by Desmond Cory
“I’ll find the stuff without the notebooks,” said Hendricks. “Don’t you worry about that. It may take me a few more days—but I can do it. And if you’re getting scared just because this gunman guy’s come along—what the hell are you two here for, anyway? That’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to be here to deal with.”
“Quite,” said Trout. “But we don’t have to look for trouble. We want to find the stuff and get out quick— just as quick as we can. That’s the way I look at it, anyway.”
“I don’t give a damn how you look at it. I’ve told you how I look at it; and if that’s not good enough— then so long, it’s been nice knowing you.”
Trout’s voice changed a little in timbre and became noticeably colder. “Let’s get one thing straight,” he said. “You’ve got no say in this matter at all. This is a point of policy that affects E.I.E. directly and, as two of the directors, we’ve got a right to decide it. You happen to be employed by E.I.E.; you’re being paid good money to work for us— very good money—and what’s more you’re under contract. You break that contract and we’ll break you, Hendricks—that’s all.”
“That’s bloody not all,” said Hendricks, landing the table a most formidable thump with his fist. “If I’m on a contract, it’s not because I wanted it. I wanted a ten per cent cut in the takings. But that bloody agent of yours told me that E.I.E. only did business on a paying basis and never gave away any flaming shares, never, and it was on that understanding I took the deal. Yes—and now here you are giving away twenty-five per cent. . . twenty-five/ . . . to the first ruddy little tart who waggles her behind at you and . . . and . . . and has some footling story about someone’s notebooks. I tell you, it makes me mucking sick. I say ha ha! I say ha mucking ha!—you hear me, Trout?—and I say it in your mucking face.” He did, too; his own face, red and contorted with righteous ire, having been advanced to a point approximately six inches from the tip of Trout’s nose. “So you think you can break me, do you? Ha! I’d like to see you try. How d’you think you’ll find this bloody silly mineral without me? What happens if I go to Galdos, eh? and tell him what I know? You can’t do a dam’ thing without me, and you know it.” He finished his discourse on a final upstroke, emitted two more of his explosive “Ha!“s and withdrew his face maybe a couple of feet. Trout watched him carefully, contemplating the matter.
“If what you say is true,” he said thoughtfully, “it would appear that you have a legitimate source of complaint.”
His choice of words was deliberate but rather unfortunate, for Hendricks belonged to that class of persons which instinctively associates long words with the taking of elaborate mickeys. All the same, he really should not have tried to throw the oil lamp at Trout. Johnny’s right foot snapped out and flicked the chair from under him as he rose; he clawed frantically at the air for a second, then landed ignominiously on his posterior with a thud that shook the room. From this undignified position he gazed up at them, his eyes bulging with fury.
“. . . Two of you,” he said, more or less intelligibly. “So there’s two of you—all right. We’ll wait and see. All right—we’ll wait and see”
He leaped to his feet and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him with a noise like a clap of thunder. The sound of his passage, furious as Lucifer’s, died away behind him, leaving a heavy silence. Johnny and Trout looked at one another.
“I feel,” said Trout eventually, “that on this occasion we’ve been rather conspicuously lacking in our normal exquisite tact.”
“People who live in wooden houses shouldn’t throw oil lamps.”
“No, manifestly not. But that wasn’t quite what I meant. Do you think,” said Trout wistfully, “we might convene a special session and vote him his ten per cent?”
“I think we might,” said Fedora. “I propose the motion.”
“I second it.”
“Motion accepted. This idea seems to have possibilities, doesn’t it? Couldn’t we vote ourselves say sixty per cent each while we’re about it?”
“Unconstitutional,” said Trout, “And mathematically impossible.”
Johnny was disappointed. “Oh heck,” he said. “Never mind. If the business of the meeting has now been completed, I suggest we adjourn for refreshment. Maria?”
“¿Sí?” said Maria, opening the kitchen door. “¿Pasa algo?”
Chapter Six
“WHAT d’you think of Hendricks, Maria?”
