Suddenly, above the low stone fence, she spotted a man’s head. A pair of manacled hands were lifted into view and the man eased himself carefully over the fence.
The old woman shuddered with terror. An escaped convict in her garden! She wanted to cry out but couldn’t, tried to get up and run but her legs buckled under her. From her bank, spell-bound, she watched the stranger.
Meanwhile he had made his way cautiously among the bushes to the house and was stealing from window to window, peering in.
Then she heard him-or was she mistaken?-caU softly, “Gutierrez! “
That’s your beauty for you, she thought. That’s the type she goes about with. Wouldn’t be surprised if she murdered me and Pedro, burgled the place and made away with that convict of hers.
A feeling of gloating hatred for Gutierrez seized the old woman. Her strength recovered, she jumped up and waddled quickly inside.
“Quick! ” Dolores whispered to her son. “There’s a convict in our garden. He’s calling for Gutierrez.”
Pedro rushed out as though the house were on fire, seized a spade lying by the garden path and ran round the corner.
Standing at the wall and peering into a window was a stranger in a crumpled suit, his hands manacled.
“Damn you! ” Zurita muttered and brought his spade down on the crown of the man’s head.
The man fell as though cut down.
“That’s done for him,” Zurita said in a low voice.
“It has indeed,” Dolores, who had caught up with him, agreed in a tone she would have used if her son had squashed a scorpion.
Zurita looked at his mother.
“Where shall we take him to?”
“The pond,” the old woman indicated. “It’s deep.”
“Hell come to the surface.”
“Well weight him. Hold on a second.”
Dolores ran inside and searched feverishly for a sack to put the dead man in. But she had sent all her sacks to the mill with wheat that morning. So she took a pillow-case and a length of string.
“There’re no sacks,” she told her son. “Here, put some stones in the pillow-case and tie it up to his handcuffs.”
Zurita nodded, heaved the body on his back and dragged it to a small pond in the back of the garden.
“Mind the blood,” Dolores whispered to him, waddling behind, pillow-case and string in hand.
“You wash it away,” Pedro replied, putting the man’s head down, however, so that the blood would spill on the ground.
At the pond Zurita quickly stuffed the pillow-case with stones, tied it securely to the young man’s hands and shoved the body into the water.
“I must change.” Pedro glanced up at the sky. “It’s going to rain. By the mom-ing there won’t be a trace of blood on the grass.”
“What about the pond, won’t the water turn red?” asked Dolores.
“No, not in a running-water pond. Oh, to hell with it! ” growled Zurita and shook his fist in the direction of the house.
“There’s your beauty for you,” the old woman was saying in a whining voice as she followed her son towards the house.
*
Gutierrez had been given a room in the attic. That night she could not go to sleep what with the stuffiness, stinging mosquitoes and the cheerless thoughts that crowded her mind.
The memory of Ichthyander still came between her and her sleep. Her husband she did not love. Her motherin-law she detested, yet here she was sharing their roof with them.
Gutierrez thought she heard Ichthyander’s voice calling her. A noise like muffled voices floated up to her window. She listened but heard nothing. Towards dawn she decided that she was not to fall asleep that night at all. She went out into the garden.
The sun was not up yet. The garden lay in front of her, wrapped in pre-dawn haze. The clouds had been chased away and heavy drops of dew sparkled in the grass and on the trees. In her light gown, barefoot, Gutierrez was walking over the grass. Suddenly she stopped short. In the walk, outside her window, the sand was blood-stained. A blood-stained spade was lying nearby.
A crime had been committed that night. Or was there some other explanation for these blood stains?
Involuntarily Gutierrez followed the track which led her to the pond. Suppose the key to the crime is hidden in the pond, she thought, peering, scared, into the greenish water.
Down there, in that murky water, looking straight at her was Ichthyander’s face. There was a wound near the temple. The face expressed suffering mingled with happiness.
Could she have gone mad? Gutierrez wanted to run away, but she couldn’t. Nor could she tear her eyes
away from Ichthyanders’s face.
Meanwhile Ichthyander’s face was slowly coming up, till, with a soft ripple, it was clear of the water. Ichthyander stretched his manacled hands towards Gutierrez and smiled wanly.
“Gutierrez! ” he said. “My dearest! At last-” but he did not finish. Clutching at her head Gutierrez was crying:
“Be gone! Be gone, unlucky ghost! I know you’re dead. Why should you appear to me?”
“No, no, Gutierrez, I’m not dead,” the ghost hastened to reply, “I didn’t drown. Forgive me… There are things you don’t know about me… Why didn’t I tell you… Oh, don’t go away, listen to me. I’m alive, here, touch my hands…”
He was stretching his hands towards her. She kept staring at him.
“Don’t be afraid, I’m alive… I can live underwater. I’m not like other people. I can live underwater. I didn’t drown that time I jumped into the sea. I did it because it was difficult for me to breathe on land.”
