by Desmond Cory
“No,” said Johnny. “Hendricks can look after himself, if anyone can.”
“I’m uneasy in my mind,” said Trout. “I say, that wouldn’t be a bad title for a rock-and-roll ballad, would it? It’s got definite possibilities.” He experimented under his breath, frowning thoughtfully the while. “Just me and mah. . . . Uneasy Mind. When I’m feeling. . . . Oh, a little uneasy. I don’t mind. Because I’ve. . . . Oh, just a little uneasy in my mind. . . .” He went on like this for some time, then went away once more and came back with the whisky. He put it on the table, reached for a glass, and then stopped dead. Fedora had heard that noise, too.
“Here he is,” he said. “I told you there was nothing to worry about.”
“No?” said Trout. “Have you looked over your shoulder lately?”
The floorboard squeaked again; Fedora swung round in his chair. Inside the open front door there was not one shape, but three. They advanced, stepping forward into the pool of light of the bright lamp; Fedora, who believed in being safe rather than sorry, placed the palms of both his hands flat on the surface of the table. A second later, he relaxed; it wasn’t likely that anyone planning a nice cosy evening’s Fedora-killing would have brought along a woman to watch it. On the other hand, this was Venezuela and one ouldn’t be sure. He left his hands where they were.
Then the bigger of the two men came stumping up to the table. He was pretty big; not quite as big as Trout, but big enough. And he was smartly-dressed. He wore a tan-coloured jacket with enormous shoulders, cream-coloured trousers with an alligator-skin belt. A slim bamboo cane dangled from his right wrist. He was not handsome. Fedora knew who he was. This was not quite the type of man that he had expected; but he knew who this was, all the same.
“You must be Señor Galdos,” he said.
Galdos looked down at him. He had eyes of a deep chocolate brown, eyes which seemed to hold no expression other than a vague and muddled affection, like a spaniel’s. “So you guessed that,” he said. “Clever of you. Very, very clever of you. Clever people and I always get on. Mind if I sit down?”
“Go right ahead,” said Fedora.
Trout pushed a chair politely forward, and Galdos sat down without looking at him. ” Verde, preciosa,” he said, patting the cane seat of the chair where Maria had been sitting. “Sientete aqui.” And the woman came forward fully into the light, smiled once and briefly at Fedora, smoothed her skirt and sat down. Fedora watched without saying anything. These were Galdos’ party manners, but no one was being fooled by them.
“. . . You know who this is?” said Galdos, wriggling round on his chair as though to see the woman better. “You think maybe you can make another guess?”
“You’re Mrs. West,” said Fedora.
“You see? He knows all about us. He knows all about us. Now,” said Galdos, turning back again, “suppose you tell us who the hell you are?”
“Why don’t we go on having fun,” said Fedora, “with guessing games?”
Galdos’ flat brown face creased suddenly in sixteen different directions; his mouth opened; a curious kind of hiccuping noise emerged. He was laughing. “No,” he said. “I don’t like guessing games. I’m not very clever, myself, though I get on well with clever people, like I said. That’s because I never mind it when they make fun of me. I’m a good-humoured person, all my many friends will tell you I’m a very good-humoured person. I like making friends. I came here tonight in the hope of making some new friends and now that I’ve met you I’m glad I did because I can see you’re clever people and I like clever people. . . . What’s your name?”
“Fedora,” said Fedora.
“American?”
“I’m kind of what you’d call a cosmopolitan.”
“I don’t know that I would,” said Galdos. “That’s a very long word for me to use.” He hiccuped again for a while, this time almost soundlessly. “What d’you think you’re doing here, Fedora?”
“Whatever it is I’m doing, I got here first.”
“You mean?”
“I mean I don’t owe any explanations.”
Galdos didn’t like that much. His eyes took on a distant, hurt look, like those of a spaniel that has been refused a slice of cream cake. He sighed deeply. “You know my name all right,” he said, “but it seems you don’t know the kind of person I am, or you wouldn’t talk that way. Let’s put it like this. . . . How many cars you got, Fedora?”
“One,” said Johnny. He grinned. “It’s the Company’s.”
