“Phew! What a storm,” he said. “Plane’s fine, though.”
We heard voices faintly on the other side of the door. The old lady was coughing but talking too. Eulalia spoke only a little. Pretty soon the door opened and Eulalia stood there. You could hear the old woman’s short breathing behind her.
“She wants a priest,” Eulalia said.
Emilio looked at me. “There is no priest,” he said.
Eulalia touched him on the arm. “You be the priest. She wouldn’t know. It is no sin if through that she can die in peace.”
Emilio swallowed hard. “I have not been to confession in a year.”
“Anyway.”
They went inside together. The door closed and there was the sound of sudden coughing and Emilio’s voice. It was ten to five on O’Tool’s watch when Emilio came out. O’Tool had just told me the time. There wasn’t a sound in the other room.
“The vieja is dead,” Emilio said.
Pedro opened some cans of beans and heated them, grilling thick strips of bacon and dropping them in, then dishing beans out in tin plates. I took one of the plates, steaming hot, inside to Eulalia. She sat without moving at her mother’s side. They hadn’t covered the old lady’s face. It looked calm and much younger in death than it had in life.
“You ought to eat.”
“No. Not now.”
“It will do you good.”
“Keep away from me.”
“At least take it.”
“Don’t touch me. Get out of here.”
“Try to eat.”
“Get out of here. You killed her. You killed her.”
We hung around the front room after Pedro had cleaned the dishes. There was very little talking. We listened to the rain. At about eight o’clock we all had coffee and Irish whisky. Half an hour later Eulalia came out. She had some coffee and whisky but wouldn’t eat anything.
They’re on their way by now, I thought. If they can get through the rain.
Emilio asked if we wanted to be taken back to the ranch. I told him I had smashed his jeep against a tree. O’Tool said he had a small truck we could use. I shook my head. There was only one road out of there. We might meet the security police head-on. Besides, if the weather cleared we still could take off in the Beechcraft.
“I wouldn’t leave now,” Eulalia said. “She would have wanted me to stay here. I could help Señor Robles.”
I shook my head. “Caballero’s manuscript is only a first draft. You’re the one can put it into shape.”
“I’m not going, that’s all.”
By eleven o’clock O’Tool and I had killed what was left of the Irish between us. O’Tool was pacing back and forth between the zinc-topped counter and the door. Pedro and Emilio sat playing checkers on a beat-up old board Pedro brought out. Pedro was winning steadily and Emilio surveyed the board with a sad, surprised face. They were playing for cans of beer. The winner would have one and the loser would sit watching him. Pedro had five empty cans in front of him and Emilio, his face deeply troubled, had only one.…
Just before midnight, Eulalia began to cry. She didn’t make a sound, but stood there with her shoulders moving and her eyes shut and the tears squeezing out under the lids. I went over to her and put my arm around her shoulders, feeling them stiffen.
“She blamed herself,” Eulalia said in a whisper. “Oh, dear God, all these years she blamed herself.”
“About your father?”
She wouldn’t say anything else. She went over to the counter and sat down.
A few minutes later the rain stopped. It did not slacken gradually. It stopped as if someone had shut off a faucet. O’Tool grinned at-me as if he had been responsible, and opened the door. I went with him.
“Let’s get the hell on our horse,” he said.
We ran outside together and across the wet tarmac toward the hangar. I helped him roll the big metal door up. Inside there was barely room for a small truck in front of the Beechcraft. O’Tool had attached a towline in the afternoon. He climbed into the truck and started it up. I stood at the entrance to the hangar as he rolled forward slowly in the truck. The Beechcraft came out with no more than a foot’s clearance at either wing tip. I ran behind the truck and unfastened the towline and O’Tool parked the truck off to one side.
“Come on,” I shouted. “Come on, Emilio.”
O’Tool sat at the controls of the Beechcraft now. He put the running lights on and said, “The prop. The prop, Drum.”
I looked toward the shack. The door was closed. “In a minute,” I said, and went over there.