“I don’t think anything of him,” said Maria shortly. “Ought I to?”
“Maybe not,” said Fedora.
All the same, he felt uncomfortable.
. . . Things had sorted themselves out all right, eventually. Or more or less so. Hendricks had blown in again shortly after dinner had been served; he had not actually apologised, but had nevertheless given Trout and Fedora to understand that the matter had been, at any rate temporarily, forgotten. After dinner, he had received the news of his new appointment on a ten-percent basis in a mollified silence and, after a modicum of the usual cultured chit-chat, had pushed off to bed . . . or, more precisely, to his sleeping-bag.
Trout and Fedora both sensed, however, that the incident was likely to have further and perhaps unexpected repercussions. They hadn’t said anything to each other at the time; but, on waking up almost simultaneously the following morning, their first action had been to glance at the recumbent figure rolled up in Hendricks’ sleeping-bag. Their second action had been, as usual, to yell for breakfast; and Maria had brought it.
“. . . What was West like?” asked Johnny.
“Something like Hendricks.”
“Oh.”
. . . Things had sorted themselves out all right, outwardly. There had been no further reference to the quarrel or to its conclusion. Breakfast had gone its way down their gullets in the usual bleary-eyed silence, and afterwards. . . . Afterwards, Trout and Hendricks had made their preparations and had left the house in a business-as-always sort of atmosphere. Johnny had gone out to sit in the morning sunlight and to clean his pistol, watching the two tiny figures toiling steadily upwards over the rocks beyond the river cleft, dwindling into insignificance in the distance and finally vanishing from sight.
Fedora, left at a loose end, had given the Land Rover’s engine a thorough overhaul, had given it a ten minutes’ spin down the track and then, dripping with honest sweat and axle-grease, had returned to the house. Then he had checked the accuracy of the pistol, sitting on the verandah and trying snapshots on an old tin can; the temperature variation seemed to be very slight. At last, he had gone indoors and more or less relapsed into a coma until lunchtime. This was perhaps the hottest day they had experienced yet; and—though things had sorted themselves out all right, on the surface—Fedora felt uncomfortable.
He tapped his mug meditatively with his spoon and Maria, correctly interpreting this gesture, refilled it. “. . . So you never thought anything of him, either, I suppose?”
“Eh? Who?”
“Of West.”
“Oh, him. No, I didn’t. Why should I have?”
“No reason,” said Fedora, rather tiredly. Thinking probably wasn’t Maria’s long suit, he reflected; and her habit of answering questions by making another made conversation with her rather a fatiguing business.
“Most women think things about the man they live with, that’s all.”
“Oh, think things,” said Maria, as though everything had now been made clear to her. “Of course. Desde luego. You can’t help but think things, can you?”
“Looking at you,” said Johnny, “hardly.” He clicked his tongue. Pseudo-smart dialogue was likely to be totally lost on Maria and would, in any case, only confuse the issue if comprehended. “What sort of a fellow was he?” he asked, picking up his coffee-mug again. “I know he was a bastard. You told me that before. But what d’you think made him come here in the first place?”
“I don’t know,” said Maria. Her big brown eyes had become reflective; or as reflective as
they could. “But he didn’t like it once he’d got here. I do know that.”
“Why didn’t he leave, then?” Maria shrugged. “Where would he go to?” There was always that, of course: where would he have gone to? In a sense, he hadn’t got out at the wrong station at all; he’d just reached the end of the line. “What about you, Maria?” said Johnny, looking at her over the rim of the mug. “You like it here?”
“Oh, as for liking it. . . . It’s better than Maracaibo, anyway. That’s where I come from; Maracaibo. Here at least I’ve got a house to live in. Back there, there was eight of us to a room. . . . It wasn’t decent.”
“It’s a big town, though. For Venezuela.”
“Oh it is, isn’t it? It’s e-normous. But it’s dirty, it’s not nice and clean like Los Cielos.” Fedora took this remarkable statement without batting an eyelid. “You’re from Paris, aren’t you? That’s in France.”
