Murder Is My Dish

by Stephen Marlowe

  The dogs paced back and forth, pawing the ground, sniffing. The Guaranis chanted. They were stolid and unhappy. Only Encarnacion seemed almost serenely happy. “It is a beautiful sound,” she said. “It is beautiful.”

  The jaguar coughed now, without roaring. I thought he was just out of sight beyond the nearest andiras and strangler figs.

  The oldest brother said, “A mile. Maybe a mile and a half.” He blew his horn again and the jaguar answered immediately and with arrogance. The oldest brother smiled. “A big male,” he said. “Almost certainly a splendid male.”

  He told us, “We will find him with the dogs. We will worry him. The dogs will worry him. When we are ready for the kill, you will hear my horn. My brother will lead you. All right?” He had spoken to those of us who would remain in camp.

  El Grande’s horse reared. He brought it under control with deft rein-work. He looked very good on horseback. Even his bandy legs looked good. He was a handsome figure on horseback. Probably he had encouraged the horse’s rearing.

  The oldest brother blew another blast on his horn. At once the jaguar voiced its coughing challenge. The other jungle noises, the monkeys and birds and smaller animals, were stilled.

  The oldest brother smiled and waved his hand. “Come, children,” he said. “Get him, children.”

  The eight hounds leaped, baying, from the clearing. The four horsemen galloped after them.

  With bright eyes Encarnacion watched them go.

  All morning we heard the baying of the hounds and the snarling grunting answers of the jaguar. Much of the time Lequerica stood near the embers of the fire with Encarnacion, whispering to her. Finally she went to the remaining brother and said:

  “I want to go now. I want to go after them.”

  “Señorita, we must wait,” the brother told her uneasily.

  “Then I command you.”

  His leathery face showed no expression. “I have already received my commands,” he said.

  Encarnacion cursed him. señora Rivera had a shocked look on her face and said something swiftly and softly to the girl. Encarnacion laughed, then listened to the sounds of the dogs and the jaguar and stopped laughing. Listening, she went over to the crate of rifles, her boots silent on the carpet of the jungle clearing, the carpet of fallen leaves which fell from the vaults of the jungle cathedral in the ghostly green light overhead steadily all year.

  She came back carrying a Weatherby .300 Magnum. She pointed it at the brother. “Now take me,” she said.

  The brother looked bewildered. Lequerica and Kiki stood off to one side. The dueña’s eyes were wide with horror. Encarnacion worked the bolt of the Weatherby, sliding a cartridge into firing position. “Well?” she said.

  I came up behind her and pinned her arms to her sides. The rifle did not go off. She made a little hissing noise while the brother took the rifle away from her.

  Just then the hunting horn sounded.

  Quickly and with a look of great relief on his face, the brother went over to where the horses were tethered. When he had saddled two of them Kiki told us:

  “I’m staying here in camp.” For once she had forgotten her accent. Her voice was hoarse. “I’ll stay with the Indians.”

  When the brother led the horses across the clearing, señora Rivera absolutely refused to mount. Nobody argued with her. Silently the brother handed out rifles. Before giving Encarnacion hers he looked at her and looked at me.

  “Oh, that’s all right now. Everything’s going to be fine now,” she told him. “I like you now. I love you now. I will tell my father great things about you. Please. Please.”

  He gave her the rifle, a Remington .300, and she slid it into the harness alongside her saddle.

  Sounding very close, the jaguar snarled. The hounds bayed, then one of them screamed. Then we galloped from the clearing with the hunting brother in the lead.

  It was a wild ride. After the first hundred yards or so, I gave my horse his head. He had been trained for jungle hunting and almost instinctively he knew how to avoid the castlecones of the jungle ants and the holes made by peccaries. There was the drumming of hoofs and the wild rush of air and the swinging dipping cathedral vaults of green and Encarnacion’s horse galloping past me with a rush and pretty soon Lequerica’s too. There were the sounds ahead of us, the coughing roar of the jaguar, worried all morning by the dogs and now apparently too tired to run in circles through the jungle any longer, the baying and sudden yelping screams of the hounds.

