The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  Terrified by the murderous accuracy of her aim, Rosario made for the stairs. The first instinct of customers and waiters was to rush to Almádena so that she was able to get away. Toby, having no wish to be involved in enquiries, ducked under two tables, giving the impression that he was picking up broken pieces of crockery, and bolted after her. He went through the door of Number Seven hard on her heels and out on to the fire escape. Rosario, hysterical with fear, twisted and tumbled her way to the bottom. She was about to rush half-naked into the street when Toby grabbed her.

  “Careful! Careful, chica!” he said. “We must use our heads.”

  Rosario tried to wrench herself away. She was sobbing:

  “He is dead! He is dead!”

  “I don’t think so,” panted Toby—a quarter of the plate had been sticking ominously in Almádena’s head, but there was no point in upsetting the girl. “You just cut his scalp a little. We’ll talk about it later. I’m very grateful. Pull yourself together and don’t be afraid.”

  There were two ways out of the courtyard into which they had descended. One of them evidently led out into the street, for the far end was bathed in red light from the neon sign over the entrance to the cabaret. The other ran into darkness between the front of a garage and a blank boundary wall. This was tempting, but Toby rejected its offer; it looked too likely to end in a cul-de-sac. A third way of escape was a small door, very close to the street but on the side of the alley opposite the cabaret building. Should it be open it was a good gamble, for anyone running down the alley into the courtyard would be certain to pass it without thought. Toby raced for the door, dragging Rosario after him, and passed through unseen.

  “Very bold,” said Manuel’s voice in the darkness. “It was the only place. Come on!”

  “How the devil did you get here?”

  “Logical. Here’s your coat and hat. Quick!”

  The wing of some building, melancholy with rain, stared down on them, emphasising by an occasional lit window the number of the unlit. They were evidently in the backyard of a block of cheap flats. Manuel bolted the door and led the way through a maze of garbage cans and building material. The courtyard and alley that they had just left became alive with excited voices and pounding feet.

  “What’s the next move?” whispered Toby.

  “I don’t know. Through the basement and out by the front door, if we can. Can you pray, Rosario?”

  “I am,” Rosario sobbed.

  “Well, pray that the porter is asleep. Vámonos! ”

  Luck was with them, for the stairs were close to the back entrance. They crept up, hearing nothing but the crying of a child and the faint voice of the porter’s wife soothing it, and emerged from the darkness into a white-tiled entrance-hall with a light obligingly burning over the front door. Manuel silently buttoned Rosario into Toby’s raincoat and squashed his own black felt hat over her head. Then he opened the door and watched until the street was empty. They walked rapidly round two corners, Toby divesting himself of his apron on the way, and were temporarily swallowed up in the city.

  Manuel halted in the dark portico of a house.

  “We must stop and think a minute,” he said. “Rosario, imagine you live here and that we are saying good-bye to you.”

  “I’ll never live anywhere,” hiccupped Rosario. “Never … never … never….”

  Manuel pushed his handkerchief into her hand and then raised her unresisting arm so that her face was covered.

  “That’s better,” he said gently. “Now you won’t make so much noise, and if anyone sees us he’ll think you are just saying good-bye to the novio. Put your left hand on the doorknob.”

  Rosario obeyed. It was a convincing pose.

  “And now then don’t cry so much. They won’t do anything to you, chica. You throw too straight—that’s the only fault.”

  “Did you see?” Toby asked.

  “Yes. When Rosario started on the crockery, everyone rushed in from the door and the cloakroom, so I got your things and ran out. Then I climbed the wall of the alley and unbolted that door. I hoped you’d have the sense to make for it when you got to the bottom. But even if you didn’t I could hear all that happened and possibly help.”

  “Gracias, compañero! ” said Toby gratefully. “What’s your advice now? Wouldn’t it be best for Rosario if we all went back?”

  “No. Look at it this way! I met you to-night and I don’t know who you are. I honestly believe you are the ex-valet of the Spanish ambassador. The proprietor of the Alcázar will back me up—he must for his own sake. The police will want to question you, but so long as nobody who knows you saw you and so long as you don’t show your face in the streets till you sail, they’ll never find you.”

  “But I’ll have to give evidence for Rosario.”

  “Better if you don’t! There are fifty people ready to swear that the row was started by you—a rowdy gringo, fighting drunk!”

  “He was not,” murmured Rosario indignantly.

  “He was,” Toby said. “And don’t you forget it. But thank you, simpática!”

  “Rosario hoped to startle you into your senses,” Manuel went on. “It was an accident that she hit anything. True, Rosario?”

  “He was going to shoot him,” Rosario sobbed. “And he was your friend and so nice.”

  “He wasn’t nice. And you didn’t take any sides. As a matter of fact, you were very fond of the Marquis of Almádena.”

  “No!” said Rosario loudly.

  “You’d better coach the witness later,” suggested Toby.

  “Yes. She must vanish for a day or two. I’ll look after that. The essential thing is that none of us be seen together. Rosario, do you know the Casa del Corregidor?”

  “No.”

  “You must. The big tenement house on top of the hill.”

  “No. I only know the Alcázar. I sleep during the day, you see. I’ve only been here a year.”