Ichthyander swayed; then went on, as hastily and as disjointedly as before:
“I’ve been looking for you, Gutierrez. Last night your husband struck me on the head when I was standing outside your window and then threw me into the pond. In the water I came to. I managed to get that stone-weighted sack off but I couldn’t”, here Ichthyander showed up the handcuffs, “these…”
Gutierrez was almost convinced now.
“But why are your hands manacled?”
“Ill tell you about it later. Come away with me, Gutierrez. Well hide at my father’s, nobody can find us there… And well be together… Feel my hands, Gutierrez. Olsen told me people call me the ‘sea-devil’ but I’m human. Why
are you afraid of me?”
Covered with silt from head to foot Ichthyander waded out of the pond and
sank wearily onto the grass.
Gutierrez bent over him and took him by the hand.
“My poor boy,” she said. “What a pleasant rendezvous! ” a mocking voice suddenly came to them.
They looked round and saw Zurita standing nearby.
Zurita, like Gutierrez, had not been able to sleep a wink that night. He had come into the garden, attracted by Gutierrez’s cry, and had heard all that had followed. When Pedro realized that the “sea-devil” he had been so long trying to catch was at arm’s length from him he thanked his lucky stars and decided to take Ichthyander to the Jellyfish there and then. But then he had second thoughts.
“I don’t think you’ll be able to carry Gutierrez to Doctor Salvator. She’s my wife, you know. Besides you’re wanted by the police.”
“But I’ve done nothing wrong! ” the young man cried.
“People who’ve done nothing wrong are not issued with nice little bracelets like those. And as you’re now in my hands I feel it’s only my duty to hand you over to the police.”
“Surely you are not going to do that?” Gutierrez asked her husband indignantly.
“My duty points that way,” Pedro said, shrugging his shoulders.
“Nice thing that’d be,” cut in Dolores, who had just appeared on the scene,
“letting loose a convict. And what for? For prying in another man’s garden and
looking for a chance to carry away his wife?”
Gutierrez went across to her husband, took hold of his hands and said gently:<
br />
“Let him go. Please. I’ve done you no wrong…”
Dolores shook her head vigorously, afraid her son would give in.
“Don’t listen to her, Pedro! ” she shouted.
“I can’t resist a woman’s entreaty,” Zurita said urbanely. “Ill do as you wish.”
“Hardly married and already tied to her apron-strings,” the old woman said grumpily.
“Wait a minute, Mother. We’ll file your handcuffs, my young fellow, rig you up in something decent and take you on board the Jellyfish. When we’re in the Rio de la Plata you can jump overboard wherever you please. But I will only let you go on one condition: you must forget Gutierrez. And Gutierrez, 111 take you along, as well. Youll be safer with me.”
“You’re better than I thought you were,” Gutierrez said sincerely. Zurita gave a complacent twirl to his moustache and bowed to his wife. Dolores knew her son well enough to guess that he was planning something
nasty. But, to play his game, she went on grumbling, “Tied to her apron-strings that’s what you are. Well, you deserve all you 11 get.”
FULL SPEED AHEAD!
“Salvator’s coming tomorrow. My fever’s kept me away just when there was a lot for us to talk about,” Cristo was saying to Baltasar in his shop. “Cock your ears, brother, and don’t interrupt me, so’s I won’t forget anything.”
Still weak after the fever Cristo paused, marshalling his thoughts, then continued:
“We’ve done a hell of a lot for Zurita, brother. He’s more brass than both of us but he’s out to get still more. He wants to catch the ‘sea-devil’-” Baltasar made to speak.
“Hold it, brother, else I forget something. Zurita wants the ‘sea-devil’ to slave for him. And d’you know what the ‘sea-devil’ is? A regular treasure. Untold riches. The ‘sea-devil’ can pick pearls from the sea-bottom-any amount of ‘em. But that’s not all. On the sea-bottom there’s plenty of sunken treasure. He can get it for us. I say, ‘us’, not Zurita, and I mean it. D’you know, brother, that Ichthyander’s in love with Gutierrez?”
Baltasar wanted to say something but Cristo didn’t let him.
“Keep quiet and listen, will you. I can’t speak when people interrupt me. Yes, Ichthyander’s in love with Gutierrez. There isn’t much gets past me. When I twigged that I told myself, ‘Not a bad thing that,’ I said. Let him fall in love with her good and proper. Hell make a better husband-and son-in-law—than Zurita. And Gutierrez too loves Ichthyander. I’ve shadowed them, not interfering with Ichthyander in any way. Let them meet as often as they wish, I thought.”
Baltasar sighed but did not try to say anything.
“And that’s not all, brother. Listen further. I’d like to recall to your memory things that happened many, many years ago. About twenty years back it was, you 11 remember, I was accompanying your wife home from a visit to her people. We’d been to the mountains to bury her mother. On the way your wife died, giving birth to a dead child. At that time I didn’t tell you everything. Wanted to spare your feelings. Here’s the whole story. Your wife did die on the way here, that’s true, but the clild was born alive, though very weak. It was in a small Indian village it all happened. And an old woman told me that a great miracle-worker, God Salvator, lived not far away…”
Baltasar became all ears.