  Then all at once we came upon them.

  My mount pulled up short, rearing and almost throwing me. The other horses, lathering and blowing, had stopped just ahead, close to four riderless horses.

  The brother who had brought us dismounted. So did Encarnacion. Lequerica remained in his saddle. I swung out of mine and took my rifle as the others had done, dismounting mostly because I felt better able to cope with an emergency on foot than in the saddle.

  About thirty yards from us across a little clearing were the hounds. They danced, darted, lunged, side-stepped and retreated like boxers with good legs. They never stopped moving. Seven of them made a circle which swayed and swung and broke and re-formed. The eighth lay off a little ways on the ground, its head red and smashed.

  Inside the circle was the jaguar.

  It was a big orange-yellow cat with black rosettes on its smooth-muscled, sleek body. It was as big as a tall man. Snarling and coughing, its flanks heaving and bloody, it whirled in the hound-circle, jabbing hard and straight at the dogs with its forelimbs, using them as a man who knows how to fight uses his left hand, jabbing and hooking but never slashing. Another one of the dogs fell with a scream from the circle. Its head too was smashed. But two others darted at the jaguar from behind, nipping at its flank. It turned snarling, but they were gone. The circle of six dogs moved. The jaguar struck at air with its forelimbs and extended claws. There was blood on its panting flank and blood on its forelimbs.

  To one side of the circle of hounds stood the two hunting brothers, their rifles ready. On the other side and also very close was Indalecio Grande. Behind him and a step or so off to one side was Duarte.

  The hunter who had brought us called out something. The other hunters did not look around. They held their rifles loosely. With the dogs they had cornered and tired the great cat. They had done their work. Now unless something went wrong the party from Ciudad Grande would finish the job.

  Suddenly the oldest brother shouted: “Basta, hijos! Batra!”

  The circle of hounds fell away, the dogs panting and breathing hard, their jaws slack, their tongues protruding.

  There was a look of utter animal delight on Encarnacion’s face.

  For a moment the jaguar’s head darted from side to side on the thick strong neck. With his tormentors so abruptly called off, the big cat was bewildered.

  El Grande and Duarte raised their rifles.

  I stood right next to Encarnacion. Her face did not change. She brought her rifle up too. From where we were standing it almost looked as if Duarte was directly behind El Grande and aiming his rifle at the caudillo’s back. Actually he stood off to one side with room to shoot.

  Duarte fired his rifle and the bullet whonked home in the flesh of the jaguar. The big cat screamed and charged. In the same instant El Grande got down on one knee in rock-steady firing position. It all happened very swiftly, Duarte firing, the cat’s charge, El Grande dropping to his knee. Maybe it looked to Encarnacion as if Duarte’s bullet had struck her father. Maybe it didn’t look that way at all. Maybe she was really trying to hit the charging jaguar.

  Her rifle roared and the recoil of the big .300 Magnum drove her back a step and Duarte, dropping his own rifle suddenly as the jaguar leaped, fell forward on his face.

  Then El Grande yelled hoarsely that his rifle had jammed. Even as he yelled it the hunting brothers were firing, but by then the jaguar reached El Grande and they went down together, the cat snarling and the man screaming, rolling over in a
yellow-orange and black blur.

  No one dared fire while they rolled together like that. No one, that is, except Encarnacion. She worked the bolt of her rifle and without seeming to take aim at the big cat and her father, fired. The jaguar leaped, and died.

  Then dropping her rifle Encarnacion ran to where her father lay. The hunting brothers pumped volley after volley into the dead cat. Lequerica dismounted and ran to Encarnacion and El Grande. The caudillo’s right arm was mangled and crushed. Part of his scalp had been torn away and his left temple was crushed and sunken like an old man’s.

  He was dead, but Encarnacion did not know this or would not believe it even when Lequerica dragged her away. I went over to Duarte and so did one of the brothers. The big man had fallen face down. Encarnacion’s bullet had entered his back low on the left side. He was breathing rapidly and shallowly and clawing the ground with his huge hands, trying to get up.

