Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  I burst out into a small clearing and stopped short. On the ground I beheld Cabrera engaged in a brutal assault on a naked Indian maiden, who writhed and bucked beneath him, clearly an unwilling participant in the proceedings. He laughed as he forced her down. The girl was slight of frame, easy for Cabrera to overpower in spite of his short stature. When I caught a glimpse of her face, I realized she was young, perhaps no older than my twelve-year-old sister Rachel. Her screams grew louder. As I gazed in horror, he silenced her, first with a punch that shattered her jaw, then by seizing her about the neck and choking her until she slumped and fell back against the earth.

  To my shame, I failed to act until too late. By the time the paralysis that seized me at the sight let go its hold, the girl was dead.

  “Stop!” I croaked, starting forward, though I knew my tardy protest served no purpose.

  As he rose from the ground, Cabrera drew a musket from his sash and pointed it at my chest.

  “It’s the Admiral’s pet,” Cabrera said with an evil grin that bared his rotting teeth. “Well, boy, are you dog enough to take this bitch? You can have my leavings—before I kill you.”

  “You can’t kill me,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice from shaking. “As you said, the Admiral will miss me. Besides, a musket shot will bring many running and disclose your crime.”

  “What crime?” he sneered, kicking the girl’s body with a booted foot. “This is but a savage.”

  “As the cacique Guancanabarí is a savage?” I inquired. “The Admiral won’t thank you if you turn the Indians against us and ruin our chance to find the gold of Cibao.”

  Cabrera snarled, acknowledging the justice of my point. He shrugged and tucked the unfired musket back into his sash.

  “This but delays your death,” he said. “Call this moment yet another score we have to settle, you and I.”

  I held back, for fear of provoking him beyond reason, the words that sprang to my tongue: What is to stop me from reporting this crime? He read them in my eyes.

  “You’ll say nothing,” he declared. “Or I will report your greater crime, which will send you to the Inquisition and a shameful death.”

  I had forgotten I still wore my t’fillin, with the prayer shawl fluttering around my neck and chest. I drew a wavering breath.

  “It seems we are at a stand,” I said. “What now?”

  “First, you help me bury this.” He indicated the body with a careless nod. “Then we return to the camp. And we say nothing.”

  “We say nothing,” I repeated. Sick with shame and horror more than fear, I folded my tallit carefully and laid it on a bank of moss beneath a tree, the t’fillin placed within its folds. Then I turned to help him with the burial.

  It took us four more days to complete the building of La Navidad. The fort’s walls were made of the Santa Maria’s timbers and its cellars stuffed with stores the men would need, including seed. For if we found the mine, their majesties would want to establish a settlement. Conquest is for soldiers, not that we had thus far needed arms to cow the Taino. But a settlement requires farmers.

  As I worked, the sun beating on my bare back and arms and turning them browner than ever, I had always an uneasy sense of Cabrera’s presence. He watched me constantly, alert for me to make some mistake or seek a seclusion that would allow him to kill me with impunity. Knowing this, I stayed close to my fellows at all times, especially Fernando. I did not tell him what was wrong, although he asked me several times. The knowledge I bore was burden enough for me without loading it on another’s shoulders. As for Hutia, having seen one of his people so wronged, I could hardly bear to meet his eyes.

  The remaining days flew by, yet in my darker moments, they seemed unendurably long. When it came time to choose the forty men who would remain at La Navidad when the rest departed, I was tense and nervous. My palms were damp with sweat and my teeth had a tendency to chatter, despite the scorching tropical heat. I hardly knew what to hope for. Being left behind with Cabrera would prove a certain death sentence. But further voyaging under even more cramped conditions than before would provide opportunities for him to do me harm as well. To my relief, the Admiral chose Cabrera and his cronies to man the fort, separating them from the treacherous Juan de la Cosa, whom he naturally wanted to keep under his eye. He said nothing of me, so I would sail on with the Niña.