Eulalia sat near the counter, looking quite calm. Emilio stood near her with a perplexed expression on his face. He told me, “She doesn’t want to go, señor.”
“Then carry her, if you have to.”
“The vieja … burial.…”
“You see about it. Tell Robles. Now get her outside.”
I couldn’t wait for them. I couldn’t help Emilio because the Beechcraft would need warming up. Emilio took Eulalia’s arm and she calmly slapped his face and he calmly held her hands so she couldn’t do it again. Pedro was coming over to help him when I ran for the plane.
On the way across the tarmac I heard something. It was the sound of a motor. No, of many motors. A convoy. I cursed and grabbed hold of the propeller blade. O’Tool waved his hand and I pulled down on the prop. It kicked away from me and back into position. I pulled down on it again. The engine sputtered. I pulled again and the propeller went around two or three times. The engine coughed and conked out. I looked up at the big yellow front of the monoplane. It was probably almost as old as I was. I cursed it and pulled the prop down again. Pedro and Emilio went past me, half dragging, half carrying Eulalia between them. She was shouting something hysterically. The motor sound was much closer now. I wondered if O’Tool heard it in the plane.
I pulled the prop again and suddenly smoke puffed and billowed behind it and the engine caught and coughed and roared. Pedro was crouching in the high doorway of the Beechcraft, leaning down, his hands stretched out. Emilio was trying to boost Eulalia up to him, but she kicked him and he lost his balance on the slippery tarmac and they both fell down together.
Eulalia got up and started to run. Emilio ran after her. Eulalia opened her mouth and screamed something. She ran in front of the plane, in front of its running lights, and kept going. Then suddenly lights swung out onto the tarmac, not from the plane but from the far side of the field. Eulalia ran right toward them, with Emilio behind her. I sprinted after them. Four big trucks pulled to a stop across the tarmac, their headlights like big yellow eyes in the night.
Figures detached themselves from the trucks, running and disappearing in darkness. Eulalia fell down. Someone shouted. Abruptly the Beechcraft’s engine was silent. It had stalled, or maybe O’Tool had shut it because he knew we weren’t going anyplace, at least not with him, tonight.
Eulalia got up and eluded Emilio. They ran silhouetted in front of the trucks’ headlights. Eulalia ran toward them like a moth toward flame. A voice shouted in Spanish: “Stop, or we’ll fire!”
Then just as Eulalia stumbled and fell again the voice shouted: “Fire!”
A volley of rifle fire punctured the night.
Emilio jumped, one arm outstretched, one leg stiff and one bent, an impossibly high jump, like Nijinsky. He went up gracefully taut like that and came down like a rag, limbs loose and floppy.
Feet pounded across the tarmac. I put up my hands and stood in my tracks. Someone came over and grabbed the .38/44 from my belt and poked me in the small of the back. I went forward with him. Another one of them helped Eulalia to her feet. She walked with him docilely. More of them trotted toward the plane.
“Por favor,” I said, and crouched over Emilio when we reached him. I felt for his wrist. There was no pulse. The man with me wore a uniform and had a Tommy gun pressed tight against his side, held there by his elbow.
“Venga,” he said.
They w
ere not security police. They were soldiers in the Parana army. Their commanding officer was a young major in a hard helmet with a harder face and bright, dark eyes. He questioned us. When we gave our names he seemed very pleased. In a little while two of the soldiers brought Emilio’s body over to the major’s trauk. One of them found a wallet in the dead man’s pocket and took something from it. He showed it to the major, who appeared to be pleased again. This was some night for the major.
Then Pedro and O’Tool came over. They were very tough with Pedro but not so tough with O’Tool. They asked O’Tool something I didn’t hear and without looking at us he said, “I don’t know nothing, Major. I’m a pilot. You pay me, I fly. They were going to pay me. That’s all.”
I couldn’t blame him. I hoped he would get away with it. For all I knew it was the truth anyway, but the major said, “They come too.”
“My mother,” Eulalia said, “is over there.”
“Where?”
“The shack.”
