into Spain in his shoe. But the cigarettes, the automotive parts, the chapeaux from France, the medicines.… No, Fernando, I thank you; but you are not enough.”

  “Never have I tried to betray you,” Fernando pleaded.

  “No? Who was it who brought Huntington to the cave?”

  Fernando blinked his blind eyes rapidly. “That? That was different. His wife told me Huntington had lost interest in the diamonds, saying they were too difficult to obtain in Gibraltar, saying there was too much danger. In the future he would concern himself with cigarettes, with automotive parts, with the other contraband you have mentioned. She said, if I went with Huntington to the cave, Maruja would convince him the diamonds were worthwhile.”

  “She lied to you,” Pez Espada said flatly. “Huntington never intended to stop delivery of the diamonds. She is a whore and she had found a new lover and the new lover appealed to her as a man who could take her husband’s place.” Pez Espada jabbed his revolver into Maruja’s back. “Which suited your schemes perfectly, eh gypsy woman? Eh?”

  Maruja turned halfway around to face Pez Espada and his gun. That left his head exposed. The Beretta on the phonograph drew me. Snatch it up, pivot, fire in the same motion.…

  And probably blow Maruja’s head off. A revolver is not a rifle, and though I’m pretty good with one, nobody is that good.

  “Huntington demanded too much,” she said. “He did not have to face the risks we faced. He wanted more of the profits.”

  “Fool of a gypsy woman,” said Pez Espada coldly, “we are not dealing in terms of a rucksack of contraband carried over the mountains and distributed by peddlers. We needed a man with contacts to dispose of large shipments. Huntington was that man.”

  “There was another.”

  “Huntington asked me for a bigger share. I agreed.” Pez Espada shook his head. “It wasn’t going to come out of my share.”

  “But ours?”

  “Yours. Of course.”

  “The new one would have worked for less. He told Ruy that.”

  “Worked for less because he was worth less. You should have asked me. Huntington—he could snap his fingers and a wholesale distributor of cigarettes, complete with government license, would take ten thousand cartons in Malaga. Snap them again, and a garage in Valencia would buy a boatload of automotive parts. Snap them a third time, and a jeweler in Madrid—but what does it matter now? A wife who sleeps in any bed as long as there is a strange man in it, gypsy pack-rats too greedy to know a good thing when they see it, and Huntington is killed. Should I weep for you when Estebán and Diego are on their way to Alicante? Weep for those who deserted me when the new partner they thrust upon me decided to sell abroad?”

  “There, you make a mistake,” Maruja said. “I had made no decision as yet, señor. And when I make one, my boys obey.”

  Pez Espada laughed harshly. “Do they? They were going to drive the contraband from the ranch down to the coast at Marbella. They had friends there who could hide it until a boat could be found for the crossing to Africa. That was why Estebán and Diego did what they did.”

  “Ruy, he is young,” Maruja said. “Blame Ruy, but it is nothing I cannot alter. He sees a skirt, he sees what is under that skirt, a foreign skirt, a clever and artful and evil woman, and the soft dark foreign trap there ensnares him and she leads him around as easily as one can goad an ox though she does it not for him but for—”

  “Stop!” Ruy cried. “You can’t talk about her like that. I love her.”

  Maruja recoiled from him as if she’d been struck physically by his words. “Love?” she said. “What do you know of love that I haven’t taugh
t you?”

  Ruy took a deep breath. Very softly but distinctly he said, “What you taught me is filth. I know that now. It was you who could lead me around by a nose-ring. You—never anyone else. Did I ever see myself as a highjacker? As a criminal? Was it for that my father educated me? To be a man who could stand by while murder was done? But you and your black gypsy magic.… Tenley showed me what love could be like—clean and pure as the movement of a veronica.” Comparing his relationship with Tenley with the art of a torero was the highest compliment he could pay.

  Maruja called out, just his name, and on that one syllable her voice broke: “Ru-uy.…”

  “You’re filth,” he said. “Even while my father still lived, even when I was a little boy, it is all I remember now of your love. How you took me to your bed, and first you sang to me, and then we played, and you gave me much wine to drink, and then more than played, and then with my father sick in the next room, we were like animals coupling, and that is what you call love.”

  Maruja screamed his name again, her voice breaking again, and clawed at his face with her hands. He struck her arms away contemptuously. Paco hit him, a single casual blow that sent him reeling across the room. He went down to his knees against the wall, stood up and grabbed a pair of barbed and ribboned banderillas off the wall.

  Turning, raising the hooked sticks overhead, he strutted back across the room. He had everyone’s attention, Pez Espada’s included. I made a grab for the Beretta. Then Ruy leaped across my line of vision, making straight for his brother and Maruja with the bright banderillas. At the last instant he swerved, as if the bull, too, that only he could see had swerved. “Here, toro; hey, toro!” he cried, and I had time to realize Paco wasn’t the only one Pez Espada had slated for death in the burning ranch, and Pez Espada had time to fire—once, the small revolver making a flat, cracking sound, the slug taking Ruy in the chest and halting him momentarily before he stood high on his toes like a ballet dancer and drove the sharp hooked barbs of the banderillas, one on either side, into the soft meatiness of Pez Espada where shoulders and throat met, drove them in deeply and then collapsed on the floor.