“Well, I’ve got seven. I just don’t know offhand how many the Company’s got. How many houses you got?”
“One,” said Johnny. “That’s all.”
“I got eighteen for my personal use and I own two hundred and thirty . . . business premises apart. I don’t count those. How many suits you got?”
4 ‘Forty-three,” said Johnny, brightening.
“Forty-three?”
“Forty-three.”
“H’m,” said Galdos. “Is that so.” He thought for a moment; his agile brain had no difficulty in seizing on a suitable come-back. “Well, if I wanted forty-three suits, I’d have ‘em waiting on my doorstep in a matter of minutes—or forty-three hundred, if it comes to that. What I’m getting at is that I’m a big man in this district. I notice that a whole lot of people are pretty careful of how they talk to me, and that’s how you can tell that they think you’re big. Money counts, but money isn’t everything. Anyway, when it comes to owing people explanations. . . .” He turned his head to one side and spat on the floor, a few inches clear of Fedora’s right foot. “About those two hundred and thirty houses I mentioned. It so happens this is one of them. If I were to tell you to get out of here, you’d have to get out. . . . Not that the law’s got anything to do with it. If I were to tell you to starve, you’d starve— because no one round here’d sell you anything. And if I were to tell you to get dead, you’d get dead—because someone’d kill you before you knew where you were. Take a look behind you.”
Johnny looked round. The other man was behind him, the man Johnny had almost but never quite forgotten; he had a long sad face and a drooping moustache and a heavy pistol in his hand. It looked like a German model. It would work, all right. Johnny shrugged. “And what’s all this go to prove?”
“It all goes to prove you don’t want to get too fresh when you’re having a friendly talk with Uncle Tom. That’s what it goes to prove.” Galdos rattled the bamboo cane he carried against the leg of his chair. “Now suppose you tell me what you’re doing here, and quick.”
Fedora lit a cigarette, his eyes resting thoughtfully on the split yellow tip of the cane. He said, “We came here to see Señor West.”
“Señor West is dead,” said Galdos.
“I know,” said Fedora. “I know.”
“And what did you want to see him for? You friends of his?”
“That’s right,” said Fedora.
Galdos looked again towards the woman. Till then she had been sitting quietly, her hands folded in her lap, saying nothing at all; but Johnny had been conscious all this while of her eyes examining him coolly and once, half-turning towards her, he had run directly into her gaze, blue and steady and ironical. It was a gaze that suggested that if Fedora had answered Galdos back, it had been purely in the hope of impressing her; and there was just enough truth behind this suggestion to make Fedora feel slightly self-conscious. He looked at her again now, and she straight at him. “I’ve never seen him before,” she said. “Nor the other one, either.”
“You think you’d have remembered?” said Fedora.
She lifted her right shoulder half an inch, dropped it again. “I knew all Roberto’s friends,” she said. “And you weren’t one of them. You knew him in the Argentine?”
Fedora had never been to Argentina, and nor had Trout. That made it risky. “No,” hesaid. “In England.”
Galdos leaned forward. “Señor West left England in 1934. Where were you then? . . . At school?”
; Fedora had never been to school, either. But that didn’t matter so much. “.. . He was my uncle,” he said.
“Your uncle?”
“That’s what I said.”
Galdos fingered his chin. “I never heard that Roberto had a nephew. Did he ever tell you that, palomita?”
Palomita watched Fedora for a moment in silence. “Oh yes,” she said.
“He did?”
“Yes. He told me so. This one’ll be the oldest.”
“Well,” said Galdos, staring hard at Fedora. He tilted his chair back on its rear legs, still staring. Then, abruptly, he swung his weight forward again. “So you’re Roberto’s nephew, eh? That makes things a bit different. Came to look the old man up, did you? And. . . . Yes, it’s tough, of course. Very tough luck. They’ll have told you all about it, I suppose?”
“Oh, everything,” said Johnny. “Everything.”
