Murder Is My Dish

by Stephen Marlowe

  I was drunk. I was drunker than I had thought. Maybe if I had willingly played his game with him I could have talked him into showing me where the jungle track we would follow tomorrow began. Maybe I would have had a chance to use his own ornate six-shooter on him. But it didn’t work out that way.

  “Well, amigo?” he said. He stuck out his hand, waiting for me to shake it.

  I smiled at him and hit him in the belly as hard as I could with my right fist.

  Sober, it might not have hurt him. But there was too much whisky in him. He stood there and bent from the hips slowly, gagging. Then he was noisily sick in front of the pirotecnico’s stand. I don’t know if anyone saw me do it or not. They were all watching the mayor’s brother. Then they all gathered around to watch the important man from Ciudad Grande who could not hold his liquor. They laughed and poked each other in the ribs. The pirotecnico went on with his work.

  I walked away from there and back to the house of the alcalde.

  They were still drinking and talking and laughing in the mayor’s dining room, but I didn’t go in. I stood outside for a long time wondering if Duarte would come back tonight, and, if he did, what he would do. I felt like hell, and the worst part of it was what I knew to be true—you could make the noble gesture, as Robles was doing and as he had wanted me to do, but in the end if you wanted to have a chance, any chance at all, then you had to play the kind of game Duarte played.

  When the mayor’s brother left his wooden stand at the far end of the street, the hot, still, night air heavy with the acrid stench of his fireworks, I went inside and up to the room they had given me. It was silent now in the mayor’s two-story house. It was the only two-story structure in Encarnacion Grande. My bedroom was upstairs in the back. From the window you could smell the jungle.

  I closed the door and walked into the dark room. A big insect batted itself against the window screen. The mayor did all right for himself, screens and everything.

  I sat down on the bed and smelled her.

  She was wearing good perfume, subtle perfume, but too much of it. At first I thought she was Kiki Magyar. Hell, if she got tired of Lequerica she could also get tired of Duarte. He was much man physically but almost no man any other way at all. “Go on,” I said. “Blow.”

  First she laughed. Then she sat up in bed. I could barely see her. I could not tell what she was wearing or if she was wearing anything.

  “Beat it,” I said. “Get lost, Kiki. You’re in the wrong bed.”

  She giggled and said, “Ayudaste a lo que el corazon dice. Siempre, Chestair. Siempre.” It was Encarnacion.

  “Well,” she said, “aren’t you going to say anything?” Then she hiccupped in a very polite and dignified manner. Riding on top of the musk and fragrance I could smell the liquor.

  I said, “You better get out of here before your father finds you.”

  “Drunk,” she said, and giggled again. “He drunk himself to sleep. He often does. Do you like me as much as I like you, Chestair? All the time you were gone I dreamed about you. I couldn’t stop myself dreaming about you, could I?”

  I said nothing.

  “Come here. Come here to the bed before I scream. And then what would you do?”

  Maybe she meant it. If she got worked up enough she might decide to do anything. Anything at all. I remembered what Lequerica had said. Hebephrenic schizophrenia. She could get worked up over anything she thought was worth getting worked up about, or she could get worked up over nothing at all.

  I went over to the bed and her hands drifted up out of the darkness to pull me down beside her. She was wearing a great deal too much perfume, but she wasn’t wearing anything else at all. She kind of wrestled us both down on the bed, giggling all the while. If I tried to stop her she might scream. She was soft and rounded in the approved South American fashion, which meant as far as I was concerned she was eight or ten pounds overweight. If I did what she wanted she might scream too. If I didn’t do anything at all she might scream loudest. She nuzzled her face against my neck and began to kiss me. Her body moved against me. Her legs moved against my legs. I lay there with her in my arms and said one word.

  “Duarte.”

  She hissed. The hissing sound came from her throat. It wasn’t the slightest bit vocal. That was encouraging, so I said, “I thought they had it all arranged for you to marry Duarte.”

  She hissed again and stopped kissing me. She lay perfectly still in my arms. Then suddenly she sat bolt upright just as a Roman candle, probably stolen from the mayor’s brother’s supply, went off outside the. window. It showed her dark, round, pretty face contorted in petulant rage and her big, high, round breasts.

