Run to Death

by Patrick Quentin

I stubbed my cigarette in an ash-tray. I would like to have been stubbing it in Vera’s face.

  I turned off the light, but I didn’t feel sleepy. As I lay in the darkness, my mind clicked round and round like a cogwheel. Vera owned that huge house. She was rich, a person with position. Halliday could have got himself any amount of Juniors. Juniors come a dime a dozen in Mexico. But how had he managed to hire Vera? Perhaps she wasn’t hired. Perhaps she was a full-fledged partner.

  But whatever she was, her role was clear to me now. Halliday had used two methods against me, running them both at once—the direct method and the indirect method. Junior was the direct method. Vera was the indirect, the simple ancient method of Delilah.

  She had been part of the direct method, too. She had been assigned to pick me up in the cemetery and drive me to Los Remedios, where Junior could get me. When the theft of my clothes had brought them nothing, she had been commissioned to manœuvre me into a dark street where Junior could kidnap me in the light-blue sedan.

  Sometimes, trying to win my confidence must have given her bad moments. Her quick response to my telephone call, for example, had destroyed my last suspicions of her, but it had almost ruined their plan for abducting Lena at Xochimilco.

  Only almost, of course. From the beginning their teamwork had been perfect. Certainly they had got everything they wanted out of me.

  Or had they?

  I started to wonder just why they had lured me to Cuicuilco that evening. I knew now why they had made Lena Snood ask for Vera, too. They had seemed to threaten Vera simply to strengthen my confidence in her. But why had they wanted me?

  I was almost sure that they had never believed I was just a tourist who had blundered into their mayhem by accident. That was too simple an explanation for minds as devious as theirs. To them I was still the associate of Deborah Brand, who was masquerading as a sucker. And, as such, it was possible that they thought I had known Brand’s address all along and that, once they captured me, they could wring it out of me.

  But was that all they had wanted? Just Brand’s address? When Halliday killed Deborah and stole her pocket-book he must have found her plane ticket to New Orleans inside. If that were so, he had always known her true destination. Wasn’t it improbable that their elaborate kidnap attempt had been staged simply to get Mr. Brand’s street number, which might well have been in the New Orleans telephone book?

  It seemed to me, then, that a detective story with some kind of message in it and an address weren’t much to justify a conspiracy as tremendous as this one seemed to be. Wasn’t it more likely that there was still something else they lacked, something they thought I had, something from Deborah, something, perhaps, which was the most important thing of all?

  I played ineffectually with this new idea until my thought-processes started to blur and I slept.

  My dreams were bad. They were haunted by women—Vera Garcia, Lena Snood, Deborah Brand. Deborah was a ghost. Lena was a corpse.

  Vera was an Aztec feathered serpent with a beautiful woman’s face.

  XIX

  The shrill bell of the alarm clock awoke me to darkness. I got up and dressed, putting the colt in my pocket. There was orange-juice in the ice-box. I made coffee. After I had breakfasted I picked up my suitcase and my brown gabardine bag and went down to the street.

  Dawn had come, and a thin grey light was bringing the city back into day. The street was deserted. I walked the few blocks to the Paseo and caught a taxi almost immediately outside the Hotel Reforma.

  It got me to the airport before six-thirty—too early to check my bags. Vera had not arrived. I had my ticket changed to take in my stop over and optimistically took a reservation on a plane to New York leaving New Orleans at 10 p.m. that night. I inquired if a plane had left for New Orleans the night before after ten. I was told that the regular evening plane had been delayed for repairs and had left at midnight. That meant, almost certainly, that Halliday was now in New Orleans.

  I felt licked before I started. My chances of seeing Iris that night seemed infinitely remote. I sat down on my suitcases to wait for Vera.

  A boy with bare feet and a serape came by desultorily vending copies of yesterday’s Mexican Herald, the local English language newspaper. I bought one, glanced at the headlines and put it down on my knee.

