Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  I took a room overlooking the cove and the little private beach, the cliffs covered with shining organ pipe cactus from where local boys launched themselves into the air for a lovely moment before shooting downward into the surf with knives between their teeth, like kingfishers, purely for the pleasure of guests. They had done that in the old days, too. Marimba wafted up from the hotel bar. The sun set behind spear-like agaves as I had dinner on my balcony.

  The rich have their secretive mansions around Puerto Vallarta and down the coast in places like Costa Careyes and Tenacatita. Houses as beautiful as anything in Provence and set into a coast not unlike the Côte d’Azur. The owners come up to Puerto to eat at the elegant restaurants, even though it’s a long drive each way. Many of them stayed the night at Conchas Chinas.

  It was an hour’s work to ascertain that Black’s yacht was moored at the Paradiso marina in Nuevo Vallarta north of the center, and that he came into town every night with his girl to have dinner on the rooftop terrace of Chez Elena. At nine I walked up to the marina in a navy blazer with brass buttons in the hopes of catching him on the yacht, and the boys there told me that there was in fact a small party going on in the Deep Blue Devil that evening. They pointed out the yacht and I walked around the marina with my cane, struggling a little because the arthritic cramps that sometimes plagued me had returned. When I was opposite the gangplank I saw that it was not a party at all but just a middle-aged man with a Mexican girl and a boat’s captain of sorts in a cream-colored uniform. The middle-aged man—Black, I assumed—had a sunburned pirate’s face with a ridiculous dyed goatee and eyebrows painted on with a calligrapher’s brush. The man fighting the signs of aging always has a touch of sinister vaudeville about him. But his threads were impeccable. The three of them were playing cards at a glass table with a bottle of Jav’s rum and listening to Bob Dylan. Black was in a V-necked Yale sweater with a white shirt underneath and crisp whites with dark-blue Sperry boat shoes. There was, in fact, something lifted out of the Official Preppy Handbook about him, as if Lisa Birnbach had had something like his figure in mind as she instructed our decade on how to do the look right. It wasn’t what I had expected, but then I wasn’t sure what I was expecting in the first place. The scene was sedate and gentlemanly, with an air of ancient reasonableness. There was even a liquor cabinet stationed politely by the table, with shakers and long mixing spoons and obviously expensive glassware. The three looked up together as I appeared at the foot of their gangplank, and out of nowhere, summoned by a general sense of alarm, a butler appeared and called down in a Filipino accent, “Yes, sir?”

  The girl tittered, perhaps as I was a little overdressed for the occasion, and the middle-aged man whom I took to be Black rose from his chair and stepped to the edge of the boat to get a better look at me. Suddenly he smiled.

  “Ahoy there. Do we know you?”

  I made my case, making it as affably as I could, and pretended to be a friend of Zinn’s rather than someone investigating him. Again, my name did not ring any rusty bells.

  Black turned to his companions.

  “He says he’s a friend of Donald’s.”

  The girl was skeptical. “Really?”

  Black turned back to me.

  “You came here all alone without calling? That’s rather odd of you. Personally I don’t mind. Would you care to come aboard for a drink?”

  The butler helped me up the gangplank, my legs feeling the stress. It was a handsome yacht, a multimillion-dollar affair, a Knight & Carver Riviera, if I wasn’t mistaken. When I was seated with them, Black asked the butler to make me a Campari and soda since that was what they were drinking, and he asked me the inevitable questions about myself and Zinn—did we know each other from San Diego? I said I’d known him from years ago and since I happened to be on my way to Acapulco I thought I’d find out how he died. It had saddened me to hear the news.

  “Same for us all,” he sighed. “I heard while I was in Manzanillo. You can imagine—”

  “So you weren’t traveling together?”

  “What an idea. No, he was on his own as far as I know. It’s quite a wild place, Caleta. It was one of Donald’s hideouts. Of course we drop anchor there ourselves sometimes, usually in the winter. It’s a nice little bay and the bars on the beach are sweet. You can swim in from the yacht.”