“A grand fellow, old Roberto,” said Galdos, his eyes melting as he spoke into twin pools of concentrated melancholy. “A very fine engineer. Had his faults, of course.” And his eyes flickered briefly over the heroin packets that still lay on the table. “But a dam’ good engineer and the hell of a gambler. I Won’t tell you how many nights we spent drinking and playing poker in this very room, because if I did . . . if I did. . . . I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Fedora. I’ll tell you what I’d like us to do, and right away. We’ll all drink a toast, that’s what we’ll do, to old Roberto’s memory. Pedro? . . . Get a bottle. Get some glasses.”
Pedro tucked the pistol into the waistband of his trousers and moved away. Galdos watched him go,
absently patting with the palm of his hand Señora West’s round brown shoulder. “I had great respect for your uncle, great respect. A shock for us all, his death was. By the way, who’s your pal?”
“Name of Trout,” said Johnny. “Sebastian Trout.”
“Well, that’s all right,” said Galdos. “Any pal of. . . Fedora here . . . a pal of mine. . . . Understood there were three of you. But I must have got it wrong.”
“The other one’s out for a stroll,” said Johnny. “He’ll be back before long. That’s if he hasn’t taken a tumble into the river.”
Galdos looked sideways at him, a glance of an almost comical shrewdness. “That’s the way to take it,” he said. “I like to see a boy who isn’t too much put out by these unpleasant little surprises. Cheerful and smiling —that’s how I like to see people. Always cheerful and . . . smiling. . . . Roberto was the same, of course. A really happy character—wasn’t he, honey?”
“Oh yes,” said Señora West. “A really happy character, was Roberto. I always thought that was why you two always got on so well.”
“Exactly.” Galdos leaned forward to fill the dusty glasses that Pedro had placed on the table. “Many’s the time I’ve sat here, at this very table, and Gracia will tell you the same, to enjoy . . . to enjoy a really good. . . .” He tried the whisky, frowning deliberately the while. “You two don’t fancy the cards, I suppose? You wouldn’t care for a couple of hands or so right now?”
“I don’t mind,” said Fedora. Galdos beamed at him.
“Why, that’s great. Of course, you wouldn’t be Roberto’s nephew otherwise; your family must have it in the blood. That how I’ve got it. Gambling’s in my blood. My father was just the same before me. People may tell you I never had one, but that’s all cock. Pedro,” said Galdos, hiccuping deliriously at his last shaft of wit, “get the cards. You know where they are. We’re going to enjoy this evening, by God.”
They cleared the table, except of course for the whisky bottle and the glasses. Galdos shuffled the cards between his pale, hairy hands, a faraway smile on his face; the others drew their chairs in closer to the table. Pedro remained alone in the background, leaning against the wall and smoking a foul-smelling cigar; the sharp glow of the tobacco in the shades formed the only tangible reminder of his presence. Galdos put the cards down on the table and drew forth from his coat pocket a solid wad of banknotes; these he thumped down on the table beside the pack. Then he peeled off half of them and slid them over to stand at Gracia’s right hand. “That’s how I like my money,” he said. “On the table, where everyone can see it. It prevents misunderstandings.”
Johnny, who could take a hint when offered delicately enough, took his wallet from his hip pocket and pulled out a very much more slender wad; the which he, also, divided in two for himself and Trout. “That’s E.I.E.’s money,” said Trout, in English and a conspiratorial whisper.
“That’s all right,” said Fedora. “We don’t plan to lose any of it.”
“Cut for the bank,” said Galdos, reaching for the cards.
Siete y media is in no sense a difficult game, being in all essentials identical to quarante et un or baccarat. The eights, nines and tens are drawn from the pack; court cards count as a half; and the idea is to draw cards to a value of seven and a half, or as little less as possible. It is ninety per cent pure chance and ten per cent nerve and instinct . . . not that any two people are ever agreed as to the exact proportions. That was Fedora’s own estimate. It was a game he quite liked, since he had good card sense and phenomenal muscular control. Besides, on this occasion he wasn’t playing with his own money. As was his usual habit, he opened quietly enough, concentrating less on the run of the play than on the movements of the other players—excluding Trout, whose style he had observed on many other occasions and who could prove a very aggravating fellow to be matched against. Gracia West seemed to be doing much the same as he was, and equally unostentatiously; at the fifth round she won the bank from Galdos but continued to play in much the same way, declaring a low ante for each round and contriving neither to lose nor to gain very much. Then Trout took the bank and, obviously with the idea of pitching in before the others had properly warmed up, moved the bidding up quite as high as was comfortable; a development, however, which Galdos seemed positively to welcome. He was probably the weakest player of the four, surprisingly enough—or maybe not surprisingly at all; his thick, fleshy fingers were clumsy at times with the deal, and he could not keep the satisfaction from his face when the cards were running his way. All the same, he won three hands in succession from Trout and, shortly afterwards, took back the bank again. The game by now was nicely warmed up.