  I have never liked the atmosphere of impersonal efficiency which anything to do with aeroplanes seems to engender. That morning the airport was particularly depressing. Flustered passengers, hunched against the early morning cold, were as usual scurrying around, searching for bags that weren’t lost, calling unnecessary instructions to each other, making inquiries at the wrong desks. An air hostess, metallically pretty and indistinguishable from any other air hostess, went by, laughing and flirting with two pilots. A white-coated attendant was half-heartedly sweeping dead cigarettes and candy papers into a dusty pile.

  My speculations of the night before started to plague me again. Did they still think I could be useful to them? If not, why were they letting me go to New Orleans? Between them they could at least have tried to stop me. Had I been right? Did they still think I was in possession of something—something without which they were stymied?

  The minutes seemed to drag. For want of anything better with which to divert my thoughts, I began to read the Herald. Being yesterday’s, I knew there’d be no report of the discovery of Lena’s body. I read that someone had divorced someone, that something had happened in Paraguay, that Miss Leona something, the sparkling songstress direct from somewhere, was to make her sensational Mexican début at….

  My eyes riveted on a small paragraph at the foot of the third page. I read:

  AMERICAN ARCHÆOLOGIST MISSING

  Lima, Peru…. To-day word came from the Camp of the Brand-Liddon Archæological Expedition deep in the hinterland, that Mr. Joseph Brand, well known Finnish-American archaeologist, is missing. He disappeared from the camp last night, and although search-parties have been sent out, no trace as yet has been found of him. It is feared that he met with some accident in the jungle, or possibly even that some of the primitive Indians in the neighbourhood have captured him. Mr. Brand and Mr. Liddon have been trying to locate a hitherto undiscovered Inca city buried in the jungle. Mr. Frank Liddon, who headed the expedition with Mr. Brand, was not present at the time of the disappearance, having left for Argentina the week before.

  I read the paragraph again. It proved startlingly that Deborah had been telling the truth at least about her father’s profession and whereabouts. It also opened up new and alarming vistas.

  What sort of opposition was I up against when Deborah’s father could be kidnapped in Peru, while Halliday was killing her in Yucatan?

  A voice behind me called:

  “Peter.”

  I threw the paper down on the cement floor and turned. Vera was coming through the little clusters of passengers. A porter walked behind her with a fancy pigskin suitcase. She looked sensational in a tomato-red suit, a small black straw hat and the silver-fox cape. People stared at her. I could tell she was making them feel dowdy. They thought she was someone famous—a Mexican movie star, maybe. And she might have been. She had the celebrity touch. She’d always had it.

  I wondered whether she had ever really been a ballerina, or whether that story had been phony too.

  She smiled radiantly. I smiled back.

  “Good morning, Peter.”

  “Good morning, Vera.”

  The porter put her bag down next to mine and went away. She was being vivacious, almost arch.

  “Am punctual, no? You like me to-day? Am chic?”

  “Where is the kitchen stove?”

  “Kitchen stove?” She looked suspicious. “You mock me, no? Am too smart? Like always I junk me up?”

  “On the contrary. You’re elegant. Ginger-peachy.”

  “What is this….?” She broke off and grinned. “Ginger-peachy. I know. Is elegant.” She was suddenly serious. “You have the plan for what we do in New Orl
eans?”

  I’d like to have asked: What about your plans, baby?

  I said: “Just to see this guy Brand, I guess. What more can we do? Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Me?” She nuzzled her hand through my arm. “Is you are the big brains. Me? I am just the stupid cow who obeys.”

  Someone blared something through the public address system, first in Spanish, then in English. It had nothing to do with us. The air hostess passed again without the pilots, patting her back hair smugly and looking as if she’d eaten them for breakfast.

  “Peter.”

  “Yes, Vera.”

  “Am thinking.”

  I jumped on my guard. That was always how she started when she was fishing for something.

  “Thinking of what, Vera?”

  “You think is only this book—this detective story? You think there is nothing more?”