“I’m from London,” said Johnny. “That’s in England.”
“It’s the largest city in the world,” said Maria encyclopaedically, “and it has the biggest dockyard in the world and it has the tallest buildings in the world, except for New York, and the beer there is the best in the world. I know a lot about London.”
“You do,” admitted Johnny; who, to tell the truth, had been rather impressed by this recital. “Did you go to school, or something?”
“N-no. Not in the way you mean. But there are lots of sailors in Maracaibo.”
“That certainly wasn’t quite what I meant,” said Johnny. He put a cigarette into his mouth, pushed the packet across the table towards her. “Have one. No, go one—take one. I never went to school either, if it comes to that.”
“Didn’t you? What did you do instead?”
“I learnt to play piano. Nothing else. That was in Dublin,” said Johnny. “It’s a big town. You might even call it a fine town. But it used to have a few places that I doubt if Maracaibo could beat, and I lived in one of them. I hated it so much I played piano all day and every day until I was sixteen, and then I left, and I’ve never been back since and I don’t much want to.”
“I’ve never seen a piano,” said Maria. “I’ve heard them on the radio, of course. . . . I think I have.”
“I’ll play you something some day,” said Fedora.
“Aren’t you kind? Aren’t you wonderful? Aren’t you the cat’s stinking whiskers? I didn’t ask you,” said Maria wrathfully, “to play me anything on a chamberpot, let alone on a piano. You keep your bloody pianos to yourself.”
“Sorry,” said Fedora mildly. ‘Just an offer. I meant it.”
“All right.” Maria got up, went to stand by the window. “So you meant it.” She stared at the trees outside, her hands clasped behind her back and her fingers twitching slightly; the cigarette protruded outwards from her mouth at an amateurish angle, but she seemed to have forgotten all about it. After a while, she remembered it and took it out and looked at it; then came to sit down once more at the table. “How long you staying here?” she asked.
“Not long.”
“And where you going afterwards?”
“Back to Caracas,” said Johnny.
“. . . Give me a ride?”
“I’ll ask the others,” said Fedora. “It’s all right by me.” After a pause, “I thought you liked it here.”
“I said I liked it better than Maracaibo. Caracas, though—it’s bigger than Maracaibo, even, and it’s . . . Well, it’s on the way to somewhere. I wouldn’t want to be stuck here all my life. The same thing might happen to me^as happened to Roberto.”
“How d’you mean?” asked Fedora, not betraying by the slightest motion his new intentness.
“On the booze. Always using that filthy heroin stuff. Why, he was crazy before he died, and I don’t mean just odd, I mean crazy. You could tell it the way he talked and the way he acted. Of course, it may be different for a man.” She inhaled a prodigious quantity of smoke, enjoying it immensely. “He was a foreigner, like you. He’d been places, done things. He felt kind of cooped up here, you could see that. He saw he hadn’t any other place to go to, it was just the end of the line for him . . . so. . . . ” She shrugged, blew out an enormous wreath of smoke that hung spinning in the air. “That was it.”
Johnny nodded. It was curious that she’d hit on exactly the same metaphor that had occurred to him last night. “He might have committed suicide, then, if he felt that way.”
“Oh no. He wanted to get his own back too much for that.”
“His own back?”
“Yes. On Don Tom&s and on that wife of his. Do you like her?” Maria’s voice held, at this point, a kind of awestruck envy. “She’s smart, isn’t she? And really clever. You can see she’s been around, she knows all the ropes. She’s pretty, too, isn’t she?”
Johnny considered for a moment. “You’re prettier than she is,” he said slowly.
“I suppose you’re going to say you mean that, too.”
“I do mean it. I don’t say that it matters; just a personal opinion, that’s all. Besides . . . I don’t like her, no.”
“Why not?”
“I suppose because she always struck me as fitting in a bit too damned well with Galdos. She’s his sort. That’s why.”
“I see,” said Maria; but dubiously, as though she didn’t really. And, at the same time, pleasedly.
