by David Dodge
I went ashore only because I knew the West Coast Cable agent there. We had lunch together. During lunch I asked him questions about the rules covering privacy of radio messages transmitted from vessels at sea. He said they were pretty strict, and read me part of the International Convention. I could see that my chances of getting anything out of Sparks were hopeless, unless I wanted to try a bribe bigger than I could afford. I would just have to wait and see how the cards fell.
After lunch I wandered around town, killing time. It was March, late summer and hotter than the top of a stove. I walked four blocks uphill, two blocks over, and came back. That was Mollendo. Beer seemed like a good idea by the time I finished the gran tour, so I stopped at a cantina to cool off.
Jeff was there, alone, breaking matchsticks between his fingers and dropping them into an ash tray. He didn’t say anything when I sat down at his table, only nodded. When my beer came, he picked up his own glass and drank to keep me company, then went on breaking matchsticks.
Five minutes later he said, “Hot.”
“Too hot.”
“Some dump, Mollendo.”
“I’ve seen better. What are you doing ashore?”
“Stretching my legs.”
“Lost interest in the nurse?”
He grunted. I knew that Ana Luz didn’t mean a thing to him after Berrien learned that he was trying to pump her, but I wanted to try him out. He said half-heartedly, “Maybe I ought to go back to the ship and see how she’s getting along.”
“I’ll split the cost of the launch with you.”
We finished our beer and started down the dusty street.
Right at the foot of the street, just before it turned into a steep cobblestoned fire-escape going down the cliff, there was a tourist trap, a tienda full of junk silver, alpaca rugs, carved wooden souvenirs, Indian weaving, the same stuff you find in the same kind of shops all over the world. As we went by, I looked at the rugs on display. Anybody would have looked at them. They were fur patchwork, black and brown and white alpaca skins cut up into little pieces, triangular, square, oval, any shape, all sewn together into the ugliest designs you could think up if you worked hard at it for a month. I wouldn’t have had one of the things if it had been lined with dollar bills. But Jeff caught my arm.
“Wait a minute.”
It wasn’t the rugs that interested him. He was looking at a little silver pot in the window, a squat tarnished thing about four inches high with animal figures hammered into the metal. He studied it for about thirty seconds, all the time holding my arm. Then he turned me around and pushed me toward the doorway of the tienda.
“Buy a rug.”
“I don’t want a rug.”
“Bargain with the guy anyway. Offer him half of what he asks, and put up a fight, but let him stick you. I’ll pay.”
It was nothing to me if he wanted to waste his money, and I was curious. We went into the store.
The rug cost three hundred soles, about twenty dollars American, twice what it was worth even to somebody who wanted it. The storekeeper and I spent fifteen minutes arguing about it. All that time Jeff wandered around the store fingering things and asking prices. While the storekeeper was bundling up the rug, Jeff planked a silver copa down on the counter—not the pot, but a shinier piece he had lifted out of the window.
“How much?”
“Five hundred soles.”
“Por dios, what do you take me for, a tourist? Two hundred.”
“I regret it deeply, señor. The silver is precio fijo.”
“In that case, it remains yours.”
Jeff turned away.
The storekeeper forgot about his fixed prices and came down a hundred soles. Jeff went up fifty. The storekeeper came down fifty. They stuck there. Jeff put the copa back in the window and picked up another one—still not the pot. They couldn’t reach a price on the second piece, either. Jeff was keeping his bids low, feeling the storekeeper out to see just how much he would come down from his opening price to make a sale. I had played poker with him, so I recognized the technique.
When he finally got around to the pot, the store-keeper opened with eight hundred soles—a higher price than the others because the pot was a real antigua, genuine native manufacture, heavy silver, and so on. Jeff got it for five hundred.
Going down the hill, he gave me back my money. The boatman who took us out to the Talca got the rug for a tip. While we bounced along in the launch, the wind whipping salt spray into our faces from the tops of the waves, Jeff tapped the silver pot with his finger.
“Know what it’s worth?”
I took it from him and looked at it. It was old and heavy. That was all I could make out of it.
“More than you paid for it,” I said.
“About five hundred dollars. It’s pre-Conquest by two hundred years. I could sell it to that old thief Berrien for seven thousand soles right now.”
More than I wanted to find out how a gringo who looked like an ex-football player had learned to pick a six-hundred-year-old piece of Inca silver out of a collection of tourist souvenirs in a store window, I wanted to know what his grudge was. I said, “What have you got against Berrien?”
He studied the pot for a minute, rolling it between his hands.
“Not a thing,” he said shortly.
We didn’t talk any more about it, and he didn’t pay any attention to Ana Luz after we were aboard.
There was a new passenger on the Talca when we hoisted anchor that evening. He was peruano, a young fellow down from Arequipa on the train to go to Lima by boat because he had a bad heart and couldn’t fly there. He told us all about himself at dinner. He said his name was Raul Cornejo. His English was good, his clothes were good, his fingernails were clean. He looked pretty healthy to have a bad heart. And I wondered what difference it made to a heart whether you dropped seventy-five hundred feet with it to sea level in three hours by plane to Lima, or in four hours and a half by train to Mollendo.