  My heart seemed to flip over like a fish on a river bank. She was asking me whether there was something more than the book. That meant my earlier suspicions were correct. She and Halliday were still missing something from Deborah Brand. Of course, it didn’t mean that I had it. It only meant that they thought I had it. But…

  “Like what, Vera?”

  “Oh”—she shrugged—“I do not know. Only it seems so little. All this fuss just for the detective story, the address.”

  The cleaning man swished his broom around our suitcases and moved on. A little girl, travelling with a large man, was abandoned near a straw basket close to us and started to howl. An American woman, with a sharp nose and a mannish haircut, strode up to the airline desk.

  She was obviously just back from Acapulco. Her face flamed crimson. The sharp nose was magnificently peeling. It was a sunburn to end all sunburns.

  Vera giggled. “Gods! what a sight. Is the rare steak, no? The sunburn….”

  I didn’t hear the end of the sentence. Sunburn. The word seemed to shoot up in my mind like a rocket. Something Deborah Brand had given me! She had come to my room in Chichén-Itzá with the jar of sunburn cream. After she had rubbed my back, she had left the jar on my bedside table.

  Her jar of sunburn cream.

  Earlier, in the car, it had been Deborah who had brought up the subject of my sunburn. It had been she who had suggested lending me the cream. I thought of the first thing that had made me suspect she was something more than a tourist—her nervous glance over her shoulder at her bag. Had her fear been for the jar of sunburn cream? Had the really important thing always been hidden in it? Had she seized on my sunburn as a plausible excuse for smuggling the jar into my possession where it would have been safe, whatever might have happened later in her own room?

  My original fantastic ideas came back. A jewel. A jewel could be buried in a jar of cream.

  I had never thought of the jar from the moment Deborah had put it on the bedside table until now. But presumably when I left Chichén-Itzá I packed it with the rest of the things. Presumably it had been in my bathroom closet ever since I had come back to Mexico City. Presumably, too, since last night I had cleared everything out of the closet, I had packed it again in my gabardine bag.

  When my apartment had been ransacked, the bathroom had not been touched. Perhaps Halliday’s man had not bothered to search it, or perhaps he had been scared away by something before he had finished the job. That didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they obviously had not found it—or Vera would not be questioning me about that “something more”.

  I tried desperately to reconstruct the moment last night when I had packed my toilet things. I couldn’t remember whether I had seen the jar or not.

  But it must have been there, and I must have taken it.

  It must be lying in the gabardine bag which was standing on the ground now, between Vera’s feet and my own.

  The gabardine bag which didn’t even lock.

  Those thoughts tumbled through my mind in a couple of seconds. I was still looking at the woman with the peeling nose. I turned to Vera, and saw that she was watching her, too.

  She was absorbed. She didn’t realize I was looking at her. There was a strange, speculative gleam in her eyes, and suddenly the gleam changed to an expression of controlled excitement.

  It vanished as quickly as it had come. But it had given away her thoughts as plainly as if she had spoken them out loud.

  I had told her of the sunburn episode in Yucatan. She had been watching the woman, and her mind had taken the same leap as mine.

  She had realized about the jar of sunburn cream, too.

  I felt like a piece of elastic twisted to its extreme endurance. I had planned to make some excuse and duck off to inspect the suitcase in the Men’s Room. I couldn’t do that now. Anything I did which had any connection with the baggage would give away to Vera the fact that I had realized the importance of the sunburn cream.

  I was horribly conscious of the gabardine bag at my feet. It seemed as if everyone in the crowded airport was looking at it.

  Vera was playing super-nonchalant. That was her way of covering up. She felt in her pocket-book and brought out a package of cigarettes and an album of book-matches. She put a cigarette in her mouth, struck a match and then gave a little cry. For the match had ignited all the rest, and for a second the whole book blazed in her hand.

  “Damn!” She threw the book to the ground and stamped it out.

  I saw what her game was. I saw it as clearly as if I had thought it up myself. I felt a kind of panic.

  She spun to me, holding out a smoke-blackened finger. Her eyes were flashing with the psuedo-Russian anger. “Damn! Damn! How am I such the fool? Peter, please, it burns—burns. Haven’t you something in the bag? Something to soothe?”

