by Desmond Cory
He was dazed by the violence of the revolver-blasts and by the shock of the fall, both of which had struck like a fist at his exhausted nerves. He was puzzled at the darkness and silence of the house, at the absence of Trout and Hendricks, at the half-mad vindictiveness in Maria’s voice. And most surprisingly of all, the hatred that for the last half-hour had controlled his each and every action was suddenly almost overwhelmed by a sudden outpouring of not-quite-recognisable emotions, occasioned by the fierce and intimate contact of a warm and yielding and virtually naked body under his own. He lay for a moment motionless, his eyes closed, as he had lain on the floor of the summerhouse; but this time conscious, incredibly conscious as it seemed to him, of the firmness of Maria’s breasts against his chest and of the great, shuddering intakes of breath that thrust her body towards him and then withdrew it. He propped himself up On one elbow, looking down at her; her dress, he saw, had been torn open from the neck almost to the hip, and this was odd, since he had no recollection of having heard it tear. He reached out a hand and ripped it down its entire length and then sat very still again, leaning over her, looking at her body. She wore nothing underneath the dress. There were big blue bruises at the base of her neck and on her ribs and against the curved whiteness of her thighs. Then he looked at her face and saw that in her eyes were enormous tears; the effect of his blow of the knee, perhaps; but the rims of her eyes were red, as though she had been crying for a long time.
“Who was it came?” he said.
Her eyes turned towards his face; then her lips moved. “Pedro,” she said. “Mendes. All the others.”
“What happened to Trout? And Hendricks?”
“They weren’t here. They’d gone.”
“I see,” said Johnny. “So they had you all to themselves, did they?”
He hadn’t come to that conclusion in any way logically; nothing that Maria had said had really made much sense to him. He was now completely punch-drunk; words didn’t mean anything to him, not any more. Nothing did. He put his hands around her waist, then moved them gently up to her breasts; her whole body shuddered, drew itself up, and then went limp. After a while, he lowered his head to kiss her neck and shoulders; her hands came up to him, caught him, moved inside his shirt and ran over his back, at last pulled him down towards her. Slowly, under his mouth and his hands, her body came back to life again.
Fedora found that he couldn’t close his eyes, much as he wanted to. When he closed them, the image that kept coming to him was that of Gracia West’s face cradled in the water, her black hair floating about it, while the beating of the blood in his ears became the rhythm of the whirring cane, and pain exploded again and again in his outstretched hand. . . . No, he couldn’t close his eyes. He opened them, and raised himself a little, looking down at Maria’s face directly beneath him . . . contorted as though in agony, yet beautiful still and with a kind of wild contentment radiating from it . . . the tears wet now on her cheeks and her lips also wet and slightly swollen, constantly moving as she spoke little gutter-phrases of empty love, little amorous cries to the unheeding air. Then her eyes suddenly went blank and Fedora closed his eyes: and now there was nothing there at all, nothing whatsoever. Just darkness. A darkness which gave way perpetually before him. . . . Until at last he was falling, falling through it, and swayed by its movement as though by the slow swell and heave of the tides. It was over, and he lay still. And Maria didn’t move, either. The only thing in the room that moved was the flickering flame of the lamp.
Five minutes passed, maybe.
Fedora rolled over on his back and lay there staring at the ceiling. Maria sat up, and looked at him, and began to stroke his face with one hand.
“. . . I’m all right, then,” said Fedora, as though to himself. He seemed quite surprised. “I thought I might not be, but I am. That’s a bloody good job.”