“. . . But how was he going to get his own back on them? And what for? I didn’t understand that bit.”
“Well, he said they were the ones who took all his money off him. So they did, of course. All at gambling, and selling him whisky and drugs . . . so it was his own dam’ silly fault, really. But he was full of ideas for getting his money back and making fools out of them, he had that on the brain more’n anything else. He may even have got them worried in the end,” said Maria dispassionately. “I don’t see why else they should’ve killed him. If they did.”
“And dojou think they did?”
“I don’t know,” said Maria. She looked at him. “If it was anybody else but you, I’d say I thought they didn’t; because I’m scared of Don Tomas like everyone eke is . . . except you. You and your pals. That’s why I tell you I don’t know, which is the truth. See what I mean?”
“Yes,” said Fedora. “Perfectly.”
He finished off his coffee, looked down casually at his wrist-watch. Ten to three. It wouldn’t be getting any hotter than it was now, thank the Lord. He breathed in deeply, filling his lungs with warm, sweet, heavy, close, almost unbreathable air, and unbuttoned his shirt. Then he looked at Maria. It really looked as though he were getting somewhere at last, somewhere behind the facade. The important thing now was to keep her talking. . . .
“He used to talk to you, did he? What about?”
“Oh,” said Maria. “This and that.”
“Like I’m talking to you now, for instance?”
“Oh God, no. He used to talk more sort of at me. He never seemed to expect a reply, or anything like that. More as if at times he just wanted to talk, and I was the only person who could. . . . Towards the end he talked to himself an awful lot. Sometimes in Spanish, but most in some other language, English I think—and when it was in Spanish, I couldn’t understand a word of it, he talked too fast and mumbled everything. He used to laugh a lot, too, all to himself, like a madman. Well, he was a madman. Made my flesh creep, at times.”
Johnny said, “I see.”
“Nobody ever talked to me the way you do, not since I can remember. Except your pal, the big one;
he’s just the same, except he makes me feel he’s making fun of me . . . and you do, sometimes, and then again you don’t. . . . Why can’t you talk like ordinary people?” said Maria, turning on Johnny almost savagely. “It makes me not know how to treat you, the way you talk.”
“I talk like anyone else,” said Fedora.
“No, you don’t. People here say what they feel; except when they’re telling lies—that’s different. But you sort of . . . hide behind
the words . . . and you won’t come out, you won’t talk about what you really feel at all.”
Maria’s tone was definitely injured—on the whole, Fedora thought, her indictment of the underlying basis of the whole of the conversational arts in Western Europe was more than justified. “Look,” he said, forced back on the defensive. “How do you want to treat me, anyway?”
“I like you,” said Maria. “I want to go to bed with you.”
“But. . . .” Johnny pulled diffidently at the end of his nose. “You mean you always go to bed with people you like?”
“Yes,” said Maria firmly. “Always.”
“It must make life rather a hectic business for you.”
“No, it doesn’t, ‘cause I hate nearly everybody.”
“Ah,” said Fedora. “I see that, under those circumstances. . . .”
He stopped, without having intended to, and drank the rest of his coffee, which was almost cold. Animal magnetism, he thought; that’s all it is. Just a couple of words that you . . . For heaven’s sake. . . . He looked up and saw Maria watching him, her eyes open very wide and glowing quietly with internal excitement. “Well?” she said.
“It’s better if we don’t, you know,” said Fedora. For some reason, he found this brief and simple sentence remarkably difficult to pronounce; conceivably because his tongue had got gummed to the roof of his mouth. “You mean you don’t want to?” said Maria. Her tone of incredulity struck Fedora as being natural in the extreme.
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” explained Fedora, in a tone of sweet reasonableness. He paused for a moment, then suddenly and inexplicably lost his temper. “Well, can’t you see I want to, you silly little bitch? What d’you think I’m made of, then? Putty?”
“That’s it,” cried Maria, transported with delight. “That’s the way we talk round here. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