  Once the men were chosen, Admiral Columbus entered into negotiations with the cacique for interpreters who spoke the local dialect. The chosen Indians bore little in the way of gear or possessions as they climbed into the ship’s boat, in which we would row out to the Niña. It seemed to me that in some respects they embodied Christian principles far better than the Spanish Christians. But I reminded myself that I must not criticize, for I was not free of fault myself. Thinking of how I had concealed a murder, however good the reason, I thanked Ha’shem that I did not believe in the Christians’ hell.

  The new fort’s whole garrison and every soul in the village came down to the beach to see the Niña sail. I felt both glad and sorry to be leaving as I boarded the boat myself and took an oar. I paid little attention to the Indians until Hutia came running down to the boat. He called out, “Baba! baba!” One of our new interpreters, evidently Hutia’s father, stood up and held out his hands, which Hutia grasped. Speaking rapidly in Taino, they embraced. Their hands clung and then parted. Hutia stepped back onto the shore.

  In the forefront of the crowd, I could see Cabrera with his arm around a woman. He clutched at her naked body as he leered at me. Still holding her, he raised a gourd of chicha, or perhaps a stronger spirit made from the plant that they called yuca. He waved it at me in a jeering salute, then poured the liquor down his throat.

  Beside me, Hutia’s father called out, “Anacaona?”

  “Itá,” Hutia replied. I don’t know.

  The father sighed deeply. Hutia looked grave and sad, with no trace of the twinkle that usually lurked in his black eyes.

  I looked from Hutia to his father and then at Cabrera on the shore. I leaped to my feet, thrusting my oar at Fernando on the bench beside me.

  “Don’t let them leave without me!” I said.

  I splashed through the shallows to the beach, where Hutia, looking puzzled, came down to meet me where the water met the sand. Cabrera, a quick glance told me, was paying no attention. Another woman had joined the first, and he was busily engaged in nuzzling them both. Ordinarily, this lewd behavior would have caught the Admiral’s eye and been stopped at once. But in the excitement of our departure, Cabrera clearly thought he was safe from interference.

  I grasped Hutia’s shoulders with some urgency.

  “Anacaona,” I said. “Is she missing? Guaibá?”

  “Itá.”

  “Ocama!” I said. Listen! “I know what happened to her.”

  I turned him toward Cabrera, to direct his attention to the man without drawing anyone else’s notice as I racked my brain for Taino words to convey my meaning.

  “Anacaona! That man killed her!” I could not bring myself to mime the rape, but Hutia’s face darkened as I demonstrated with my own hands and body the blow to the jaw and the squeezing of her throat.

  “Anki!” I said. Evil person. “Akani!” Enemy. He had taught me these words while telling me about the fierce Caribe, who preyed on the Taino and were said to be cannibals.

  “Bara?” he said. She is dead?

  I nodded, my heart heavy.

  “Bara!” I will kill him!

  He started forward, his face flushed with rage and his hands curling into claws. I held him back.

  “Wait,” I said, wishing I knew the Taino word for it, if indeed they had one. I put my arms around him from behind and turned him first toward Admiral Columbus, who was watching the ship raise sail from further down the beach, then toward the Niña itself.

  “Wait until we leave. Once we are gone, you may tell whom you wish and do what you must.”

  I felt him slump against me. He had understood
. He would wait. Only then did I hear Fernando’s voice among others bellowing for me to let the savages be and get back to my oar, or there’d be no gold left in Cibao by the time we got there.

  As our oars raked the water and the sails of the caravel billowed ever greater as they filled with wind, I looked back once more and found Cabrera’s eyes upon me.

  “I’ll see you in hell, boy!” he bellowed, brandishing his gourd.

  “If such a place exists, you will surely get there before me,” I murmured as the boat pulled into the shadow of the Niña and we prepared to climb aboard.