  “God! Never mind—go in a taxi. Nobody will recognise you in that hat. Go up to twenty-eight on the top floor. It’s my room and here’s the key. You send a taxi to this house, Tobal, on the way back to your hotel.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going straight back to the Alcázar to join in the search for you. There is sure to be a crowd in the yard and no one will know where anyone else was for the last quarter of an hour.”

  “When shall I see you?”

  “Not at all, if you are wise. Get on with your business trip while the going is good.”

  “Hell!” said Toby. “I like to consider myself discreet, but that’s carrying it too far. Even if they put me in gaol for a week or two I can only lose my job. And that doesn’t matter. We have to talk.”

  Manuel chuckled.

  “I’ll be at home at four to-morrow,” he said. “Once you get to the Casa del Corregidor, you needn’t worry. But use taxis for the street and keep your face covered.”

  “Then till to-morrow!”

  “Till to-morrow!”

  Toby sent a taxi to pick up Rosario and returned to his hotel by side streets. He had forgotten, as usual, to give up his key to the hotel porter on going out and therefore it would be supposed that he was in. This encouraged him to attempt an illegal entry. He had not practised house-top alpinism since Oxford, but the night’s happenings had reminded him how easy it was to force a way into any building that had not four perpendicular sides.

  Behind the hotel was a deserted lane used by delivery vans and the hotel bus. He explored it, but found no possible route to any of the hotel windows. There was, however, a drain pipe which gave access to the adjoining roofs. This he climbed and found the rest to be simple. A quadrant of iron chevaux-de-frise effectively cut off the parapet of the roof from the nearest cornice of the hotel, but the builders, too impressed by the conventional terror of iron spikes, had forgotten t
hat they also formed a convenient ladder; Toby used them as such, and from the cornice reached a balcony on the third floor. Satisfied by the sound of regular breathing, he thanked heaven a second time for the blessing of sleep, and groped his way from the balcony to the bedroom door without disturbing the occupant.

  Once in his room he undressed and telephoned to the night porter for a bottle of beer. While waiting for it, sober and thirsty, he steamed his rain-soaked limbs in a hot bath, meditating the events of the evening. He could feel no sense of guilt; there seemed to be no point at which he could or should have acted other than he did. He regretted the folly of his laughter, but Almádena’s and Rosario’s impulses had been so completely beyond his control that his conscience surprisingly agreed with reason; it was a matter for pity but not remorse.

  His modest alibi was worth the trouble, for when the night porter at last appeared with the beer he said he had been delayed by a visit from the police who had asked him to report the names of any foreigners returning within the last half-hour or who might return later in the evening; the Alcázar, he explained delightedly, had been wrecked by the Spanish ambassador and his valet, and several people killed. Toby expressed his horror, tipped him well and went to bed.

  Meanwhile Manuel had put Rosario into the taxi and returned to the Alcázar. He mingled with the crowd of guests and waiters who were watching the removal of Almádena in an ambulance, and lent a hand to the stretcher-bearers, taking care to come under the eyes of the proprietor and an inspector of police.

  “You! Manuel Vargas! Where have you been?”

  “Very occupied in the kitchen,” answered Manuel. “Then someone told me there had been a row, so I ran after the Englishman with the rest.”

  “His name?” asked the inspector. “And where is he stopping?”

  “Hombre! Why ask me? I never saw him before this evening.”

  “You seemed to know him well enough,” said the proprietor suspiciously.

  “We had been drinking since ten,” Manuel answered simply, as if that were sufficient explanation. “Try the cheap hotels and telephone the Spanish Embassy at Santiago for his name. His Christian name is Miguel, he told me. Michael in English.”

  Manuel described Toby in great detail, choosing with a show of exactitude the points that were common to him and a quarter of the population of Valparaiso as well. The proprietor of the Alcázar added his own observations and, since he now had a vision of what an English valet ought to look like rather than the actual appearance of Toby Manning, swore that his hair was more fair than dark. He then invited the inspector and Manuel to his office and opened a bottle of wine.

  “The English are not what they used to be,” he complained. “Once they were all caballeros. I would give credit to any Englishman who came into my place. But now! It is a fallen nation!”

  “It is the same here. And in all the world,” said the inspector sententiously. “Men are not what they used to be.”

  “That’s what Rosario thinks,” Manuel said.

  “She’s a good girl!” declared the proprietor. “Believe me—it’s hard for her and the rest to live with so many girls of decent family competing.”

  “Is she pretty?” asked the inspector.

  “She was. But a lot of flesh, you understand.”

  “They tell me that if she hadn’t thrown the plate, they would have murdered each other,” said Manuel.

  “There’s one of them half killed anyway. But they say he has a chance. These women! Why do they mix themselves in what does not concern them?”

  “Speaking for myself,” said the inspector, “I do not think she was to blame.”

  He did not want Rosario in a witness-box; it would have meant too close an enquiry into the conduct of the Alcázar and why it was tolerated.

  “In no way,” said the proprietor gratefully. “She’s a good girl.”

  “If I were to see her,” Manuel suggested. “I should tell her to keep out of the way for a day or two.”

