“About an hour ago.”
“Did you see them leave?”
“Yes, sir. They had their bags.”
And now it seemed to me that I should do the same.
Packed and shaved, I arrived back down in the lobby with my bag at seven and after paying went to the Loco, ordered a gin and tonic, and sat there quietly waiting for my appointed time to come. I was glad to be exiting from that pleasure dome, and in the back of my mind the idea of returning home had already formed.
At five to eight I went out into the parking lot with my single bag made heavy by the listening device and hauled it to my car. But I had carefully packed my cash on my person, where it seemed the safest place for it to be. It was a clear night, and the wandering mariachis paid for by the hotel filled the air with the old music of better times. I found the white Grand Am, and there sitting in it was the same boy who had patted me down the night before.
His window was already rolled down.
“I’ll have to pat you down again,” he said. “But we’ll do it on the road.”
“Am I allowed to take my cane?”
“I wouldn’t take your cane from you.”
“I’d fall over without it. You wouldn’t want that.”
The idea was that I was to follow him in my car until we reached a spot where another pickup would meet us. We’d stay on Highway 200. It wasn’t far.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” I said.
“We’re all called José. Makes it easy for you.”
The road south wound through a great forest, before turning onto a small winding track that led to a headland plunged in darkness and the somber glitter of the sea. It was a tiny cove called Cuastecomates.
A hotel stood there right on the water with a jetty next to it and longtails hauled up on the beach with storm lamps around them. It was a rough two-story structure with a bar on the ground floor and a patio giving right onto the sand. José stopped behind the hotel and we got out and walked down to the patio. Inside the bar a jukebox was playing and two girls were dancing together, having decided that since there were no customers they might as well. The moon now hung right above the bay, and its pale papaya brilliance made the darkness around it feel constricting and oppressive. We sat outside and the girls brought out micheladas for us. Once they had gone back inside José patted me down as promised and we sat in our chairs and drank. Across the bay, two or three lights marked remote houses in the forest on the far side. That, he said, was where Señor Linder has his place. A boat would come and pick me up.
In the meantime he asked for a bowl of oranges. When they came he took one and began to peel it for me. He said they’d asked him to do it for me.
“I hate oranges.” I said. “Eat it yourself.”
“You hate oranges? No wonder you look so scrappy.”
“There’s a Punjabi saying. Oranges are the blood of wives.”
“What?”
I laughed. But he also laughed along with me: so he wasn’t a bad kid, all in all.
“That’s a crazy saying,” he sighed.
A few oranges later, a light appeared on the water and moved toward the hotel from the farther shore. We strolled down to the end of the jetty until the shape of a longtail could be seen moving against the bright reflections of the moon. As it approached, José wished me luck and told me that the same boat would take me back on the return. On the far side was a path that led up to the house; I couldn’t miss it. He would not be there when I came back later. We shook hands and he walked off back to the hotel.
The man helming the longtail was a local. On the way over he told me that if I paid him now he would wait as long as I needed on the far side. There was no other work that night. I told him that would suit me fine. Though I was surprised my hosts had not made such an arrangement with him. No, he said, it was just the man who had dropped me off at the hotel and he had only paid one way. I had to wonder about that.
“But you’ll wait for me?”
“Yes, sir. If you pay me now, I’ll wait.”
I gave him a few pesos and felt I could trust him.
We reached the headland and he cut the engine. I scrambled out onto the rocks as he tethered the boat. The waves battered it about, but he left the boat there and came with me onto dry land.
Pointing out the path, he said to just follow it up the side of the hill through the trees. The house was at the top. With my cane, I was able to climb to a point where I could look out over the sea. Below me, the longtail thrashed about on its tether and the man was now hidden from view. The headland was a place of singing trees and immense winds, and here and there, fragments of masonry stood in the undergrowth. I climbed up farther until I could see a wall, and a house behind it. It looked like a 1940s villa abandoned by owners who might have fallen on hard times, the walls Spanish in style, with tiled roofs, and the whitewash streaked with disrepair and nearly half a century of sea spray.
The gate was rusted away and the house was unlit. The gardens had overgrown and its trees, untrimmed for years, had reverted back to forest. Farther up, the path petered out and there were no other properties. I hesitated. Now I knew there’d be no Linder inside, but it’s always the same—I am the cat who is curious. Then, from inside the house, I heard a faint music.
It was some old jazz, and it must have come from a radio. I went to the door and pulled a chain bell, which didn’t ring. But the door was open anyway. I called out, pushing open the doors with my cane, and stepped into a vestibule whose roof had caved in, leaving a pile of debris on a checkered stone floor, and whose walls were covered with graffiti. A crashed bronze chandelier lay on its side within a mound of discolored glass droplets and curled dead leaves and its once impressive chain had broken up into segments.
From inside the maze of rooms, a candle’s light appeared and I went toward it with the cane half-raised. The vestibule led directly into what had once been a hacienda-style salon in which, at a long dinner table covered with bricks and small piles of shells, a man sat with a candlestick eating salami from a piece of waxed paper. He looked up as I shambled in and his look was cool and unsurprised. It was the man from the bar the other night, the man with the spinning top. So it had been a mistake to come.