  Copyright © 2010 Elizabeth Zelvin

  Next Article

  Previous Article Next Article

  Fiction

  A BULLET FROM YESTERDAY

  By Terence Faherty

  Terence Faherty returns this month with a new adventure for Scott Elliott, the second series character he created, after the popular Owen Keane. A former actor and World War II vet turned private security operative, Elliott takes on a case here involving a supposed artifact from World War I. But as in most of Elliott’s cases, Hollywoood itself is at the forefront of the drama. Mr. Faherty is a winner of the PWA’s Shamus Award and a past nominee for the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

  ---1---

  Wally Wilfong was known a-round Hollywood as an operator. Not a camera operator, which was a respectable profession and maybe even a calling. Wilfong was a guy who worked the no man’s land between the studios, sometimes scaring up money for an independent film, sometimes representing a naive young hopeful, sometimes brokering an exchange of equipment or talent between the major lots, places where he’d never find a home.

  He hadn’t always had his nose pressed against the candy-store glass. Before the war, he’d worked on the sane side of the cameras for Paramount, where I’d apprenticed as an actor. We’d both done a stretch in the army and both ended up in the European Theater of Operations, along with a few million other innocent bystanders. Wilfong and I had one other thing in common. We’d both come back to Hollywood after the war to find our places taken and our welcomes expired.

  I’d gone to work for a private security firm, Hollywood Security, which patrolled that no man’s land I mentioned earlier. So I’d crossed paths with Wilfong once or twice. But the first time he visited our offices on Roe Street was a morning in late December 1954.

  We were decorating those offices for Christmas, an annual rite that the head man, one Patrick J. Maguire, tried to put the kibosh on every year. Paddy was thwarted in this—as in so much else—by his wife Peggy, the power behind the Hollywood Security throne. She and I were hanging ornaments on the reception-area tree—an all-aluminum one—when Wilfong made his entrance.

  I noted that he checked the front sidewalk through the front door’s glass as it closed behind him, but his greeting was breezy enough. Wilfong was a shorter-than-average guy who sprang for a lot of extra padding in the shoulders of his suits. Today’s gray example needed pressing, and his two-toned shoes could have used a shine. Whoever had shaved his not inconsiderable chin that morning had been in a hurry.

  “The big guy to home?” he asked Peggy.

  On any other day, she would have told Wilfong to wait while she checked or even to come back a week from Tuesday. But Paddy had just made a remark critical of her metal tree—specifically what a great job it would do cleaning out a drain—so she showed our visitor right in. I tagged along to get a good look at Paddy’s reaction, which was a mistake. Peggy pushed me in after Wilfong and shut the office’s double doors behind me.

  Normally some small talk between the client and Paddy would have followed, with a witty aside or two thrown in by me. Wilfong rushed things along a bit by drawing a gun from his suit-coat pocket.

  It was a small automatic, and Wilfong had his finger on its trigger, though he wasn’t pointing it at anything in particular. I was tensing myself for a dive at it when Paddy held up his hand like a traffic cop.

  “If you’re collecting for the Salvation Army,” he said, “you’re supposed to use a bell.”

  Wilfong blinked, looked down at his hand, and said, “Right.” He set the gun down on the arm of the chair next to him, its muzzle pointed toward a neutral corner.

  “I want you to save me from that,” he said.

  “Tempted to end it all?” my boss asked. He then lit a cigar, which was as close to a sigh of relief as I expected him to issue. His wide-screen face, which had once been described as a map of Ireland carved on an Easter ham, looked almost bored as he added, “The holidays take some people that way, I’m told.”

  “I’m not afraid I’ll kill myself with it,” Wilfong said. “I’m afraid it will get me killed. It’s already put ten million people in the ground.”

  Paddy and I gave the gun another look. It was an ordinary .32, either brand-new or very little used. I’d have been surprised to learn it had been fired a hundred times, never mind ten million.

  Paddy had the same thought. “Must have gotten most of them with the first shot,” he said.

  Wilfong came down heavily in the chair whose arm supported the gun. The automatic didn’t even hop.

  “That’s a Browning Model Nineteen-ten. Maybe the gun that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in nineteen fourteen. Maybe the gun that started the First World War.”

  “Maybe is right,” Paddy said. “They’re still making that particular popgun. There must be a few hundred thousand floating around.”