People with bad hearts were beginning to make me suspicious. That unexplained radio message with my name in it had got under my skin. Only Berrien and Ana Luz knew—or ought to know—that I was anything but a tourist. If one of them was double-crossing me for some reason, I had plenty to worry about. I still had to go through customs at Callao. If the radio message had been a tip-off that I was smuggling something, I would land in the can in a hurry. I didn’t think it had been a tip-off, because I couldn’t see any sense to a tip-off, but I didn’t know what was going on. I had to figure on all possibilities. My hunch was that somebody—I didn’t have any favorites—would be making a try for the package before the Talca reached Callao. The break would have to come within thirty-six hours, the Talca’s running time between Mollendo and Callao.
The thirty-six hours covered two nights and a day. The first night, I left the poker game early, about ten. I told everybody within earshot, including the captain, Sparks, the first officer, Harris, Jeff and the steward, that I was going right to bed. I didn’t tell them I was getting jumpy and wanted the action to start if it was going to start, but I hoped somebody would get the idea.
There were two ladders leading up to the boat deck, port and starboard. I went up the starboard ladder because the ship rolled that way as I came out of the messroom, sending me down the slanting deck. When I reached the top of the ladder—or when my head and shoulders reached the top of the ladder—I saw Ana Luz and the young peruano who called himself Raul Cornejo standing in the nook between two lifeboats, talking.
I stopped where I was. The moonlight was bright on their faces. I knew right away they weren’t just chatting about how many knots the Talca might be making. They were talking business—angry business. I hung there on the ladder, not moving, hoping that my coat wouldn’t flap in the wind and give me away, trying to catch the conversation. They were both talking at once, their voices low and hot, and I couldn’t get it. It didn’t last long, anyway. In the middle of it, he lifted his hand and smacked her.
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br /> It was a good stiff slap, right on the mouth. It turned her head in my direction. She was looking at me, her face still twisted from the blow, when his hand came back, knuckle side this time, whanged her head the other way, then back with the palm to turn her face toward me again, crack, crack, crack.
“¡Cállate!” he hissed at her. “¡Ya hablo yo! Tu vas a…”
He didn’t have time to tell her what she was going to do. I think if she hadn’t seen me there I might have been able to check my gentlemanly impulses long enough to try to hear more of what he had to say to her. But you can’t stand still when a lady has her face slapped while she is looking at you, whoever she is.
I got to him before he knew I was there. He was small and light-boned. I jammed him back against a lifeboat, my left hand on his chest, and whacked him three times the way he had whacked Ana Luz, only with more steam behind it. It almost put him to sleep, not quite. His hand went under his coat, pushing against mine, trying to get to his armpit. I shifted my hand ahead of his and felt the gun.
I didn’t know what to do. As long as it was just a little friendly face-slapping, I could be another crazy gringo who objected to seeing ladies pushed around, and no hard feelings. But if I took his gun away from him, I made a personal feud out of it. And if I didn’t take his gun away from him, he was going to get at it sooner or later and let me have the business. He squirmed like an eel, trying to get out from under my hand. He wasn’t afraid, or badly hurt. He just wanted to kill me.
While I held him there, trying to make up my mind what to do with him, Ana Luz said warningly, “Raul!”
It reached him. He kept struggling, but the hell-fire began to leave his face. He took his hand out from under his lapel and used it to pull at my wrist, as if that had been all he was trying to do all the time. I let him work free.
“It is a bad thing to strike a lady, caballero,” I said.
He kept his eyes down and his mouth shut, breathing hard, fighting himself, holding it in while his fingers itched to grab for the gun. I waited another thirty seconds, more to let him calm down than anything else—I wouldn’t have liked a bullet in the back any better than in the belly—and then turned to Ana Luz.
“May I take you to your cabin, señorita?”
“Thank you, no. I am perfectly all right.”
She made no move. I said, “Shall I leave you here?”
“Please.”
Her face, in the moonlight, still showed the marks of fingers, dark on white. I supposed that he would smack her again after I got out of sight, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I left them standing by the lifeboats and went to my cabin.
Nothing else happened that night, except that I picked Raul as a good man to keep my eye on. If he knew Ana Luz well enough to slap her around and say, “Shut up, thou!” to her, he knew her well enough to receive a radio message from her if she had sent one, on her own hook or at Berrien’s orders. Berrien was afraid of Jeff and worried about his package. He might have called for reinforcements, either to make sure that I turned the package over to him when I was supposed to, or to make sure that Jeff didn’t get it. Or Ana Luz might have ideas about the package herself, and needed help to get it from me. Or everybody aboard the ship might be in cahoots with a band of fanatical Tibetan monks who had sworn to recover the stolen idol’s eye I was carrying around taped to my skin. One explanation was no sillier than another.
Nobody tried to crawl through my porthole that night. Berrien took another walk around the deck in the morning, and gave me the nod. I slipped into his cabin at lunchtime, when the boat deck was clear.