  “Then I wonder how he got there last July?”

  “Oh, he hitched a ride on one of the yachts going down there. It’s a big party scene at this time of year. They swim in from the yachts all boozed up—well, you can see how accidents happen.”

  “It seems a little foolish.”

  The girl was eyeing me up, cool and unconvinced. I had the feeling she had seen through me at once. The eyes were a dark Castilian green, like coins sunk in old water.

  “You’re driving?” Black said cheerfully. “Splendid way to go. I should try it myself someday. They say the roads at night are getting violent, though. There are certain stretches you should stay off past nine o’clock.”

  “Oh?”

  “Kidnappings and all that. It’s a disagreeable fact of life. Stick to daytime driving, if I were you.”

  “Even dusk,” the girl finally said.

  Her name was Elvira, the accent American as it turned out.

  “At first,” I said, “I thought Donald had been kidnapped. I admit it was the first thing that sprang to mind. He had enough enemies down there, I suspect, they could easily have kidnapped him and held him for some ransom. I wouldn’t have been surprised at all. It’s such a pity—he was a lovely man. Wasn’t he, Elvira?”

  “He was a rake, let’s face it.”

  Black laughed.

  “They’re so cruel when we’re dead. When we’re alive, too, come to think of it. But he was a bit of a rake. So was I once upon a time. How about you, Mr. Marlowe?”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  “It’s the blind judging the blind, then. There’s nothing wrong with being a bit of a rake. It didn’t get him killed at least.”

  But that, I thought, was an open question.

  “Unfortunately, Marlowe, a fair number of aging white men die here every year. It’s a sort of yearly harvest. When you consider why they’re here, it’s not surprising. They come for a thrill and they find it. That’s all I can say.”

  “It’s pretty dismal,” I lied.

  “It’s what it is. You have to wonder if it’s what they’re hoping for deep down. You have to die somewhere, so why not here? I’d say it’s a pretty fine place to die, all things considered.”

  “I can’t think of anywhere more beautiful. Capri, maybe. But who can afford to die there?”

  He lifted his glass to toast the departed Zinn.

  “To Donald, may he rake the Elysian Fields!”

  The butler served some small tortas and I asked about the American scene on the coast. The world of tanned men in big-shouldered jackets with a taste for cigars, of marlin hunters and whore mongerers on the lam on the cancerous Tropic.

  “They come and go,” Black went on. “We all need something in this world, we all come from places where we can’t get them. I wouldn’t live in the United States if you paid me by the minute. Can you imagine ending up in a hospital there? Can you imagine trying to pay for a night of sensualidad? After a certain point you get tired of angry adolescents. You get tired of five hours’ sleep a night and endless white noise. Then you run for the border. When I see the thousands running in the opposite direction, I am reminded of certain facts of human nature that are not encouraging. But you have to make your peace with the world and find your place to die. In the meantime, you can just push the envelope a little.”

  “I don’t know—no matter how much you push the envelope it’ll still be stationary.”

  “Still,” he went on in a different tone, “you seem awfully curious about our mutual
friend. And are you just, as they say, passing through?”

  “That’s about the long and short of it.”

  I glanced at my watch—the classic move—and uttered a ritual sigh. Time to be moving on. I stirred and the butler sprang forward to help me up. But Black waved him away for a moment.

  “We’re sailing down to Manzanillo ourselves,” he said calmly. “You’re welcome to join us if you like. We can even sail on past Caleta—what do you think?”

  There was a note of threat in the invitation, like a clenched hand inside a very pretty glove.

  “Thank you for your offer, but I don’t like yachts—I get claustrophobia.”

  “Very well. Sam, could you help Mr. Marlowe down the gangplank? It looks like that stick of his will get in the way.”

  I gave them an old-fashioned bow and I was aware suddenly of the sweat glistening all over my face and the effect it must be giving in the light of the sickly yellow lamps on the deck.

