Murder Is My Dish

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Any what?”

  “Direct descendants of Simon Bolivar. Another Martini?”

  “No thanks. How’s the missus?”

  Something ugly passed over his face unexpectedly, furrowing his smooth-shaven cheeks and drawing the corners of his lips down. It was gone before you could grab hold and take a good look. “Taking the grand tour of the city with a friend we met on the flight down.”

  “Duarte?”

  “What do you want, Mr. Drum? Why did you come here?”

  “Well,” I said, trying to get the light touch back, “I don’t want your friend Duarte. I can do without him.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “This is kind of out of my line, Mr. Lequerica. Unless you happen to know another traveling salesman with a private dick’s license.”

  “What are you selling?”

  I looked at the cocktail glass in my hand. It was Steubenware and probably cost more than Esteban’s clothing, which I was wearing. I said, “The down payment is Eulalia Mistral, safely out of the country. With her mother, if that’s the way she wants it.”

  “If you mean the dead revolutionist Arturo Mistral’s daughter, I didn’t know she was down here. Naturally she may leave any time she wishes.”

  He smiled at me. I didn’t smile at him. The smile dropped off his face. He didn’t throw it on the floor and step on it, but he was going to. “You didn’t know your goddam foot,” I said. “She came down on the plane with you. I saw her off.”

  “Exactly what are you selling? It must be something immensely valuable, like a half interest in your detective agency, if you think you can talk to me like that.”

  “Go ahead and make with the cracks, chum. While you can. I’m down here to make a buck, but I happen to think Miss Mistral deserves a break. That’s why you people are ahead of Hipolito Robles on my list of customers. You have Eulalia Mistral. It’s the only reason. The rest of what I want is money. A hundred thousand gringo dollars.”

  “Robles never saw that much money.”

  “There’s that too,” I admitted.

  “Well, Drum, I admire the way you built up to it. It was admirable. Now, what is it you have to sell?”

  “Rafael Caballero’s book.”

  He bent down and picked up his smile and somehow got it back in its place, all without moving a muscle. He made another pair of Martinis. His hands were not shaking, I’ll say that for him. I waved my Martini away. It would like sharing the inside of Chester Drum with a bar of chocolate and a little charqui and nothing else, but I wouldn’t.

  He gulped his drink and said, “Can you prove you have it?”

  I smiled. “Can you prove I haven’t?”

  “Down here?”

  “I look like I’m tired of living? A friend has it.” Some friend, I thought. General Delivery, Alexandria, Virginia, U.S.A. “Who’ll know what to do with it if anything happens to me,” I added. Such as, truck it on over to the dead letter office in Richmond.

  “But how can you prove—”

  “Simple. First you hand over the down payment—in this case, Miss Mistral. Then I contact my friend and he flies down to Paraguay or some mutually agreed-on place outside the country, with the manuscript. You send somebody to take a look. If he likes what he sees, my friend gets the money, I get an exit visa, you get the book.”

  He said, “Still talking theoretically—and we are talking theoretically—you might have had it copied.”

  I said, “I might have.”

  “Then only a fool would do business with you.”

  “If I don’t contact my friend, he has word to deliver the manuscript to the university press where Caballero taught.”

  “When?” Lequerica demanded very quickly.

  I said the first thing which came to mind. I said, “On Tuesday,” and knew it was a mistake. Tuesday was too far in the future, still four days off. A lot could happen between now and Tuesday. Four days. Your team could win a World Series in four days. You could crown a king in four days or abolish a monarchy or get married or sue for divorce, or carefully plan and execute mayhem and murder.

  Lequerica hiked across the big room, past the Matisse and under the tessera. He turned at the door and flashed me his gigolo-diplomat smile. “Help yourself to a cocktail,” he said. “Don’t go away.”

  I leaned back in the coolie hat and got comfortable. I had taken a nap on the paddle-wheeler up the river to Puerto Casado. It was the last time I had slept. I dozed off and dreamed I saw Pablo Duarte out in the jungle hunting a jaguar with, a rifle big enough to blow an elephant’s head off. It turned out to be quite the most beautiful jaguar you ever saw. It roared. Then it began to cry. It wasn’t a jaguar at all, suddenly. It was Eulalia Mistral. Duarte lifted his rifle.

