Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  I asked at the café by the cross. Yes, there was a bus that ran down to Colima and it had already left. The next one arrived in an hour.

  Had he already taken it? I sat by the cross and watched the indios in the milpas slipping in and out of view and the miners plodding along the road. A man changing buses in places like this—it was a ruse and nothing else. The boys playing among the nettles were happy to let me know that an old white man had gotten off the bus from Mazamitla and carried on toward Colima. We gringos stick out and are easy to remember. I asked if he was carrying a bag. They said he was empty handed.

  I went back to the car and found it surrounded by a crowd of small boys marveling at it. They scattered when they saw me, and I realized that there must be something terrible in my appearance, a ferocity I couldn’t see myself when I looked into a mirror. All the same, I drove slowly down to Colima through slumbering villages, and it was late afternoon when I rolled into a city that looked as if it had been built at about the same time as Havana.

  I felt slightly delirious by now. The town’s cream-colored buildings struck me as airy whimsies built after many an earthquake. I parked by the gardens occupying the center of the zócalo and strode into the biggest hotel on the square, a place called the Cebolla. It was colonial and full of swagger and salutations. I liked it at once. A place of lanterns on chains and dozing habitués perched on sofas. I took a room on a hunch and then asked about Señor Linder. Yes, they confirmed, he was staying at the hotel. This was not brilliance on my part; there was only one decent hotel in the area. I even found out his room number on the floor above mine.

  I then went back outside with a habanero and sat for a beer at the hotel terrace bar, where the mosquitoes were just getting started. My hands were shaking, and they hadn’t shaken like that for some time, but by the time night fell a feeling of calm had returned. The air was filled with the whistling of pintails and soon a brass band started up in the park. I went for a walk in that park and saw that there were little signs on the grass that read No pise al pasto. For some reason they made me laugh. You can come to our town as an imposter, but don’t tread on our grass.

  TEN

  There were times when I would find myself in hotel rooms on the road in which I would wake surrounded by shabby wallpaper at four in the morning, surprised that I wasn’t a boy anymore and why I wasn’t waking up into my childhood bedroom with bees tapping at the windows and Mother operating a music box. Years of this kind of life wears you down and makes you porous. You die off bit by bit. The stale grit of the road gets into your unconscious, a small voice arises and says to you, “This is the last time, there won’t be any more awakenings and thank God for that, eh?” A hotel room in Anaheim in 1957; another in Sacramento, maybe the late 1940s. The sound of jukeboxes and dive bars next door and characters long dead are suddenly alive again and chattering in my ear. Guys with names that people don’t have anymore. A Malone, a Sam Something there, a Max over there by the window. A Lipschultz dead in his casino office. Even the old language has disappeared.

  I slept through the morning in my cavernous room. Through my sleep moved old monsters and charlatans. The men beaten in alleyways decades ago, the women resigned to their twilights. A pedestrian alley of affluent shops ran along the side of the hotel where my window lay, and from it rose the musical sound of Nahuatl spoken by people sitting on the benches. I savored the ghosts while spinning slowly in the void of my dreams. In one of these dreams, a man I knew was walking along a tropical beach under a monsoon sky. He carried an ax over his shoulders and was whistling. I knew who he was. His name was Topsy Perlstein and he had been found dead inside a betting shop in Oxnard in 1953. I didn’t know him at all, I just saw his face in the files and investigated his death. Why then does he come along our beach with an ax as if he knows how to use it, as if he knows me and I know him, whereas we are just together in my clattering dream? I can’t say why Topsy has showed up in paradise, or why I showed up there either. I clutched at the cool fabric of my sheets, opened my eyes, then closed them again and thought, So maybe not the last time after all. There’ll be one more time after this.

  I reached out almost before I was awake again, and my hand didn’t find the cane that I depended on. I turned on my side and a pain in my neck subsided a little. I looked across the room, and my first thought was that it was not the room I had taken the day before. It was a wealthy room all the same, colorless and elegant, its shutters opened an inch to let in the sunlight. On a secretaire stood a pile of old books, and the chair before it served as a prop for my cane, which had been placed against it. Yet now, there was nothing except the four-poster bed in which I was lying and a square carpet whose colors had faded to the point of indecipherability.

  But then my vision blurred, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them a second time the room had changed again. There was now a bottle of scotch on the table next to my bed. How had it gotten there and how had its ambrosia gotten under my tongue?

  I dressed clumsily and went down to the hotel café on the street and got my usual café de olla with churros. The flies came down upon me, overjoyed and knowledgeable. There I was under the pale gray cathedral in the earthquake zone, and the streets were filled with children wearing party costumes of toy Aztec armor and holding toy atlatls as they gathered along the railings of the park. The heat beat down on my eyelids. It was the first day of the Easter charreada—the festival of the bulls—and among the children now loomed formidable women on horseback glittering with silver studs and chinelos with the faces of conquistadors. It was a spectacle for breakfast after a night of nightmares. The faces of the conquerors reimagined as cartoons, bright and mustachioed, with mascaraed eyes, whirling dervish–style, the Indian vision of European evil. It made me wonder again. Evil always has a face, a very human face that makes you question what goodness really is, or if it even exists. The faces of the chinelos brought back to life the faces of dead killers in my own past.