  “You’re shaking,” Black said as the butler ushered me toward the gangplank. “I admit our Sam makes a strong Campari and soda. But even so—”

  “Are you all right?” the girl asked.

  “I’m on my way,” I answered, and wished them a hasta la vuelta.

  I picked up my cane as if simultaneously sweeping a cape and got back onto my weary pegs. My exit was grand enough.

  On terra firma the butler gave me an anxious look.

  “Do you know how to get back to town?” he asked.

  But the question seemed to conceal a different one—it was a curious coded warning to leave as quickly as possible and to not come back. I wanted to thank him for it and in the end he walked me back to the car.

  “He’s a curious guy, your boss,” I said on the way. “Does he eat live scorpions for breakfast? I was just curious.”

  “Just croissants.”

  “I’m taken aback. Are you really sailing to Manzanillo tomorrow?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, give them all my fond regards.”

  “And you have a safe trip, sir.”

  As it went I stayed another night at the Conchas Chinas and during the day I sniffed around in town asking after Donald Zinn. But he was the man-who-never-was. Come dusk I took my drink on my balcony and watched the boys plunge into the cove below like little Tarzans, and I reflected that they must be the grandchildren of the boys I had first seen here in 1958. Time was cruel, and it was me who had changed for the worse. It was my hands that shook as they reached for the salt pot. Maybe Black was right and the Tropic was the honeypot that sucked all the flies in and drowned them in honey, and for that matter Zinn and I were not so different. Men on the lam, pathetic crumbs with long pasts worth forgetting. Zinn had just found his exit and a way to provide for his young widow: it wasn’t so dishonorable when you thought about it twice.

  SIX

  I stopped at midday in Cuyutlán to buy some bottled water in the day market. The streets there lit up in shocking colors with flame vines and coral trees. It was on the sea, the wind fine and salted, and along high curbs in front of lime-white houses, women with Aztec faces stood selling gorditas stuffed with shredded and half-burned coconut and baskets of the same red coral tree petals. Already, it was a different place from Puerto Vallarta. I felt blinded and refreshed at the same time, my cane clattering on the cobbles and my senses fumbling. The sacred Colima volcano loomed nearby, and the voices in the streets whispered in Nahuatl. In the shade of the volcano, then. Coconut groves cast an otherworldly cool over the ground below them, through which little streams made their way down to the sea.

  Farther along, the road became tortuous, dipping up and down through forest, and at least once I stopped the car to let a tarantula make its way across the road in the same way you would stop for an old lady. Mountains rolled down to the coast, where the breakers smashed against beaches piled with driftwood, and their slopes were covered with ghostly shaving brush trees with open flowers.

  As the sun neared its zenith I came into view of Caleta de Campos. It lay against the wild hills with a beauty created purely by neglect. It was a somnolent village built around two separate bays connected by a few dirt paths, and where these paths converged there was a small hotel called Los Arcos. But on the slopes pitching down to the sea the houses seemed to be mostly abandoned. Behind the hotel was a village square and cantina, and beyond that the road and the mountains shining with cactus. It was a settlement of hundreds at most, maybe only dozens, and under the neon glare of midday there was no one to be seen either way.

  I parked the car under a tree by the hotel and went into the lobby. A fan stirred the air and a girl was asleep at the desk, her head on folded arms. I wasn’t sure how to wake her up. Finally I coughed. She stirred, opened one eye without shame, and said, “Buenas.”

  I asked for a room with a sea view.

  “No hay.”

  “All right, a room with no sea view.”

  She gave me the key and let me take the room myself.

  Once there, I threw open the shutters. There was a fine sea view. Then I walked back down to the lobby and found that she was asleep again.