  “Only four of them matter,” Wilfong said. “The guy who murdered the archduke and the guy’s accomplices had four Nineteen-tens, brand new, with consecutive serial numbers. Only one of them was used in the assassination, but nobody knows which one it was. The Austrians, who ended up with the pistols, didn’t keep a record. They stuck all four in a museum in Salzburg and forgot about them.”

  I was impressed by Wilfong’s knowledge, but even more so by his quiet delivery. He was usually a salesman’s salesman, leaning into you when he talked if not actually grabbing your lapels. Now his bleary eyes were half closed and he was rubbing one prominent temple like it might be a magic lamp.

  “How do you happen to know all this?” I asked.

  “And what makes you think this is one of the four?” Paddy chipped in.

  “Salzburg was taken by the U.S. Army,” Wilfong said. “By that point in the war, there was as much scavenging as fighting going on. More maybe. The GIs who liberated that museum took everything they could carry, including the four Brownings.”

  “You were one of those GIs,” I said.

  He nodded. “None of us could read German. We didn’t know what we were taking, except that they were guns. Guns were the primo souvenirs, better even than booze. Plus, they were almost as good as cash. Lugers brought the best price, but anything that made a noise would sell.”

  “But you didn’t sell yours,” Paddy observed.

  “Never got that hard up. It came home with me in my duffel bag. Now I wish the ship that hauled us back had hit a mine.”

  He seemed to notice for the first time that the office had windows and that their drapes were open. He grabbed the automatic and slipped it back into his pocket.

  “Somebody’s killing us off for those guns,” he said, “all four of us, one by one. And I’m next.”

  ---2---

  Paddy ordered up some coffee for Wilfong and sweetened it with the bottle of Irish whiskey he kept in his desk.

  Wilfong sipped for a long ten-count and said, “One of my buddies from the old unit, one of the four who’d taken home a Browning, called me a couple of weeks ago. He said he’d come across a magazine article about four pistols that disappeared from Salzburg in nineteen forty-five. The article told all about the assassination and even gave the serial numbers of the missing guns. My buddy had already found his gun on the list.”

  “The buddy’s name?” asked Paddy, who liked to collect the odd fact.

  “Pat Skidmore. Pat said he was going to get in touch with the guy who’
d written the article, some professor from a college out his way. Pat lives in Frankfort, Kentucky, if he’s still living.”

  Paddy and I exchanged a glance. The speaker drank again and continued.

  “I told Pat to hold off. I didn’t see any percentage in it for us. The Austrians aren’t going to pay to get those guns back. They’re just going to take them. And not say thank you when they leave. I wanted time to think of a way to make a buck out of the deal, a finder’s fee, if nothing better. Pat wouldn’t wait. Something about holding on to his gun was giving him the creeps.

  “Pat had already called the other two guys who took Brownings from that museum. One of them, Bob Wilson, was okay with giving his back, but the other one, Joe Reid, said all the current Austrian bigshots used to be Nazi bigshots and they could go hang themselves.

  “I waited for a couple of weeks, but I didn’t hear back from Pat. And every day of that wait, I thought about my Browning more and more. I started to wonder if all the bad breaks I’ve had since the war could be tied to that gun.”

  “So it’s also unlucky?” Paddy asked.

  “With all the people killed and maimed by it,” Wilfong said, “how couldn’t it be? It even maimed us, Elliott,” he added, turning my way.

  “How do you figure?” I asked. I was surprised to find that my mouth was dry.

  “There wouldn’t have been a Second World War if there hadn’t been a first one. You and me would never have been snatched out of Paramount. I could be head of production today, and you might be Audrey Hepburn.”

  “Scotty’s eyebrows are too thin,” Paddy said. “Let’s get back to you not hearing from this Skidmore.”

  “I finally got so antsy, I called him long distance. Got his wife. She said Pat was missing. Got all hysterical on the phone. All I could make out from what she was saying was that some stranger had come to see Pat. A guy with a German accent.”

  “So you think this buddy of yours is dead?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to reach Wilson and Reid. I haven’t been able to. When I talked to Pat, he mentioned where they live—Bob’s in Texas and Joe’s over in Jersey—but neither one answers his phone. I don’t know what’s going on.”