  “Wait,” I said. “There’s a drug counter over there. I’ll get some unguentine.”

  “No, is not open yet, too early. Peter, in your bathroom I notice. I am sure you have the stuff against the sun. The sunburn cream. Is good. Is in your bag, yes?”

  I could have said no. I could have said I’d left all the drugs in the apartment. That would have meant the end of Vera in my life. Heaven alone knew how she would have wangled it, but she could never have afforded to go on the plane and leave the jar behind.

  In the few seconds I had for a decision I played with that idea, tempted by the thought of the mental anguish it would cause her. But I abandoned it, because I knew that I would have Halliday to face in New Orleans. It was better to keep Vera with me, even at the expense of letting her see the sunburn cream.

  Better to keep my hostage.

  “Peter,” she shrilled. “Please. It hurts. Look in the bag. Please.”

  I squatted down and unzippered the gabardine bag. I groped through shirts, feeling the thin handle of my razor, the stiff bristles of my brush.

  Was it there or wasn’t it? If it wasn’t, both Vera and I had lost. If it was, even though the danger was terrific, I still had a chance for victory.

  My fingers touched something smooth and round. I pulled it out.

  The jar of sunburn cream was there all right.

  It was in my hand.

  BOOK III: NEW ORLEANS

  XX

  I had never really looked at it before. It was the size of a large jar of cold cream. It was an American brand, but the label was printed in Spanish.

  It was heavy. I noticed that with a stab of excitement. Heavier than you might expect a jar of cream to be.

  “Quick, Peter,” cried Vera querulously. “Give it to me.”

  I glanced at her. In spite of myself, I admired her. Her whole desperate plot would succeed if that jar passed from my hand to hers, but I could never have told it from her face. Her expression was exactly right, a little anxious, a little piqued at her own stupidity and my delay.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “I’m quite a first-aid man. Hold out your hand.”

  She stretched out her hand. The burn was localized on one finger. I unscrewed the cap of the jar. It must have been full when Deborah used
it on my back, for only a little had been scooped out. It was excruciating to know that the solution was almost certainly there in my hand and I could do nothing about it.

  I smeared cream on her finger. Her hand was trembling. Still holding the jar, I searched through the bag again and found a band aid. I applied it neatly over the burn.

  “There. Good as new.”

  I screwed the cap on the jar. Vera laughed.

  “What a fool I am! So clumsy. Peter, give me the cream. I keep in my bag, no?”

  I had been expecting that. “I wouldn’t bother. This stuff’s only good for sunburn. That’ll hold you till Brownsville. Then we’ll buy some unguentine.”

  I knew she couldn’t argue against that. She wouldn’t dare make an issue of it and risk arousing my suspicions.

  A voice brayed Spanish over the public-address system. Then it said: “Passengers for Flight Number 564 to Brownsville, New Orleans and New York, please check your baggage at the airline desk.”

  Once again I had to make a split-second decision. Should I keep the jar with me or put it back in the bag? It was too big for my pocket. If I kept it, Vera would offer to put it in her pocket-book. I couldn’t reasonably refuse so sensible a suggestion. It was better to leave it in the bag. The bag would be checked through, and I would have the check.

  I dropped the jar back into the gabardine bag and zippered it. I tucked it under my arm and picked up Vera’s suitcase in one hand and mine in the other.

  “Come on.”

  After they’d weighed us in they tagged the bags and gave me the three checks. The check for her suitcase was only one number different from that of the gabardine bag. If she had it I was afraid she might try to pull a switch in New Orleans. I kept all three checks. I knew she couldn’t object. It is natural for a man travelling with a girl to handle the baggage.

  When you’re leaving a country the customs is a mere formality. While the official searched cursorily, I hovered around the gabardine bag. Soon I watched a porter carrying the three pieces off to the plane.

  Until we reached Brownsville, the sunburn cream was as safe as if it was in a bank vault.