“Am I late?”
It must have been my tone that amused him, and the husky eyes were now not entirely hostile. There was a time, no doubt, when I would have been afraid, but at that moment I felt no fear whatsoever. When a man can already see his end the means of passing through it don’t matter that much. His joviality remained undimmed.
“No, you’re right on time. Salami?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Then we’re all good.”
There was a hunk of dry bread next to the waxed paper and on it lay a long carving knife. He leaned back and looked almost relieved. He was now in a leather jacket and a white scarf.
“The oven’s not working, so I couldn’t make you a pheasant roast. I’m afraid I’m a terrible host. Not only that—the Linders are away fishing.”
“I gathered.”
“Are you happy to be here?”
“I was expecting fire-eaters.”
“Oh, them. They’re indisposed as well. It’s just you, me, and the salami. We’ll have to make do by ourselves. Please, take a seat. I can offer you some stale bread, though. It goes well with the salami.”
Ill met by candlelight, then. I felt calm enough as I sat down opposite him. It wasn’t such a bad place to die, come to think of it. He’d bury me in the garden under the apricot tree. My decomposition would make it bloom.
“You’re looking robust after that climb. Did you wonder if you’d have to go down again? Or whether the old man will wait for you with the boat? He only comes when I turn on the flashlight here.”
He reached down and put it on the table.
“So to get out of this place you need to have the flashlight. See how fun it can be?”
I saw his point and said so. And now my ears began to work, anxious about sounds behind me in the dark, feet moving toward me across the floors of an abandoned house.
“You remember this?”
He took out his top and put it on the table and set it spinning.
“It calms me down,” he went on. “You have to admit, life is very stressful. I find you very stressful.”
“Me, I’m a breeze.”
“But they don’t like you. That’s the problem we have here. You’re not as popular as you think you are. Personally, I rather like you. You’re a nice old gentleman. But there we are. Likes and dislikes are for little boys.”
“I realized that a long time ago. It’s a shame—I was looking forward to Mrs. Linder making me deviled eggs and a martini.”
“You’ll never know. But it’s you who got greedy and overeager. It’s a bad thing to be in this world. I thought you’d know that by now.”
“It’s always curiosity that kills cats. But that’s why they have lives in the plural and some to spare. I never could get over my curiosity. It’s really a bitch, as they say.”
“And look where it led you.”
I looked up at the still-plastered walls, the windows with their metal shutters, and the faint shadows where pictures once hung.
“I had a feeling I’d end up here,” I said. There was more doom in my head than I was prepared to let on. “In fact, I had a definite feeling. I’ve had it for years. Isn’t that strange?”
“Not at all. I have those dreams, too. We all know where we’re going to meet the end of our road. It’s a funny thing.”
He stopped the top and pocketed it. The wind suddenly slammed against the walls and the whole house creaked. The husky eyes had slowed and finally come to a stop, and in return I smiled.
“Well, I guess I should be on my way now.”
“You’re a real old-timer. I like you. It’s a shame, in my opinion—but anyway there’s the door if you want to go for it.”
He got up and picked up the carving knife, and there was a sad slowness resembling a reluctance in his motion. I got up as well, but with more confusion, and struggled to hold the cane firmly. He had not even taken my crutch into consideration and his eye did not track it. He stepped around the table and I fell back toward the door through which I’d come.
It was a ballet for which all my muscles were trained by decades of burlesque violence—by a thousand violent Carnivals and their tawdry dances. Unsheathed suddenly, my blade swung around as he came in and, as his knife sliced into my left arm, it fell into his shoulder, ripping open the leather of his jacket. He was astonished at his mistake, and by the sudden appearance of the blade, and wasn’t quick enough to pull back his own and lash out again. Instead he spun around and stared at the cut in the fabric and his blood that had come rushing out of it. I had time, then, to swing again and this time caught him clumsily on the right leg with the flat of the blade. He came to his senses and his eyes lost their initial wild surprise. He was more like a dog than even I had realized when I first saw him at the bar, and his limbs had the stocky malice of hounds when their ire is up. His knife had been sharpened on a whetstone and it had cut beautifully: blood was running down my arm and onto my foot. I stumbled to the door and from there it was a straight line back to the outside world. But he was cursing at his own mistake and at me, and in the din I couldn’t think. I was almost counting the drops falling from my arm onto the filthy checkered stone underfoot. Out toward the apricot trees and the broken wall filled with bird nests, I thought I could outrun him since he was more wounded than I was, but then I thought of the path falling like a precipice back down to the sea and knew it wouldn’t work. He would catch up because I hadn’t managed to cut up his leg. I turned in the vestibule, in dust and cobwebs, and slashed the leg that came at me. This time the edge cut into his shin and he howled and dropped to his knees. I staggered out into the path.