  From the front door of the hotel, a dirt path led down to the ruined villas and the main beach. I took it. Soon a harbor wall came into view with the words Cerveza Corona painted in white letters along its length. To the left, the beach curved away toward a headland covered with more ruined houses, and along it stood palapas with hammocks. The bay was sheltered, the water calm. I made my way down the slope onto the beach, took off my shoes, and wandered along the surf. The whole place seemed to be under a sleep-inducing spell. A path led up to the headland through a mass of low-lying cactus. So this was where Donald had met his maker. The palapas were, no doubt, where he had had his late-night parties over the years. I went back to them and chose a hammock. No one came out to take my order. Half an hour later I walked along the harbor wall to the end. When I got there I found an old man fishing by himself on the seaward side. I realized then that he had been watching me all along.

  I sat on the wall under the shade of my own straw hat and we stared into the water together. Eventually I asked him why there weren’t any yachts in the bay that day.

  “They come and go,” he said.

  “No Americans this week?”

  “They come and go.”

  Now, on the headland, I could see a group of three soldiers sitting on a piece of wall with their weapons stacked next to them. There was a drugs checkpoint on the road that ran right past Caleta de Campos. An old man fishing every day, I thought, must see everything day by day. I decided to make myself a friend. A shared cigarette later, his name was on my lips: Nestor. A great name for an old man of the sea.

  He didn’t put down his rod or turn to me when he said, a few moments later, “Are you looking for someone?”

  “Do I look like I am?”

  “Yes, sir, you do.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “You speak good Spanish.”

  “I’m a good mimic.”

  The sun was now so hot that my mind began to lose its coherence. Even the sea wind couldn’t hold it together, and so I gave myself another minute before I went back to the palapas. I asked him who he thought I was looking for. That got a chuckle out of him. I was asking him?

  “There was a drowning here in the summer,” I said. “Do you remember that?”

  He said there was one every year, sometimes two.

  “But that American—do you remember him?”

  “The old one?”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember him. He came every year. He used to swim across the bay.”

  “So he was a good swimmer?”

  “He was good for his age.”

  Then, I said, it was strange that he had drowned.

 
; “It was at night,” Nestor said. “No one could figure out why he was swimming at night, though. Maybe he was high.”

  “Does everyone get high here?”

  “The Americans do. They can buy marijuana anywhere they like.”

  There was a slow drawl to him, and a gleam of truth, that quality that cannot be faked by even the cleverest man.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon at the palapas observing the pattern in all things. The old men who came down to fish and stayed all day on the harbor wall with their mescal. the little boys with buckets wading through the estuary looking for crabs. At five the radios started up and the kitchens opened for sopa de mariscos in tin bowls. The friendly women who ran them came down the dirt paths to enjoy the sunset. The best thing was to get into the swing of it, become a temporary familiar face, and order a lot of drinks. It was Pacific Mutual’s time and money as far as I was concerned, and I’d be just as happy to waste a few days here, then go back to the land of gringos and report a dead end. But at the same time I would soon have to go to the police at the delegación and get their story. It would be a fanciful one and probably untrue, but I would have to get it anyway.

  It was Saturday and that night there was a fiesta in the square. By the time I got back to Los Arcos the mariachi were already in full flow and the square was full. I went down there alone to watch the rechulos in their cowboy hats and pointed boots, dancing with their girls, and I found that the speakers set up in the square were taller than me and their sound made the whole village shake. I would have danced if my legs could have taken me, but all I could do was watch and wait. There’s no sadness greater than that of a small village in the mountains where everyone is dancing in a square without you. I thought I heard a few guns going off as the boys got warmed up with mescal, but there was nothing menacing about it. On the contrary, it was a comfort. There was a bar with iced michelada beer, and I downed one as the sun dissolved and the dark outlines of the mountains became ominous. Soon only the brightness of the moonlit sea could countervail the firecrackers and the lanterns swinging from the wires around the square. Down by the road I found the federales and showed them my ID and said I would like if possible to ask about the American who had drowned seven months earlier. They were surprisingly polite and cooperative.