Maria said nothing, and Fedora turned his head to look at her. It had just occurred to him that, as his first comment on the situation, what he had said was highly lacking in tact, if not downright brutal: but Maria was smiling, and it was perfectly possible, as Johnny realised, that she had not heard the words at all. There are more ways than one of attaining a state in which words do not make sense . . . but in any case, they were making sense once more now to Fedora. Both his hatred and his near-intoxication had been lifted from him, leaving only an overwhelming tiredness and a vague sense of wonderment. He had no clear memory of ever having intended or even wanted to take Maria, but he had done it all the same; and she was still there beside him, still desirable and still of a curiously unexpected beauty. He ran his left hand up her arm to the shoulder, pressed it gently as though to confirm its reality. Maria leaned over him and kissed him hard, to put the matter beyond all possible doubt.
“What did they do to you?” she asked.
The question didn’t really demand an answer, and she didn’t wait for one: she got up, picking her ruined dress from the floor as she did so, and went out to the kitchen. She returned with the dress wrapped round her, fastened somehow at the waist, and with a clean wet cloth in her hand. Very carefully, she began to wash the remnants of dried blood from Fedora’s face and ribs, to soothe the bruises on his body and arms; finally, to unwind the rough bandage from his swollen hand. “Christ,” she said. The cloth dabbed a wet coldness on to the purple inflammations; Johnny shut his eyes tight but said nothing, not until she had finished. Then he got to his feet, walked over to the cane chair beside the table and, very slowly, sat down.
“What happened here?” he said.
Maria sat down on the table beside him, clasping her knees. “It was like I told you. They came to look for your two pals, or so they said. And when they saw there wasn’t anybody here—”
“Who did it?” said Fedora briefly.
“Pedro. The one who tried before—you know him. The others just helped. And Galdos watched.”
She had always called him “Don Tomas” before. Johnny nodded. “All right,” he said; though not in a tone of dismissal. “Well, and that time I wasn’t there. I don’t know that I could have done anything if. I had been, but. . . . Well, all right.”
“I hated you for not being there. I could have killed you for it. But I don’t hate you now.”
Johnny grinned, for the first time that evening; it didn’t hurt his mouth as much as he had expected. “But what happened to Trout and Hendricks? Where did they go to?”
“I don’t know,” said Maria.
“Didn’t they say? Didn’t they leave any message for me?”
“No, they didn’t. They got back a bit earlier today,
round about eight o’clock. Then, about ten minutes later, ‘Endricks got in the car and drove off.”
Johnny stared at her. “Just Hendricks?”
“Yes. Just him. The other one, Trout, the big one— he didn’t know anything about it, he ran out and shouted after him just as he was driving away. Then he came in and put his boots back on and walked off. If you ask me, I think ‘Endricks drove into town and what’s-his-name—Trout—went after him. But I don’t know.”
This was extremely puzzling. “Bloody fools,” said Johnny slowly. “Damned if I know what they. . . .”
“They didn’t have any supper. And I had it all ready. D’you think they’ll want any supper when they get back?”
“They probably won’t get back at all,” said Johnny morosely. “They’ll get done by Galdos’ mob, and it’ll serve them damned well right.” He looked down at the revolver, lying on the floor a few feet to the right of the table. “That’s Hendricks’, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So he didn’t even have the sense to take it with him. I suppose you took it . . . afterwards? In case that crowd came back?”
“Mendes left it lying there,” she said. “I thought I might as well take it.”
“Mendes did? Was it Mendes who cut that bag open?”
“Yes.”
“I thought it was you.”
“Oh no.”
“Well, but why did he cut it open? What did he take?” Of course, thought Johnny; the scintillometer or whatever it was called. The Geiger counter. Hendricks probably couldn’t do his work so well without it; perhaps, indeed, not at all. Still, it seemed rather unnecessary; he probably couldn’t do his work so well without his head, either, and they could have that rolling in the gutter with a minimum of difficulty. “Was there a little leather case. . . .?”
“No. That’s still there. He took the specimen box. . .. I think that’s what he called it. . . . ”
“Oh yes,” said Johnny. “That’s right. He would have.”
“Yes. And the suit.”
“The suit? What suit?”
“Why, the black suit. There was only one there.”