  A hand shook me. I blinked up at an Indian face, the black palace uniform, an officious smile.

  I was told in Spanish, “You are commanded to appear before El Grande, the Benefactor and President of the Parana Republic.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE Benefactor and President of the Parana Republic was a dark silhouette against a bank of fluorescent lights in a windowless room. The silhouette came toward me. It had the waddling walk of a big torsoed man with short bandy legs.

  Perhaps Indalecio Grande thought he could tell if I told the truth some special way of his own, like coming up close in the strangely lighted room, all the light behind him and none of it behind me, and counting the pores per square inch in the skin of my face. Anyway, he seemed to examine me for many minutes. I didn’t speak. I wasn’t asked to. I was delivered to the room and deposited there and after a while he had entered in darkness. Then the lights had flickered on behind him. It was a good trick if you wanted to impress your visitor with the fact that he’d come to play marbles in your back yard with your rules. I never even saw his face.

  Then he surprised me by talking. He had a good deep voice and he knew how to project it, but all he said was: “Now tell me of the book.”

  I told him all I remembered about it. I didn’t hold anything back. He sucked in his breath a couple of times. He grunted. I think he held his breath when I got to the Arturo Mistral story. Mistral had led the underground opposition, and it was gaining strength. A meeting had been arranged. The underground would be heard. Safe conduct would be guaranteed for Arturo Mistral. The government-owned press announced this, and Arturo Mistral came to the meeting at the palace of the Benefactor and President of the Parana Republic. The Benefactor and President arrested him, imprisoned him, let it be known that the wild dog Mistral had made an attempt on the life of El Grande, and had him executed before the eyes of his wife and child. It was the blackest day in a black regime, and when I finished telling about it Indalecio Grande said:

  “Basta! Ahora vaya. Enough. Now go.”

  Whatever else he might be, Indalecio Grande wasn’t a man who wasted words.

  I opened a door and closed it and went down a hallway to a waiting room done in black alligator and blonde wood. I expected to find Lequerica there, but apparently he’d gone in some other way to confer with El Grande. At the other end of the room half a dozen suitcases of bleached white alligator hide were stacked like blocks of ice on the black carpet. Standing near them and looking out the window was a girl.

  She turned around when I came in. “Padrecito?” she said, and blushed when she saw I was not, as she put it, her little father. She was a plump, dark-haired and dark-skinned girl in the best-loved Latin tradition, which meant she had eyes like sloe plums, lips as fleshy as an orchid and as red as hibiscus, breasts like small round ripe melons under a tight white dress, and hips and thews as sturdy as young trees. She wore a white mantilla on her hair.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I thought my father—”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I am Encarnacion.”

  “Chester,” I said.

  She made a little curtsy. I did not bow. She said, “Encarnacion, hija del Grande.”

/>   I said I was very pleased.

  She rearranged the mantilla over her head. It covered one of her eyes as she smiled. I wondered if that was meant to be seductive. She said, “You’re not awed.”

  “Should I be?”

  “I hope not. Oh, I hope not. When I used to come home from the convent on visits all the young men were so awed of me they wouldn’t even talk. They wouldn’t even dance with me. I like to dance with men. Don’t you?”

  “Not with men,” I said.

  “I mean dance. You’re funny. I’m going to like you.” She said that as if she had decided to buy me. “Are you an Englishman?”

  “No.”

  “Father said he would bring a real Englishman to teach me English. In the convent they did not teach English. They taught us Latin and Castillian. I hated the convent; it’s no secret. But Father wished me to stay until my eighteenth birthday.” She came closer. She was a short girl, shorter than I had thought. She looked up at me with her sloe eyes. “I’m eighteen tomorrow,” she said.

  “Well, congratulations.”