I touched the major’s arm. “She’s dead.”
“Get the body,” the major told one of his men. The major was very thorough. Two of the soldiers went to the shack and brought the old lady’s body back with them. We were all loaded in the trucks, Emilio and señora Mistral in one, the rest of us with three armed guards in another. Eulalia asked to ride with her mother, but they wouldn’t let her. Then the convoy of four trucks swung around on the tarmac and started up from the plateau into the hills.
Chapter Eighteen
THE CONVOY rolled through the gates of an army post in the hills above Ciudad Grande before dawn. By the time they unloaded us, the sun had exploded over the horizon the way it does in the tropics. The sky was pale blue overhead but bronze where the sun came up. The air felt clear and washed and you knew that for now at least the rains were over.
They did not keep us together. A pair of guards marched me off across a compound walled in by low adobe buildings. Another guard took Eulalia away. O’Tool and Pedro went, under guard, with the major.
I was given a small, tidy room in one of the adobe buildings. It lacked bars on the window, but I could hear soldiers moving about, their boots creaking, in the compound outside. Since I could do nothing else, I stretched out on the bed and fell asleep.…
I awoke with the feel and taste of an old army blanket in my mouth and glue on my eyelids. I did not think I had slept very long. I was stiff and hungry, and could have drunk a quart of anything cold. The major stood alongside the bed looking down at me. He hadn’t removed the hard helmet. Maybe it went with his face, at that.
“Which one is it,” I asked, “Lequerica or Duarte?”
“We’re driving into the city,” he said.
I went outside with him. A staff car was waiting. The driver saluted as we got in back. The sun was dazzling but still cast long shadows. We drove down a hill and there was Ciudad Grande below us as I had first seen it, bleached bone-white by the sun and tilted on both sides of the river. We drove into the city and through it to the palace of the Benefactor and President of the Parana Republic. The major knew his way around the palace. It took him only twenty minutes to deliver me to Primo Blas Lequerica’s apartment. He waited outside.
Lequerica came across the room with the inside view, poised, handsome, well groomed—and under it all, I thought, ready to bust out crying.
“So it was you who gave Martinez his blood money,” I said.
Lequerica licked his lips. “El Grande has authorized me to pay you twenty thousand American dollars and to offer freedom for yourself and the Mistral girl in return for Rafael Caballero’s manuscript.”
“Like the release form you gave me, the one I took to de los Santos, you son of a bitch?”
“You’re angry. Well, I can’t blame you.”
“Remind me to put your apology in my diary.”
“It was Duarte. Duarte. El Grande gives us both all the rope we need. He always has. Duarte gets results his way, and I get them mine. El Grande doesn’t have a son. One day he’s going to proclaim one of us his heir. El Grande knows that, the palace knows it, and we know it.”
“El Grande,” I said, “is all washed up.”
“Twenty thousand dollars, Drum. And your freedom.”
“Tuesday, remember? That was yesterday.”
“Then call up. You can still stop the book, can’t you?”
“Maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. Maybe I was bluffing you all along. Maybe I never had the book. Maybe I never even saw it.”
“No, you knew all about the book. El Grande told me.”
“What I told him.”
For the first time Lequerica let his alarm show. It was in his eyes, and his eyes were naked. “You’ve got to stop the book. I can get a phone call through for you to anywhere in the United States in ten minutes. Just say the word.”
“Or else you’ll let Duarte’s men shoot Eulalia Mistral full of morphine?”
“That was Duarte. I am not Duarte.”
I said, “Tell that to your wife.”
His back stiffened, and I thought he was going to hit me. Instead he smiled a wolf’s smile, with his lips only. His eyes were burning with hatred. “That’s it,” he said softly. “That’s it exactly. Twenty thousand dollars of Indalecio Grande’s money, Drum. And I’ll chip in ten thousand of my own, to prove that Duarte was wrong. To prove his methods outmoded. I want to beat him, Drum. I want to knock him down and step on his face. I never wanted anything so much in my life.”
“He’s really got you where it hurts most, doesn’t he?”