He had rolled over as if in resignation and lay there breathing heavily, and just as I began to move off I remembered that I had forgotten the flashlight. It was too bad, but I didn’t want to step over his semiconscious body to get it. I had to rest for a while, wipe down the blade, slot it back into the cane, and then catch my breath.
The cut was deeper than I had thought and I had to calculate how much time I had before I would pass out.
I got back down to the rocks, leaving a trail of blood behind me, and made a tourniquet out of my own shirtsleeve. The longtail was still tethered to the rocks there, as if the fisherman had hedged his bets after all. He soon emerged from under the trees and in his face there was neither surprise nor horror. He must have known all along, in the calm way of all middlemen and fixers who have no stake in the game. He didn’t say a word, just helped me onto the boat and cast off into the moonlit bay. We crossed in a few minutes. By now it was surprisingly late, as if hours had passed, and the hotel was silent. I gave him a bloodied wad of dollars and he helped me up to one of the hammocks still slung on the terrace. He asked me what I was going to do.
“My car is behind the hotel.”
“You can’t drive like that. I’ll call someone.”
“Just take me to the car.”
He ran off to find it, but when he came back said it had gone. There were no cars there at all.
They removed all the traces, I thought. Good boys.
“Call a taxi,” I said.
“For where?”
“To Las Hadas.”
Because I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Are you serious?” he hissed.
“All right, Paris will do.”
I was in the hammock now and fading fast. The blood was forming a pool underneath me and the amateur tourniquet could no longer staunch it. He said I would bleed to death if I didn’t get to a hospital. Flustered, he began to think harder. But it was too late; darkness bloomed in front of my eyes and I passed out before an idea had occurred to him. I spun on the surface of a great pool of oil and yet I didn’t sink.
In my hammock I floated through the years. Artie Shaw came out of the stillness, someone singing about a choo-choo train and the lyrics I knew from the beautiful years: Mama done tol’ me, when I was in knee pants, a woman’ll sweet-talk, and give ya the big eye. And I was singing along, rowing with my hands under the volcano. But when the sweet talkin’s done, a woman’s a two-face, a worrisome thing. I tried to remember where I knew it from, but then back in the day it was everywhere on the radio, night and day during the war, in the very first days when we were still happy. But I was in my twenties then and full of disbelief about nobility and charm. I already knew about the worrisome things. I knew that even Los Angeles at the end of its long golden summer was a place doomed to turn into what it eventually became. Paris, though. Paris in the rain. What I would have done for a leisurely stroll down the Boulevard Haussmann.
SIXTEEN
Instead I woke to find myself in a room with high rafters and the small heat-repelling windows of the Spanish. Yet they were open and the insects shrilled outside, and I knew from that alone that I wasn’t dead. Music drifted in from somewhere out in the night: waltzes, tango, or some such, the swaying hips of Buenos Aires and men in slicked hair cutting a rug. It was a tune by Antonio Lauro. On the walls, saints and monks and Castilian patriarchs in ruffs, tongs, and crucifixes and little ceremonial daggers. I was in a four-poster with brocade sashes. There was a mosquito net spooled on a ring above me and my arm was heavily bandaged and locked into position in a sling. On a chair my clothes were neatly folded and I could tell at once that they had been washed and ironed. So days had passed.
By the bed was a little brass service bell, so I rang it to see what would happen. Nothing happened. Under the door there was light, but no one came at
the beck and call of the bell.
Could I move, was I paralyzed? Is the mind still here where the body is? But I found I could sit up and swing my legs out of the bed without difficulty. Below me, as if waiting for this very event, lay a pair of velvet maroon slippers. And now I noticed that I was in someone else’s pajamas. They were striped like toothpaste and made of heavy flannel. I eased myself into the slippers and stood up. There was no pain in my arm, because there was no feeling in it at all. Someone had seen to that. I shuffled across the room to the window and looked out. A garden with fruit trees was surrounded by a wall with tiles and barbed wire lines. There was the faint glow of a swimming pool.
The air was still saline, so I knew that I had not traveled far. The sea was still there, if only out of view. The coolness revealed it.
On the back of the door hung a luxurious dressing gown that looked like a relic from the ’20s. I put it on with difficulty. The corridor, when I peered out, was like something in a high-class liner. The boards had a dark-rose tint and were polished to the shine of Macassar on auburn hair. I crept down it to a stairwell and saw the light of a salon projected upward onto the moribund faces of yet more ruffed Castilians. The tango was coming from a vinyl with scratches. I lowered myself down the stairwell until I was in view of the room itself—an opulent colonial hall with beams and black viceregal furniture.
There was a long table here, but it wasn’t set. The French windows were open to the garden instead, where candlelight flickered through the glass doors. The masters, whoever they were, were having dinner there.
I made my way across the Afghan carpets until I was almost at the doors, and there a young maid in uniform came through them holding an empty decanter. She saw me at once but didn’t start; they were probably expecting me. She merely glanced at the table behind her and nodded to it for my benefit, then whisked herself around me. When I turned to see her go, I noticed that she was barefoot. I went to the door and saw the table. At one end, an old man sat with his back to me, eating alone.
Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 12