  “I was born Christmas day, you see. I’m so excited. You’re the first man I’ve spoken to since leaving the convent. I’m glad it was you. Have you ever been in a convent?”

  “No. It was always my dream, but they wouldn’t let me in.”

  That wasn’t much, but it really got her. She laughed so hard tears sprang to her eyes. But she did it without a sound, as if that kind of laughter or maybe any kind of laughter had been discouraged at the convent. Her reaction to such restraint was more than the reaction of a normal, red-blooded girl. The way she was looking at me I thought they would need a leash.

  “Silly, I meant did you ever visit one?”

  I smiled at her. She showed me beautiful white teeth. She said, “Sister Maria at the convent always used to say—I liked Sister Maria, she was the only one I liked—she always used to say, ‘Ayudastu a lo que el corazon dice.’”

  “Always listen to your heart,” I said, repeating the gist of it.

  “Then you believe that too? Oh, I knew you would. I just knew it. On Monday, as a birthday present, Father has promised to take me on a jaguar hunt. I have always thought that hunting jaguars was the ultimate in excitement, except for the act of love.” She giggled and added, “At the convent they would punish me for such words. But they’re true, aren’t they? Aren’t they?”

  I kept my face straight. It would be nice to have a friend in El Grande’s camp. “True, and spoken with wisdom,” I said.

  The friend in El Grande’s camp flung her arms about my neck. The orchid-fleshy and hibiscus-red lips kissed me. The friend in El Grande’s camp sighed as I tried to disengage her arms. She said, “Sister Maria would like such an impulse. I am going to tell Father to take you along on our jaguar hunt. Kiss me again.”

  I tugged at her arms. Any minute Lequerica would come into the room. I felt like a fly feels in a Venus-fly trap. She shut her eyes and waited to be kissed.

  Just then the door opened and a large, stout woman in a black mantilla came into the room with a black scowl on her face.

  “Encarnacion,” she said.

  Encarnacion opened her eyes and then winked at me. “My dueña,” she said. Then, to the dueña: “Chestair will accompany us on the jaguar hunt. Oh, forgive me. Señora Rivera, Señor Chestair.”

  Señora Rivera did not curtsy. I did not bow. The dueña clapped her hands and three flunkies sprang into the room to handle the half-dozen white alligator suitcases.

  “You may wait in our rooms,” Encarnacion told her dueña. “Father wishes to see me.”

  “I will wait right here. And I am going on no jaguar hunt.”

  Encarnacion laughed. “She thinks hunting el tigre is undignified.”

  “Undignified and uncouth,” the lady said promptly.

  “We shall see,” Encarnacion said, still laughing.

  Then Lequerica entered the room. He made the suggestion of a bow. The dueña made the suggestion of a curtsy. “Vamos,” he told me.

  “Hasta luego,” Encarnacion called after us. “I’ll see you Monday, Chestair.”

  “So she’ll see you Monday, will she?” Lequerica asked without smiling as we went down the hall.

  “So she says.”

  “What do you think of her?” he asked in English.

  “I think she’s the wrong girl to have spent her formative years in a convent.”

  “But she had to. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’m telling you so you’ll keep your distance from Encarnacion if you can. I’m afraid I have a considerable investment in you now. Encarnacion Grande is a sick girl. She had to spend that time in a convent.”

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “She is what the psychologists call an incipient hebephrenic schizophrenic.”

  I said that was quite a mouthful.

  “She can be violently enthusiastic about important things or violently enthusiastic about nothing at all. If the illness, now incipient, takes hold, she’d lose all contact with reality. Even now when she really gets started they have to hold her down. So keep your distance if you know what’s good for you.”

  We reached the gun room. I gave the man there my stub and he gave me the Magnum and shoulder holster. I unbuttoned my shirt and put the rig where it belonged, leaving the top two buttons unbuttoned so the gun wouldn’t bulge too much. Then as we went down the escalator I asked:

  “You have what kind of investment in me?”

  “El Grande wasn’t sure about you. He phoned our security chief, Pablo Duarte, to tell him your story and ask his opinion.”