“But what the hell,” said Johnny, more perplexed than ever and therefore annoyed, “does he think he’s going to do with that? What’s the idea?”
Maria shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. Then, “But I know what you’re going to do.”
“So do I,” said Johnny. “Die. On the spot.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going to bed. And then you’re going to drink some soup, I’ve kept it going on the stove. Come on, then.”
It was not, Fedora reflected, a bad idea. There was very little question of his being good for anything else. It was not that he was sleepy; he was in too much pain, still, for that. But he was tired, his muscles were tired and his movements and reflexes were slow. He was in no condition to tangle with Galdos and very much less so to risk conclusions with Paquito Mendes. What his muscles and his nervous system needed now was rest, enough rest for them to knit themselves together again: Fedora knew exactly what his constitution was capable of, and he thought that a clear four hours might do the trick. Until then, he was worth nothing; precisely nothing. So he got up and, with his left arm around Maria’s narrow waist, walked with her to the darkened bedroom. The bed creaked comfortingly under his weight; he fell back on it, swung his legs up from the floor and abandoned himself to complete relaxation. Maria took off his boots and then went away, her bare feet padding softly over the wooden floor: Fedora turned his head on the pillow to watch her go, aware of his sudden envy of the smooth grace of her movements. He began to lift the fingers of his right hand and drop them again, one by one. He could move them, all right. None of the bones were broken. That was something.
But it might not be enough. It had taken old Lecrivain eight years of steady work to persuade the tendons of the fourth and fifth fingers of Fedora’s right hand towards a total independence of each other; and after that had come twelve more years of practice, of scales, harmonic progressions and appoggiaturas, before that independence had been made final and indisputed. Several times before in Fedora’s career had that hard-won independence been imperilled; there had been a bad patch of snow-burn gained on the Austrian Alps, a deep knife-slash in Trieste . . . but never anything like this, never anything that had seemed to offer less than a fifty per cent chance of recovery. Fedora might, as a concert pianist, never have risen above the second class; that kind of fame and that kind of drudgery had never interested him, anyway. Music was therapeutic to him, that was the point; he demanded from his hands at the keyboard the same fantastic agility as was theirs with a Mauser pistol; the piano was the one thing capable of holding his complicated and highly-strung mentality in perfect equilibrium. So it was that, of the two fears that had walked home with him that night and had acted as a spur to the intensity of his hatred, that one had almost been the greater of the two. . . .
The other had been ill-founded, though; Fedora moved his body lazily on the bed, as though in recollection. Yes, the other had been ill-founded; though at that moment when Galdos’ fist had come driving into him, that moment of the most incredible physical and mental agony, he had been convinced of the contrary. And that, maybe, was a happy omen. Fedora’s fingers twitched again on the rough linen of the mattress, and he turned his head once more as Maria came back into the room; this time, though, he followed her movements not with envy but with a sense of deep, almost overpowering gratitude.
“Here,” she said. “See if you can drink this.” And she sat down beside him on the edge of the bed.
The soup was hot and very, very good. It tasted of ham and egg and chicken and rice and all kinds of other nice things. And as he drank it, Fedora felt the veins in his body beginning to course once more, as though a tap of energy inside him had at last been turned on. At first, it was only a trickle, but a trickle that gained steadily in volume; and Fedora knew that it would go on gaining steadily throughout the next four hours, if he were left to rest. Then, at the end of that time—and if only for a limited period—his body would respond to the demands of his brain as quickly as it always had, and perhaps a little faster, even, because he would be keyed-up, aware of the necessity for extra speed and fluidity of movement. It would have to be a little faster, thought Fedora, if it were Mendes whom he had to deal with. And of course, it would be.
He pushed the empty soup-plate off the bed and heard it break on the floor, then reached out for Maria.
She let the dress slide down from her shoulders as his hands touched her and her body gleamed for a moment in the deep starlight, a soft, enticing whiteness given contour by the heavy shadows around her. Then she entered the darkness thrown by the mosquito-net to he down beside him. Her ringers moved lightly over Johnny’s chest before he pulled her into him.