  “I will never marry him,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about it, Chestair. Afterwards.”

  “Let’s talk about it now,” I said.

  “Pero ayudaste a lo que—”

  “I know,” I said. “I know, but let’s get the talk over with. Why won’t you marry Duarte?”

  “I hate him. That cabrón.”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “First I thought I hated him. I hated him because he lacks the refinement. Now I know. I know. Primo Blas told me tonight. He is my friend, Chestair. My friend.”

  “What did Lequerica tell you?”

  She looked at me with sleepy eyes. The petulant rage was gone from her face. “Afterwards,” she said.

  The Roman candle was fading outside the window. A bird in the jungle made a loud squawking sound and far off something bigger and more dangerous coughed.

  “Tiger,” Encarnacion said. “Oh, it’s a tiger!”

  “What did Lequerica tell you about Duarte?”

  “You hear the tiger? It stirs my blood, and excites me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “As you do.”

  “He told you what?”

  “Oh!” she cried. “Oh, all you want to do is talk.”

  I waited. It was now very dark outside again. My right hand throbbed dully with pain.

  “That Duarte wishes to marry me only to be proclaimed heir apparent to my father. There, I have told you.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it now. If I talk about it now I will be mad and if I am mad I won’t be able to listen to what my heart—”

  “What else did Lequerica say?”

  “Duarte was drunk,” she said. “Duarte talked to him when he was drunk.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. During the fireworks.”

  Duarte had been with me. I didn’t say anything.

  “If—if Duarte is certain of me, Primo Blas said, he boasted he would kill my father on the hunt and make it seem an accident. That is what he boasted.”

  It was an incredibly transparent lie, but of course a girl like Encarnacion wouldn’t see through it. I knew that and Lequerica knew it even better.

  Encarnacion made that hissing noise again. Her hand touched my hand and put it on her body. “You like me?” she said.

  “Sure, but—”

  “Then what is your advice? Again I listen to my heart, Chestair. I trust you. Oh, I trust you.” She squeezed my fingers against her.

  I didn’t know exactly what Lequerica had in mind, but I was willing to buy part of it. I said, “Give Duarte reason to believe you’ve made up your mind to marry him.”

  “Yes. Yes!”

  “Then we’ll see.”

  “See? What is there to see? If he so much as touches my padrecito, I will kill him. I will kill him, you hear? I can do it. Father taught me how to shoot.”

  “Then you’d better find your clothes and go back to your own room.”

  “But I—”

  I rescued my hand. “If you’re going to fool Duarte into thinking you’ll marry him, you can’t be caught here.”

  She hissed. “I’ll kill him,” she said. Then suddenly she kissed me. It was the kind of kiss that showed she would have known very well indeed how to do what she had thought would foll
ow such kissing. Then she crouched in bed and found her robe and put it on.

  Then she tiptoed toward the door on bare feet.

  “I’ll kill him,” she said.

  The door opened and closed. I didn’t hear anything else for a while. A monkey howled across the jungle.

  She’d kill him, all right. I thought of Hipolito Robles. Robles wouldn’t understand. Probably Robles was a lot like Rafael Caballero, who was dead. It didn’t matter whether Robles understood or not. It was too late for that. You handled Pablo Duarte his own way or you didn’t handle him at all.

  The monkey howled again.

  I buried my face in the pillow and smelled Encarnacion’s perfume and slept like a baby.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE HUNTING CAMP was pitched in a clearing in the jungle five miles from Encarnacion Grande. Guarani Indians put up our two-man tents while the three leathery-faced brothers checked out the dozen rifles we had brought along. The rest of us stood around watching things in the green murk. Green was the natural color of things. It was like the murky green light at the bottom of the ocean. For the first few hours we all spoke in whispers, as if somehow we were violating forbidden territory.