  I had slipped the main waiter a handsome tip the night before and asked him to keep an eye out for Señor Linder who was staying on the third floor, and when he saw me he bent down to my ear and said, “Señor Linder went out this morning to Villa de Álvarez in the procession to the bullring there. That’s what the bellboys told me.” It was a walk of three miles, perhaps, and he would be gone all day.

  I went back inside and found a concierge of wonderful corruptibility on duty in the main lobby, and during our conversation I told him—with some softening of the matter—what I wanted. I was an investigator and I would make it worth his while if he came with me to Senior Linder’s room and let me in to have a look. If Linder came back unexpectedly we could claim it was an innocent confusion over the rooms.

  He hesitated at first and then made sure that no one had overheard our entirely unethical chat. Then he pocketed the hundred and gave me a nod. We went up the grand staircases together, through the colonial halls echoing with trapped birds. On the third floor we found the landing empty and stepped quietly to Linder’s door. He was clearly nervous, but a hundred dollars bought a lot in Colima. He turned the key, pushed the door in and let me step inside as if I was simply looking over a room for my own use. He gave me two minutes and no more.

  To my surprise the room was exactly like mine and virtually empty. There was no luggage, no clothes, and in the bathroom there was only the hotel soap. Even the bed was made up as if no one had spent the night in it. There was not even a spare pair of shoes. I turned to the concierge.

  “Are you sure there’s someone staying here?”

  “Yes, Señor. It is Señor Linder, as I said.”

  “But he has no luggage.”

  “That’s his choice, is it not?”

  “He’s traveling like a ghost.”

  I went quickly around the bed looking for small clues, but there was nothing more remarkable than a half-burned cigarette in a glass ashtray on the night ta
ble. The curtains were drawn back, as were the shutters. I asked the man if Linder had left his passport with them. Naturally he had. We locked the door again and went downstairs to the office. Still behaving nervously, he went through the guests’ passports until he found Linder’s. It was a standard American passport and inside it was the profile of a “businessman” age seventy-two and born in Stockton, with seven years of validity left and a picture that did not look at first like the images of Zinn that I had with me but which slowly suggested a deeper similarity. The hair and mustache had been changed and the eyes were older, if anything, but I didn’t need to look at it for very long before understanding that it wasn’t the original Paul A. Linder. I looked at the edges of the photograph and I could see the forgery. It was a good job, but not that good a job. Enough to fool a hotel clerk or cross a land border without questions. I asked him if I could make a photocopy of the photo page and this required a further payment. Once I had it I asked him how long it would take to walk to Villa de Álvarez.

  “For you,” he said with a disdaining smile, “all day.”

  ELEVEN

  As I made my way through the crowd, I looked for Linder under the jacarandas. The charreada festival was in full swing and a procession made its way along a long avenue, the snow of the Nevado levitating above it. It was a movement as leisurely as that of a conga line at the end of a party. In that high-altitude light the faces of the chinelos became even more nightmarish than they had been in the town square, and I made my way through the mass as stealthily as I could. But by the time the procession arrived at the wooden bullring of La Petatera in the suburb of Villa de Álvarez, three or four miles out of Colima, I still hadn’t seen Linder. I was waylaid anyway as I bought my ticket, and the guides rushing upon me sensed how soft and easy I was. They explained in excitable sentences how La Petatera was built anew every year for the festival, purely out of ropes, planks, and mats, or petate. When all the bulls had been killed, it was all taken down again like a tent, and the mats stored for the following year. Since 1943, Señor, and it has been built and dismantled every year since!

  I climbed with the crowd up through the wooden plank terraces until I came out into the open arena. There I settled down with the Minox and my opera glasses, which I had brought with me. The crowd by now was stamping its feet to the rhythms of mariachis, and the whole structure of ropes and mats shuddered under the assault. The ceremonial pandemonium had begun, and around the circumference of the arena a boy with a roller was painting the white circle anew. Opposite me the stalls were in full sunlight. I scanned them looking for my man and when I finally did see him he was in the sun, his eyes blinded despite the shades he was wearing, and I looked at him more closely through my opera glasses.

  He was wearing an elegant summer suit this time, a buttonhole in his lapel, and a wide-brimmed Mexican hat. It was a startling change of dress for a man traveling with no luggage. He looked strangely small and slender from a distance. While I observed him, he himself watched the death throes of the bulls. As the day wore on, the area of shade moved leftward across the sand and eventually engulfed this elfin figure. Even if I had not been looking for him, I would have noticed him, because old men notice each other effortlessly. He applauded at each estocada death blow as the bulls slid to the ground with their tongues bursting out of their faces, and he did so like a connoisseur. Boys began wading through the crowd with paper cups of chopped soursops crying “Guanábanas!” and I ate mine while continuing to watch Linder eat his. Then, for a moment, gazing across the arena, I thought that he had spotted me in turn. I put down the glasses and turned away. The only two white men in La Petatera, one of them with a buttonhole, the other with a pair of opera glasses. At that moment a young matador was preparing his estocada. He had raised his sword and the arena fell into a hush. I was diverted by the moment, but when the sword had fallen and the animal had sunk to its knees, spewing blood, I looked up and found that Linder had disappeared. Uproar broke out as the kill was completed and I struggled to find the nearest exit.