  Encarnacion broke away from Lequerica and walked toward us. She was smiling. She looked down at Duarte and laughed and said, “He’s dying, isn’t he?” When no one answered her she laughed again, without smiling. There was now absolutely no expression on her face.

  “Encarnacion, please,” Lequerica said.

  “Encarnacion? Who is Encarnacion?”

  The girl made a noise. Maybe she thought it was the kind of noise a jaguar would make. Then she walked over to her horse, laughing to herself, and mounted. She sat very stiff and straight with an apathetic look on her face. Then she said, “It’s too bad, isn’t it?”

  No one answered her.

  “I mean, that father couldn’t come along. It’s been a splendid hunt. I knew it would. Oh, I knew it would. I’ll have to tell father all about it.” Then, telling him: “Padrecito, we went on a splendid jaguar hunt. I shot the jaguar, you know. Then Señor Duarte turned into a dog. You should have been there, padrecito.”

  The oldest hunting brother, kneeling near El Grande’s body, cried shamelessly.

  There was nothing we could do for Duarte. Two of the brothers turned him over on his back and tried to stop the bleeding where the bullet had come out above his pelvic bone. One of them brought him water from a saddle canteen, but he couldn’t drink it. After about twenty minutes of shallow, desperate breathing he died quietly. I looked down at him and thought of Andy-Dineen and felt only a hollowness. It is always that way after revenge or after seeing revenge happen. It is a sick empty feeling.

  We brought the bodies back into camp slung across their horses. Kiki Magyar became hysterical. señora Rivera took charge of Encarnacion, who was babbling animatedly with an expressionless face. Lequerica asked the dueña if Encarnacion had ever been that bad before and the woman shook her head. Already she had the look of a martyr on her face.

  We walked our horses back into the town of Encarnacion Grande. A couple of the Guaranis had started out before us with the pack mules and probably arrived an hour or more before we did. The villagers met us solemnly and with grave Spanish-Indian dignity. The alcalde and his brother, the pirotecnico, who also was the village undertaker, took charge of the bodies. Lequerica didn’t argue with them. He didn’t have the time. He went straight to the mayor’s house and spent much of the late afternoon and early evening on the phone. It was the only telephone in the town, the mayor said with pride.

  In the morning we set out in the two open touring cars. One of them now was the funeral car and in the night it had been heaped with jacaranda and scarlet piuva and silver imbauba. The rest of us crowded into the other car and the cortege set out with its escort of motorcyclists. All along the road back to Ciudad Grande, in the bright hot sun, the cortege moving slowly, the people of Santa Rosa and Concepcion and the other towns came to view the two bodies in the open black touring car. The people far from Ciudad Grande were sad in the way that only Spanish-Indians can be sad, but as we approached the capital it was different.

  Along the road we saw jeeps and motorcycles with sidecars, all crowded with soldiers of the Republic in their jungle-green uniforms, armed to the teeth and looking nervous. Five miles from the city we saw the first tank, an old surplus Second World War American model clanking along the road ponderously. A few civilians stood there watching it, one of them shaking his fist and shouting something I couldn’t hear. A cyclist drove over to him and dismounted and without a word struck the man down with his pistol butt.

  All at once I heard artillery fire coming from the direction of the city. Then our cortege had to get off the road to allow a convoy of jeeps and trucks to pass, the trucks bristling with the steel helmets and rifles of soldiers.

  We entered Ciudad Grande in lurid twilight. Artillery boomed and not far away was the stitching sound of machine gun fire. A pink-gray pall hung over the city. When we pulled to a stop in front of the palace, a squad of soldiers rushed up to us. Lequerica got out quickly and spoke to them and although he was in civilian clothing they saluted him.

  Then the hard-faced major who had led the troops to the airport came rushing over and exactly like a cheerleader shouted: “Viva Lequerica! Viva Lequerica!”