Nobody was cheating. Fedora had never thought it likely, in any case; Galdos so obviously played for excitement, and Gracia West so obviously played to win. He filled his glass carefully from the half-emptied bottle, surveyed the slightly augmented pile of banknotes at his left elbow and, when the next round gave him at last a seven and a king, immediately pitched up the bidding to the level that Trout had started on. He kept it there. The next four hands he turned up were a seven, a six, a seven and a five, all of which won. Galdos, who had plunged in heavily on two of these, regarded him thoughtfully.
“This makes it more like a game,” he said. “This makes it more like a game.”
“The ante’s two hundred. Two hundred again,” said Johnny. He dealt. Trout accepted another; surveyed ruefully the perfect seven and a half that Johnny had given him and, deciding that Johnny held the bank in a winning vein, asked for another. . . . Fedora won, again on a seven, and Galdos whacked his cane against His thigh. “Lucky in cards,” he said, “unlucky in love.”
Johnny glanced briefly at Gracia West, whose face was expressionless except for a meaningless smile. “The ante is fifty. Fifty.”
“Cold feet, eh?” said Galdos. “Oh, well. I don’t blame you.”
Johnny looked at him, at Trout, at Gracia West; then down at the table. “All right,” he said. “Five hundred. To give you people a chance.”
“That’s more like it,” said Galdos, satisfied. He looked down at the card in the fold of his hand, transforming his face into a studious blank. “I’ll double you.”
Trout glanced sideways, once, at Fedora; the ante had been a high one, perhaps too high. If he thought he could gain a moral advantage by riding his luck at the s
tart of the game—that was all right; but . . . the ante was a high one. Five hundred bolivares are well over fifty pounds; doubled, almost a hundred and ten. And there was still a chance of Galdos doubling again. Fedora flipped him the card across the table; he picked it up, glanced at it, and once again there was that unconcealable flicker of satisfaction behind his eyes. “Double you again,” he said.
A third card. He looked at it, hesitating; his face suddenly seemed sweatier than before, the lines in it more deeply ingrained. He looked at Fedora, who was watching him steadily with an expression of mild interest; then at the other two. Trout had gone over the mark with two fives, and had thrown in. Gracia had stayed put on two cards, probably not very good ones. Galdos looked down at his cards again, still hesitating; a drop of perspiration fell from the tip of his nose on to the table. “Joder” he said. “Come on, then. I’ll double you again.”
Trout closed his eyes, making frantic mental calculations. The fourth card slid from Johnny’s fingers across the table; Galdos, unmindful of dignity, pounced upon it. He looked at it. He went on looking at it. He looked at it as though it were a tiger about to spring on him. His face was a shade paler now and his eyes shone with a soft, moist lustre. “And again,” he said. And then, slowly,
“Ahhhhhhhhhh. . . .”
He turned the five cards face upwards on the table, one by one. Two threes. Two queens. And a king. He had gained the maximum.
. . . and doubled again, thought Trout despairingly, is eight thousand bolivares, that’s nearly a thousand pounds. We can’t have much more than that between us. If Galdos came here to break us the way he broke West, then he’s done it — and on Johnny’s deal, too. He sank dispiritedly back into his chair, watching as Johnny’s thin brown fingers flicked over the two cards that lay on the table before him. “Hope I haven’t spoilt the game,” said Galdos cheerfully, “taking all your money at once. Eight thousand—”