  Opposite La Petatera a fairground had opened for the evening and its lights had just come on. A fairground is always a maze, and he had disappeared into it purely to lose me. I was soon lost inside it, too, among the stalls of nuez fina and traveling shows—Tamara the Buried Girl, a girl sleeping under a plate of glass, the farmers gathered round to marvel at her suspended animation. This was where I saw him again, walking away from the same spectacle having left a peso note for Tamara.

  I followed him. He moved like a sloth in linen, his legs long and still firm, his motions surprisingly smooth. The more I observed him, the more I became convinced that he was Zinn and that he knew who I was as well.

  Behind us the Nevado glowed ashes-of-roses against the blue; its snow seemed more ominous and close than it had on the road. Linder appeared not to know where he was going but soon, guessing his way, beat a path back to the road. There were now mariachis in white suits roaming the byways, double basses held at those absurd angles. The spirits come alive and set to music. The pool halls by the road were in full swing, too. He crossed the road and seemed to flirt with the idea of playing a game there, but instead set off by himself along the road back to Colima, picking his way carefully as old men do and now apparently oblivious to my presence—if he had even been aware of it in the first place. And so we went, one following the other along the same road that we had both come that afternoon, until Linder came to a cantina by the road and stopped there for a drink.

  He laid his hat on one of the outdoor tables and ordered a shot of some kind and then lit up a cigar. For an hour he sat there puffing away and I sat on a wall in the shadows and watched him, taking note of the way he smoked, the way he lifted his glass, the way he drummed the tabletop with his fingers. He looked like a man who was comfortable in his surroundings, as if he had been there many times before. Then he was called inside by a waiter, got up, and vanished inside. Ten minutes later a car drew up outside the cantina and Linder reappeared, making a hasty move for its back door. They drove off. After a suitable pause I went to the same table. The waiter came out and wasn’t extraordinarily welcoming. Linder’s glass was still on the table along with a saucer of cracked pistachio shells. He offered to clear them away and I told him not to worry.

  I sat, and while he got my order—a shot of añejo—I looked at the edge of the glass that Linder had just abandoned. There was a strange smear of what looked like lipstick around the rim. He hadn’t finished the glass.

  When the waiter returned I asked him if he knew every old gringo in Colima or just us two. “Not at all,” he said, “that man is a stranger, too. Just as you are.” He smiled at me and his eyes were knowing

  “We Americans—we’re everywhere!” I joked.

  His smile was glacial.

  “Not quite everywhere, Señor.”

  I paid for the drink and let it sit untouched on the table while he cleared away the nutshells. He stood there looking down at me as if suddenly realizing that he had made a mistake. He moved off then and did not return. I knocked back the añejo and waited for a taxi to pass on its way to Colima.

  Back at the hotel I asked the concierge if Linder had returned. He confirmed that he had. Would the concierge do me a favor? Would he go up to the room and knock on the door and, when Linder answered, ask him if he needed a turndown for the evening?

  I waited at the bar, where a few Americans were also drinking, and a few minutes later the concierge came in and told me that Señor Linder had answered the door and that he had been dressed in a silk robe.

  “A silk robe?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  So Linder seemed to have a wardrobe now. I wondered if it had been delivered to his room.

  “Is he alone in the room?”

  “I am not aware of a woman, if that is what you are asking.”

  I showed him the photo I now always kept of Zinn in m
y pocket.

  “Was it this man?”

  “I think it is,” he said.

  “Bueno,” I thought. Bird in the hand.

  I might have felt exultant in the old days, but now I felt nothing but a quiet relief. An hour later I went up myself to the third floor and sat on the bench that stood on the main landing, surrounded by old Spanish baúls. The birds still swooped down the galleries, lamenting their baffling imprisonment. Though I wanted to, I resisted the urge to knock on his door myself. The opportunity to gather more evidence while still unknown to him won out, and I decided to wait and go back to my room. Before I did, however, I stood in the corridor and listened. There was the faint sound of a radio and nothing more.

  In my room I lay on the bed and tried to think it through. Pacific Mutual had not asked me to bring him in, and I didn’t have any jurisdiction to do so. All they wanted was evidence, and this was not even what they had been looking for. It was not what I had been looking for. It occurred to me that if I wanted to I could easily make a deal with him. I could scare him a little and then agree to leave him alone for a small cut of the take. It wasn’t very noble, and it was against my best instincts, but there wasn’t anything particularly noble about anyone else either. Pacific Mutual’s profits meant nothing to me, and Zinn’s scam didn’t concern me either.