  The rifles were all .300 Magnums, with enough shock power to stop anything up to two hundred yards and almost anything up to a thousand. The three brothers were very proud of them but prouder still of their dogs. The eight dogs were crossed bloodhounds and blue tick hounds with floppy ears and blue-gray coats with dark markings. They had been trained to fight jaguars and a few of them bore the scars of their battles with the great cats. They were fierce, nervous dogs with well-cared-for coats and alert eyes.

  Monkeys chattered all around us and a macaw screamed as one of the brothers passed out whisky and water in tin cups. Since leaving Encarnacion Grande, Kiki Magyar had latched onto me, perhaps because she felt safer with a man who did not regard the hunting of the jaguar as commonplace. Now she raised her tin cup to me and said, “Salud, Mr. Drum.”

  “Salud,” I said, and we drank.

  “I’m going to hate it,” she said. “I am a city girl. Yes?”

  “Nice dogs, anyhow,” I said, pointing my cup toward the tick hounds. “Don’t you like dogs?”

  “I liked only the ride out on horseback,” she said, staring sadly into her tin cup.

  We had entered the jungle on horseback at dawn. The curtain of jungle came right up to the last houses on the street of Encarnacion Grande, flame drips and yellow cassia and hibiscus and purple piuva and silver imbauba and jacaranda blossoms hanging over the thatch roofs.

  Two abreast we had walked our horses into the green twilight world of the jungle. There was almost no under-growth, which was secondary growth; the jungle beyond Encarnacion Grande was virgin forest. There were huge wide-spaced trees and looping knotty lianas dangling, the basket lianas two feet thick and the monkey ladder lianas disappearing in green murk impossibly high overhead.

  I rode all the way with Kiki Magyar. Two of the brothers led our column, riding slowly. They were followed by four Indians, by Lequerica and Duarte riding together and not liking it, by Encarnacion and her dueña, the girl eager and excited, the woman grumbling at the heat and the insects and the weird green light. Then came Kiki and me on narrow-chested, scrawny chestnut horses, two more Indians, and El Grande and his very good friend the oldest brother bringing up the rear. There were also a dozen pack mules and the eight hounds yapping and darting in playfully at the horses’ hoofs.

  After the Guaranis had pitched camp and we drank our whisky, the oldest brother took out a hunting horn and, bending close to the ground so the sound would carry, puffed his cheeks and blew a blast which resembled the lowing of a sick ox fleeing from a steam locomotive. It didn’t sound like the ox alone, but like the ox and the locomotive together.

  The dogs stopped their playful yapping. The Indians were suddenly quiet. Far off in the jungle there was an answering coughing roar. The brother smiled and blew his steer horn again. The coughing roar answered him.

  “Tigre,” he said.

  All day they kept up the calling, but the jaguar did not come closer. The brothers took turns at the horn. Finally, before sunset, the jaguar did not answer.

  “It is nothing,” said the older brother. “He is near. He waits. He plays with us. Tomorrow we take the dogs out and find his spoor.”

  Lequerica told us about the horn. Its call was not the call of a jaguar. Its call was not the call of anything but the jaguar hunting horn. Yet the jaguar answered it and often came to it.

  “El tigre is ornery,” said the oldest brother solemnly. “The horn is a challenge he must answer. Well, tomorrow you will see.”

  We ate guan for supper. It was a pheasantlike bird and it went very well with the light-bodied red wine that had been brought out on the pack mules. After supper the Guaranis built a great fire in the center of our encampment. Then they sang a dirgelike song in their native language. It made the hounds bay. One of the hunter brothers laughed softly. “It is a song to keep away el tigre,” he said. “But el tigre does not listen.”

  I sat up for a while keeping Kiki company. She was in a bad way. She was scared stiff. She sat so close to the fire she was sweating. She stared out at the blackness all around us and spoke of her childhood in Budapest wistfully, as if this were her last night on earth. The fire snapped and roared. The Guaranis went on singing. The dark jungle was alive with sound too. Kiki sweated and shuddered. Finally I got up and went over to my tent.

  Lequerica was already in there, stretched out on one of the two sleeping bags. He had not crawled inside. It was a warm night.

  “Oh, we sharing this tent?” I said.