“Don’t you think maybe—”
Fedora put his hand, his bad hand, over her mouth; took it away again in order to kiss her. He closed his eyes: he knew that he could, now. No more images of Gracia’s face or of the humming cane or of crumpled, twisted fingers; only Maria’s body, now, and his own. Fedora had been cured.
“. . . Listen.” said Maria.
“Yes. What?”
“This time it’s not to prove anything,” she said. “It must be that you just like having me.”
“I like it all right,” said Fedora.
Chapter Seven
FEDORA’S first action on opening his eyes was to glance at his wrist-watch. It wasn’t there, of couise: they had taken it. And if they hadn’t, it would certainly have got broken. He moved his body fractionally on the bed, turned his head on the pillow towards Maria . . . who also was awake. There was just enough light in the room for him to see that her eyes were open: it was not yet dawn, but beyond the window was that faint clarity in the eastern sky that precedes the sunrise.
The snuffling of the Land Rover’s engine came to them softly through the trees, and the lowest palm fronds suddenly gleamed silver in the light of its headlamps. Fedora rolled off the bed and went into the long room; only the first three or four steps were painful. He put on his drill trousers and his plimsolls. “Get some coffee,” he said to Maria; his voice sounded remote, not at all interested in what it was saying. Maria put on her torn dress, went quickly out to the kitchen. Fedora lit the lamp, picked up the revolver from the floor; then wandered over to the front door and stood with his back to the post, waiting.
The Land Rover ground to a halt. Trout got out, with the slow, deliberate movements of extreme exhaustion. He may have seen Johnny, but he gave no sign of having done so. He went round to the far side of the car; opened the door; hauled Hendricks out; then walked over the rough grass and up the verandah steps with Hendricks dangling limply from his shoulders. Limply, and at the same time stiffly.
Hendricks was dead, all right.
Johnny stepped aside; Trout went past without saying a word and laid the body down in a corner. Then he went to sit in the chair behind the table, his long legs splayed out in front of him and his round, amiable face completely expressionless.
“Take it easy for a while,” said Johnny. “We’ve got some coffee coming up. Things’ll look a little better after coffee.”
“They got Hendricks,” said Trout.
“I know,” said Johnny. “I know it. I’ve got e
yes.”
He lit a cigarette and put it in Trout’s mouth, looking down at Trout’s wrist-watch as he did so. A little after five in the morning. H’m. He flexed his arm muscles thoughtfully, then sat down and looked towards Hendricks; who lay, limply and at the same time stiffly, in the corner. Hendricks didn’t do anything. He just went on looking dead.
He was wearing a white shirt and his dark suit, the suit that Mendes had taken. The front of the shirt was matted with a dried blackness, and the outside breast pocket of the jacket had a neat little hole punched through it; there was blood there, too, but not much, and signs of powder burning. He’d got it from close range, then. His eyes were neither open nor closed, but something in between. The rictus of his cheek muscles was very far advanced; Hendricks was one of those who looked as though they were laughing. There were others that didn’t.
Maria came in with the coffee. She looked at Hendricks and crossed herself, a complicated gesture that seemed far more Indian than Spanish. Trout leaned forward to take the cup.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “I haven’t eaten in hours. Could we have some breakfast?”
“All right,” said Maria. And went out again, glancing once towards Hendricks before closing the door behind her. Trout began to sip at the coffee. He watched Johnny all the time, almost fearfully, over the edge of the cup.
“You’ve been in the wars, too, Johnny, from the look of things.”
Johnny nodded. “They worked me over.”
“Suppose you tell it first. I’ll think better,” said Trout, “when I’ve got some of this stuff inside me.”
So Johnny told it first. Trout listened without making any comment at all, drinking his coffee slowly and pensively; in the end he said, “Tough luck about the hand, Johnny.”