“Kiki’s living with him. Openly. It’s no secret.”
“I told you El Grande was all washed up. I meant that. It’s only a question of time. You’d see it too if. you used your head to think with instead of your goddam cojones.”
He slapped my face hard enough to split my lip, but not hard enough to jar me. I leered at him and said, “Even if I got you the book, how would you know I haven’t had it copied? How would you know I haven’t been suckering you all along?”
“What are you trying to say, Mr. Drum?”
“That sooner or later the book’s going to get itself printed. You’re not big enough to stop it and neither is Duarte and neither is Indalecio Grande. But go ahead, play it your way. I’ll make that call if you want me to. I’ll have the book delivered. With no guarantees, Lequerica. No guarantees at all. So where’s the telephone?”
I watched his face, or rather his eyes. His face was a handsome mask as well cared for as his gigolo body and as expressive as the white line of scalp that showed through the part in his hair. But as I looked at him and as he looked at me his eyes clouded. They said I had him, at least for now.
“I’ll call if you want,” I said. “You’ll get to deliver the manuscript to El Grande your way. You’ll make Duarte look like a clumsy fool out of the pages of a two-bit horror story. Then what? El Grande’s regime is big down here, but elsewhere it isn’t big, it’s only loud. Forget about stopping the book. It’s too late now. Maybe it was too late to stop it before I came down here.”
“Be careful, Drum. You’ll make it impossible for me to believe anything you say. You’re playing with thirty thousand dollars. Your thirty thousand dollars. That’s more money than a private dick—that is the expression, isn’t it?—that’s more money than you ever get to see at one time, in one place. Don’t talk yourself out of it.”
“All right. I deliver the book. You give Duarte a red face and a ruined reputation and maybe Kiki comes crawling out of his bed back to yours and El Grande puffs out his chest and struts around on his bandy legs and proclaims you the heir apparent. Then what? Then if El Grande lives and stays in power you suck around him a few more years, or maybe more than a few more because El Grande’s a guy who watches his health, hoping Duarte won’t find a way to knock you down and step on your face and hoping some other bright young man with a good smile and white teeth doesn’t move up out of the ranks to take your place.”
�
��That’s a chance you learn to take in our system of caudillismo.”
“Sure, but that’s only half of it. Here’s the other half: you get appointed heir apparent by a two-bit dictator who’s all washed up as soon as Caballero’s book gets printed. Because you don’t think El Grande’s regime could withstand the publication of the book, do you? I read it, Lequerica. I read the book. El Grande did a lot of things to get where he is, all of them dirty. They involve the army and they involve the church and they involve most of the big shots in El Grande’s Democratic Liberal Republican party, and they’re there in the book. The day that book comes out El Grande will have to sleep with a gun in his hand and a guard at his door and someone else to watch the guard. But go right ahead and dream. Get yourself appointed heir and spend the rest of your life cleaning up latrines in the army camp on the hill after the army takes over—if you’re still alive.”
It was a long speech and I had nothing more to say unless Lequerica was buying. I wondered if Hipolito Robles would approve of what I was trying to do. It really didn’t matter. I wasn’t doing it for Hipolito Robles. I was doing it for Eulalia Mistral and for me because I couldn’t deliver the book without leaving the country and Lequerica wouldn’t let me leave the country without delivering the book. I wondered too what Hipolito Robles would do in the event of a palace revolution. Let them beat themselves over the head until he could step in and pick up the pieces? Let whoever won out run a caretaker government until the book did its work as planned? But of course everything still depended on Lequerica.
He went to a cabinet and poured himself a drink in a hunk of cut glassware only a little larger than the diamond his wife wore. The drink sloshed out on its way to his mouth and he gulped what was left of it down, then poured another and gulped that too. Then he poured me a drink and a third one for himself. His hands were trembling. He suddenly did not look like the same man, but when he drank his third drink his hands steadied and the curtain came down so fast that the other fellow, the nervous one with the shakes, might have been my imagination.
Murder Is My Dish Page 16