  “No. You have one of the brothers, I think. Tonight I’ll sleep with Kiki. You saw how she was afraid?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lequerica was silent for a while. Then he said, “I’m taking your advice, you know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What you told me in the palace. Are you surprised?”

  “Maybe. What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing, I hope. I hope it will be done for me.”

  “Encarnacion?”

  He laughed softly.

  “Why tell me?” I said.

  “I may need some help. You have a stake in this.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “The Mistral girl.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Of course. Major Corso is my very good friend.”

  “You’re going to need what kind of help?”

  He sat up and shrugged. “El Grande’s daughter—”

  “We already talked.”

  “Well,” he said, “well, well.”

  “That’s what you wanted?”

  “Yes, Mr. Drum. But let it die there—if you want to see the Mistral girl alive. You understand?”

  I nodded and he got out of there. In a little while the youngest of the three brothers came in and stretched out on his sleeping bag. He began to breathe regularly almost at once, in a deep, healthy rhythm. I admired his uncomplicated life. I almost envied it. In New York I had gone to Lequerica for help. I had seen Duarte shoot down two men in cold blood. I had come down here thinking Duarte and El Grande were the tough boys. They were tough, all right. Duarte was tough if he had you alone in a room with a bright light shining in your eyes. He was that kind of tough. El Grande was tough if he could impress you on a white stallion with a brigade of troops behind him and a chestful of medals. But in his own way Lequerica was tougher than both of them. He didn’t advertise it. I wondered if Hipolito Robles knew that Lequerica was the one you had to watch when things got rugged.

  Later that night I began to see just how rugged things were. I drifted off to sleep and dreamed I was back in Washington in my office, feet up on my desk, the office bottle out, staring at the reversed lettering on the pebble-glass door and waiting for a client or a bill collector. It was a very pleasant dream.

  A girl’s scream awoke me.


  I plunged outside a step behind the hunting brother. The fire was still high. One of the tethered horses whinnied. Two figures grappled in front of the fire. One of them had a rifle and the other was trying to get it from her. The one with the rifle was Encarnacion. She screamed again. The one fighting her called out for help. It was señora Rivera, her. dueña.

  Figures converged on them. The oldest of the brothers helped señora Rivera get the rifle away from Encarnacion. The woman was sobbing. She wore a cotton sleeping gown and a mess of cold cream on her face. Encarnacion wore a sleeping gown too.

  “… outside …” sobbed the dueña. “A nightmare … the poor child … I ran after her and she picked up the rifle …”

  “I’ll kill him!” Encarnacion screamed. “Mother of God, I swear I’ll kill him. I know what he’s planning. I know it. I’ll kill him!”

  It was Lequerica who slapped her face stingingly.

  Then Indalecio Grande came lumbering into the firelight. He looked at Lequerica and looked at his daughter, cowering now, her hand to her face, and moved over to Lequerica on his bandy legs and struck Lequerica in the face with his right fist. Lequerica fell down.

  El Grande kicked him and said passionately, “You had no right to strike her! Are you out of your mind?”

  Lequerica didn’t say anything. He sat up. El Grande did not kick him again.

  “My child,” El Grande said. His voice broke.

  “It is nothing,” Señora Rivera told him. “Nothing, sir. A nightmare.”

  With El Grande alongside she led Encarnacion back to her tent. The hunting brothers had already retired. They were probably sleeping again already. They had not been paid to understand the complicated people from Ciudad Grande. Kiki Magyar helped her husband to his feet and they went back to their tent. He looked at me as they passed, but said nothing. His eyes were black holes in his face. His mouth was a straight thin line. Soon El Grande went over to his own tent.

  A jaguar coughed in the night. It was so unexpectedly close that one of the Guaranis near the fire cried out in his sleep.…

  After breakfast the oldest brother blew a blast on his horn. The jaguar answered almost immediately, a deep cough and a rolling rumbling, jungle-shaking roar. It was very close. The brothers smiled and quickly untethered four horses. The oldest one blew his horn again. The jaguar answered. Two of the brothers mounted with rifles slung across their saddles. El Grande and Duarte mounted with them. Duarte’s horse was a big, roan-colored stallion.