Ana Luz was setting out his lunch on the table. There weren’t any marks on her face. She didn’t look at me when she said buenos días.
Berrien was more worried than ever. He said, “You must be very careful today and tonight, Mr. Colby. I am sure that an attempt will be made to steal the package before we land. If there have been no attempts so far, it only means that—they—have been waiting until the last moment to make their escape from the ship easier.”
“By ‘they,’ do you mean Jefferson?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“Why worry about him? He doesn’t even know I have it. Or does he?”
“I don’t know. He is a clever and unscrupulous man. He may know more than we think.”
“How would he find out?”
“I don’t know. I am only warning you to be very careful.”
“If you’d tell me something about him—why you are afraid of him, and what…”
“No.” Berrien’s mouth closed tight on the word. “It is enough to say that he is dangerous.”
“Are you afraid of anyone else aboard the ship?”
“No.”
“Do you know a peruano who calls himself Raul Cornejo?”
Ana Luz was still arranging cutlery. The knives and forks stopped clinking when she heard the name. There wasn’t a movement or a sound in the cabin for that one split second, nothing but the steady roll of the ship and the faint vibration carried up through the ship’s structure from the engines down below.
“No,” Berrien said. “Who is he?”
“Somebody who came aboard at Mollendo. A young fellow. Speaks good English.”
“I don’t know him.”
I meant to follow it up. I meant to tell him that Cornejo knew his nurse well enough to slap her around in an argument, and see if he wanted to make a connection between that and a radio message about me that somebody had sent from the ship. But I looked at Ana Luz and knew from her expression that she was ready for me. She had her story.
It wouldn’t hurt to wait a little longer, see if I could get something more tangible to go on. I said to Berrien, “All right. I wanted to be sure he wasn’t a joker. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“Only to be very, very careful.”
Ana Luz laid down a fork as I left the cabin. I hoped that I had puzzled her as much as she was puzzling me.
The afternoon dragged by. I sat with Sparks in the radio shack most of the time, listening to record music from the big radiodifusora in Lima. We were getting close by then, and the music came in good. Once I asked Sparks if the radio message he had sent had been addressed to somebody in Arequipa. He said I could guess if I wanted to, laddie, and gave me a drink out of his bottle to show that there was nothing personal in his refusal to talk.
I took only one drink. I didn’t want to slow my reflexes.
That night we played poker for the last time. Everybody except Harris was leaving the ship at Callao, so we had an open game, the losers trying to get their money back, the winners after a last killing. The only passengers who didn’t sit in, except for Berrien and Ana Luz, where the fat Peruvian couple, who always went to bed right after dinner. Sparks and the captain represented the home team, trying to catch Jeff bluffing out on a limb. Raul, who was in the game for the first time, played his cards tight and was careful not to meet my eyes. We called each other “Señor” whenever it was necessary, and didn’t say much else. He had a split lip.
At one A.M. I was out three hundred soles, all I had in my pocket. Harris was clean, too. Jeff held most of the money. I had intended to stay up all night, figuring I would be less open to trouble if I had company around me until the time came to go ashore, but when I found I couldn’t cash a traveler’s check without taking all the money in the game—I had nothing but hundreds, in dollars—I decided to quit.
Raul surprised me by offering to stake me. I turned him down. I was tired, and I had begun to think that Berrien’s worries about his package were all in his head. Jeff and Raul, the two logical suspects if a play for it was going to be made, sat there as happy as a couple of clams in a bowl of milk, nothing on their minds but the cards. When Harris left the game, I went with him.
We walked out of the messroom together. We hadn’t reached the ladder to the boat deck when Raul came through the door behind us.
“Señor Colby!”
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br /> We both stopped. Raul came up to me.
“May I have a few words with you?”
“Sure.”
Raul looked at Harris. Harris said, “Oh, ah, excuse me, then. Think I’ll pop off to bed. ’Night, all.”
He went on up the ladder.
Raul motioned toward the side of the ship. We walked over to the railing. The hull wave boiled and hissed below us, greenish white in the glow of the ship’s lights. The roll of the ship was more pronounced there than amidships. If a man—even a little man—got a sucker with his back to the rail, and timed the heave just right, it wouldn’t be hard to help the sucker overboard.
He didn’t try to get me with my back to the rail. He said stiffly, “I wish to make an explanation and an apology for my actions last night.”
“Go ahead.”
“They were inexcusable. You were perfectly justified in what you did.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“You are probably wondering what my relationship is with the lady. She is a member of my family, a distant cousin.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. We quarreled about a family matter that would not interest you.” (I thought: The hell you say!) “I let my temper carry me away. I am glad to say that she has accepted my apologies. The incident is closed.”
It should have been closed, anyway. But he kept it open for another five minutes, bumbling on about his temper and the angry blood of the Cornejos, using a lot of words to say nothing important. I thought he was trying to get up courage to reach for his gun, and I watched his hands. I was going to break his arm if he moved it suddenly.