  The troops took it up, but from the sounds of artillery fire and the lurid pall hanging over the city, the people of Ciudad Grande had other ideas. While the soldiers shouted and proclaimed long life for Lequerica, he conversed with the major. Finally he came over to me and asked anxgrily:

  “What happened to your man in Paraguay?”

  I shrugged. “Give him a little time.”

  “He’s had more than enough time if he’s really coming.”

  There wasn’t a thing I could say to that.

  Lequerica talked with the major again. Three soldiers marched over and led me under guard past the big equestrian statue of El Grande into the palace. Before going inside I looked back and saw Encarnacion and her dueña getting out of the touring car. It was the last time I ever saw either of them.

  The soldiers led me to a suite of rooms on the third floor of the palace. It was furnished with deep red mahogany furniture in the Spanish style and every convenience you could think of including a guard at the door who smiled at me with his rifle at port arms when I opened it and looked out.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I REMAINED a pampered prisoner for three days. They brought my meals to me. The suite had everything I needed except a razor to shave with. Sometimes I heard the guard and the palace servant who brought my meals speaking in whispers of the revolution. They spoke of solemn funeral preparations disrupted by rioting and of student demonstrations demanding freedom before a new caudillo clamped down a new brand of iron rule. When they came to that part they always spoke nervously. Actually, what was happening in Ciudad Grande seemed to be in the classic tradition of revolutions.

  Every day I heard artillery fire, but it never came close to the palace. The machine gunning, though, moved back and forth in the streets of the city. Sometimes it was a distant stitching, a harmless sound like a battery of sewing machines, but sometimes it chattered and coughed explosively right outside the palace.

  Late on the third afternoon a guard came for me. I was led downstairs and through a hallway which looked familiar. It was the way to Lequerica’s apartment of course. By now Lequerica would feel certain I had never intended delivering Caballero’s manuscript. I wondered what he would do about it. He was the new caudillo, or on his way to being the new caudillo. As the new caudillo, what happened to the manuscript meant more to him than ever before.

  The soldier knocked at the door to Lequerica’s apartment. It was opened by Major Corso. The soldier saluted and stationed himself in the hall. I went into the enormous living room. I had a five-day growth of beard and wore filthy clothing. Major Corso wore a crisply starched uniform. Lequerica sat on the edge of a sofa, looking cool and comfortable in fresh white linen.

  He didn’t bother to get up. He crossed his legs and said, “Let’s have it straight, Drum, and let’s have it right now. It’s obvious you weren’t going to deliver the book as you said. Is it within you
r power to deliver it?”

  Major Corso stood watching us. Lequerica waited for my answer. Neither of them paid any attention to the sewing machine stitching away outside the high window.

  “Yes,” I said, “I can deliver it. But not while I’m here in the Parana Republic.”

  Major Corso shifted his weight and the holster hanging at his hip creaked. Lequerica said, “I don’t believe you. I believe you have the book—yes. Or you know where it can be had. I believe you can get it for me, Drum. From here.”

  “Because you want to believe it that way,” I said. I thought a fleeting smile touched Major Corso’s hard face, but it might have been my imagination.

  Not smiling at all, Lequerica got up and walked in front of me. “I’m fed up with you,” he shouted. “I’ve taken all I’m going to take. You’ll get the book. You’ll have to get the book. If you don’t, you’re going to be tried and convicted for the murder of Pablo Duarte. You and the Mistral girl.”

  “She wasn’t even there,” I said. “And you know I didn’t kill him.”

  “Don’t think I can’t have it done. Major, tell him. Have we arranged it—if necessary?”

  “Yes,” Major Corso said promptly. He did not look happy though.

  “I’ll give you five minutes,” Lequerica said. “You’ll make up your mind in five minutes or you won’t make it up at all. We will have made it up for you.”

  I thought of Lequerica as I had first known him: the suave diplomat, the international playboy. His polish had peeled off layer by layer as he lied and tricked his way to caudillismo, though. He was hardly the same man now. “You’re just spitting into the wind,” I said, “and you know it. If you don’t get the book, you’re finished. Well, aren’t you?”