  I didn’t like that, but all I said was, “I thought Duarte was showing your wife around the town.”

  A muscle twitched on Lequerica’s jaw. He did not look at me. He said, “The phone call found Duarte at home.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t like it. He didn’t want to go through with it on your terms. He had other ideas.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “That Duarte was wrong. That we had to do it your way or not at all. That’s my investment in you, Drum. El Grande will go along with us, but I’m personally responsible.”

  He reached into a pocket of his immaculate white linen jacket and withdrew an envelope. He gave it to me and said, “A kilometer beyond the new hospital on Avenida de los Santos is the old hospital. They use it for violent mental patients now. Deliver this note there.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s a release order for Eulalia Mistral.”

  “Why don’t they deliver her here?”

  Lequerica shrugged. “Ask El Grande,” he said.

  “But I’d better not?”

  “But you’d better not.”

  We went outside. The sun was low in the west now, but still hot. It had been some day. Lequerica shook my hand and without offering me a lift moved off toward a parked line of official cars. A chauffeur jumped out of one and almost scraped his chin on the ground bowing.

  I walked down the street and found a small restaurant with outside tables. It was only a block and a half from the palace, but it was a greasy spoon. I bolted down some cassava cakes and beans and soddered them in place with a glass of tepid beer. Lequerica, I thought; Lequerica and Pablo Duarte. El Grande’s outside hatchetman and El Grande’s inside hatchetman. The dictator played them as you play a musical composition. I wondered if having Duarte show Kiki Magyar around town was El Grande’s idea. Lequerica and Duarte. If they hated each other enough it would serve to cement their loyalty to El Grande. Duarte and Kiki Magyar. Hell, yeah. She’d go for the big guy. Given half a chance she’d probably go for anything in pants—provided he had about a million bucks and good connections.

  I got up from the table five minutes after the cassava cakes had been set down. Then I got a cab and told him where to go. It was the same driver who had taken me out there earlier.

  “Otra vez?” he said.

  “Yeah, again.”r />
  My eyelids felt like lead. My eyes burned. I was out on my feet and still hungry. Every time I swallowed, it felt as if a stone had lodged where Ansensio Martinez had stuck his two stiff fingers. I could use about a night and a day in bed with nothing for company but pleasant dreams. Then I could use a hot shower and a rubdown and a cold shower and a tall cool drink. It didn’t look as if I would get any of that for longer than I cared to think.

  The taxi climbed the hill past the gleaming new hospital. The road curved left and lost a lane. It was barely wide enough for two cars to pass. The taxi stopped before a low rambling adobe building which looked almost the color of blood in the last light of the setting sun.

  “Wait here,” I told the driver. Then I told myself, Use your head, Drum. Pretend you’re wide awake. I took out Lequerica’s letter and read it. There was no trick I could see. It was on palace stationery and signed by Lequerica. It told them to deliver the patient Eulalia Mistral to me.

  I went up to the hospital. It stood on a slight rise of ground and had seen its best days before I was born. From the rear of the place a man cried out in pain or torment, or both. I went inside.

  It was gloomy and oppressively warm. It smelled of sickness and not enough disenfectant and it smelled of death and putrefaction. The ceiling was low and cracked. A fellow in a gray-stained smock came over to me and I gave him my note. He had bad teeth and b.o. With dignified reluctance he pulled a light-cord. A bare bulb blazed above our heads. He squinted at the note and gave it back to me and shuffled across the dirty concrete floor. I followed him.

  Maybe he didn’t have b.o. Maybe he only had the smell of the place in his clothing and on his skin, the putrescent odor of mercaptans and damp rot. I followed the smell and the shuffling figure down a dark corridor past closed doors with heavy bolts. Behind one of them someone laughed. The laughter broke off in a terrible fit of coughing, but by then we had gone further down the corridor and there were other sounds, sobs and scratchings, frightened voices and the creaking weight of bodies on bedsprings.

  We stopped in front of the last door. The man in the dirty smock drew the bolt back. “Señorita,” he called softly.