  “You know more than you are telling us,” grumbled the inspector.

  “It’s the business,” the proprietor explained apologetically. “We restaurant men learn to be discreet.”

  “And a closed mouth swallows no flies, as we say in Spain.”

  “But that valet! Do you know him? Yes or no?”

  “Word of honour—if I see or hear of the ambassador’s valet, I will tell you,” Manuel replied. “Frankly, the man disgusts me.”

  “And if we want you, where shall we find you?”

  “At the Muelle de Flores. Everyone knows me. Ask for Manuel.”

  Manuel Vargas said his farewells and strolled home. His mind, left with none but its owner on whom to react, escaped from the clarity forced upon it by other human beings and wriggled into the darkness to worry its own tail. Five years of resignation had affected his former power of swift decision. Rejecting money, achievement and action as worthless to his happiness, he was no longer accustomed to the qualities developed by them. Chronic, but stoical discontent had deadened him to the fever of ambition. The conception of an objective in life had become offensive to him, and from force of habit continued to be offensive; yet the objective that he now imagined was overwhelmingly attractive. He raged impartially at himself, at Toby Manning and at the cursed 300,000 gold pesos on a Mexican hillside. As he pulled himself up the steep street that led to his house, physical weariness overcame all conscious mental conflict. He was aware only of deep depression.

  The Casa del Corregidor was at the top of a hill behind Valparaiso. It was the still living husk of a palatial private residence, devastated by age, fire and earthquake, held together by shores of timber and plates of corrugated iron. The interior had been honeycombed, almost rebuilt, by the improvised partitions, repairs and timber cutting of the very poor. The stairs, part stone, part worm-eaten wood, sloped inwards towards the curve and were encumbered by day with the children and by night with the garbage put out on them to save space in the tenements. Water was obtained by lowering a bucket down the well of the staircase to the entrance-hall, where the eight-year-old son of the ground-floor tenants filled it from the tap that had once served an ornamental stone basin.

  Manuel’s room was on the third floor at the back of the western wing. With an iron bed, a second-hand wardrobe, some odd chairs, a cooking stove and an enamelled washstand, the room was no better furnished than its neighbours; but it was whitewashed in the Spanish style instead of being covered, as the others, by the decaying remnants of past wallpapers, and it was unique in possessing a shelf of books. The window opened on to the flat top of an outbuilding that had once been the stables. Manuel alone had access to it, and had established a squatter’s right over the roof, surrounding it with half barrels of cactus, bougainvillea, a rose or two and some climbing geranium. Paying but a slum rent for his room, he had a garden overlooking the port and the Pacific. The filth of the house in no way incommoded him, for it stopped short at his front door.

  With the hive of his neighbours he was on excellent terms, doing on occasion their reading and writing for them, acting as representative of the building when there was any trouble with the police or the rent collector, and bringing home scraps from the Muelle de Flores whenever a family was hard put to it through illness or unemployment. When need was great in the Casa del Corregidor and the waste at the restaurant too little, he would buy the makings of a stew on the way home and sometimes cook it himself; he had found amusement in inventing recipes for casseroles which demanded no more fuel than a labourer could steal by the wayside and carry home in his pocket.

  He stopped at the second floor on his way up, and knocked at a patched door, its cracked panelling striped with threads of light from an oil lamp within. It was nearly five, but the family was already awake. A woman, brown, slatternly and suspicious, half opened the door, but as soon as she saw who it was gave him a lovely, comically twi
sted smile.

  “Manuel! Come in! My man is just having breakfast!”

  Her figure was matronly and shown at its worst by the yellow cotton dressing gown which she was holding together below her left breast, but her head was gloriously carried, and had the rich, pure features of a Madonna who had given birth to four Messiahs instead of one. She spoke the lingua franca of the labourers of Chile and the Argentine, a singsong mixture of Italian and Spanish.

  “Thank you, Impe.”

  Her name was Augusta. Manuel had nicknamed her Augusta Imperatrix—having been repelled horse, foot and baggage in his one and only attempt on her virtue—and the name had caught the fancy of her husband. He had shortened it to Impe.

  “Come in, Manuel!” roared a voice, muffled by food, from the interior. “What brings you here so early in the morning? Impe, woman, do not let him stand at the door! There is coffee for another!”

  “I had already invited him,” said Impe with dignity.

  Manuel went in. A vast Italian mechanic was sitting on a bed with a bowl of coffee on a bare table in front of him, an onion in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other. The two eldest children sat up in the bed, rosy with sleep, watching with awe the enormous bites with which their father tore his loaf. The two youngest cooed and fought each other like kittens in a wide cot.

  Paolo Salvini dropped his burdens and extended both hands.

  “Welcome, Manuel! You come in time!”

  “Thank you, Paolo. How goes it?”

  “As you see—nothing to complain of. Coffee?”

  “Yes—since Impe made it. No, not one of your great washtubs. A glass. I haven’t slept yet.”

  “Wine then?” suggested Paolo, pointing to a bottle on the table.

  “No, many thanks. We’d have enough for all if I could share with you what I’ve drunk to-night. Do you let him mix wine and coffee for breakfast, Impe?”