“She advised me to carry the child to Salvator, saying he’d cure it. I did as she told. Salvator took the boy—for a boy it was-shook his head and said, ‘It’s very difficult to save him.’ But still he took him in. I waited there till nightfall. When it grew dark a Black came out and told me the child was dead. Then I went away…
“So”, Cristo went on, after a pause, “Salvator told me through the Black that the child was dead. Now I had noticed a birthmark on the newly-bom. Somehow I remembered it, shape and all.”
There was another pause, then Cristo took up his story again.
“Not long ago Ichthyander came home, wounded in the neck. When I was bandaging him, I lifted the collar of his mail and saw a birthmark, exactly like your son’s.”
Opening eyes wide with excitement Baltasar asked:
“You think Ichthyander’s my son?”
“Keep quiet, brother, and listen. Yes, that’s exactly what I do think. Salvator lied to me. Your son did not die, Salvator made a ‘sea-devil’ out
of him.”
“Oh! ” Baltasar cried, beside himself. “How dare he do it! Ill kill him withmy own hands! “
“Keep quiet. Salvator’s stronger’n you. And then I might’ve made a mistake. It’s twenty years. Somebody else might have a birthmark exactly on the same spot. Ichthyander might be your son and again he might not. You must play your hand careful like. You go to Salvator and tell him that Ichthyander’s your son. I’ll be your witness. You will demand your son be returned to you. Failing that you will say you will sue him for maiming children. Thatll give Mm a proper scare. If he’s obstinate you will go to court. If we can’t pull it off in the courts Ichthyander II just marry Gutierrez and that’s that. After all she’s only your adopted daughter…”
Baltasar had jumped up from hisstool and started pacing up and down the shop, all but treading on the crabs and shells on the floor. “My son! My son! Oh, what a misfortune! ” “Why a misfortune?” asked Cristo, surprised.
“I’ve listened to you, now you listen to me. While you were laid up with your fever Gutierrez was married to Pedro Zurita.” The news made Cristo stagger.
“And Ichthyander, my poor son,” Baltasar said, hanging his head, “is in Zurita’s hands.”
“Impossible, “said Cristo.
“Yes. Ichthyander’s on board the Jellyfish. This morning Zurita was here to see me. He laughed and swore at us. He said we’d been cheating him. Just think, he caught Ichthyander all on his own, without any help from us. He won’t pay us anything. But I wouldn’t have taken anything from him anyway. I’m not selling my own son.”
Baltasar, distraught, dashed about the shop. Cristo eyed him disapprovingly. It was a case of all hands to the pump. But Baltasar could sooner ruin things, taking on like that. Himself, Cristo did not believe much in Baltasar’s fatherhood. True he had seen that birthmark on the newly-born. But was that enough to build a whole case on? Seeing a similar birth mark on Ichthyander’s neck he had decided to cash in on it. How could he have known Baltasar would carry on like a madman. And then the news he had learned from Baltasar had given him quite a scare.
“No time for tears now. We’ve got to act. Salvator’s coming tomorrow at dawn. Brace up and listen. You will wait for me at dawn on the breakwater. We’ve got to save Ichthyander. But, mind now, don’t go and tell Salvator you’re Ichthyander’s father. Where’s Zurita bound for?”
“He didn’t say but I think it’s north. He made up his mind long ago to go up to the coast of Panama.” Cristo nodded.
“So remember, you’re to be up and on the breakwater by first light. And stick around there even if you have to wait till nightfall.”
Cristo hurried home. All that night he thought of the meeting with Salvator. There was no way out. He had to face it and have a good story ready. Salvator arrived at dawn. As he was greeting his master, Cristo’s face wore an expression ofdistressed loyalty.
“We’ve had a misfortune,” he said, “I warned Ichthyander not to swim out into the gulf…”
“What’s happened to him?” Salvator asked impatiently.
“He was captured and taken on board a schooner. I-“
Salvator had gripped Cristo’s shoulders and was peering closely into his eyes. Short as it lasted, Cristo could not help changing colour under that searching glance. Then Salvator knitted his brows, muttered something and unclenched his hands.
“You will tell me about it in detail later.”
Then he called a Black, said a few words to him in a language Cristo did not know and again turned to the Indian.
“Follow me! ” Salvator ordered.
Without resting from the journey or e
ven changing his travelling clothes, Salvator strode out of the house and across the garden. Cristo could hardly keep up with him. At the third wall two Blacks caught up with them.
“I watched over Ichthyander day and night, like a dog,” Cristo was saying, panting. “I never left his side…” But Salvator would not listen to him. Standing at the pool he was tapping his foot impatiently as he watched the water gush out through the yawning hatches.
“Follow me,” Salvator ordered again and hurried down the steps that led underground. Cristo and the two Blacks followed the doctor into the darkness. Salvator ran down the steps, taking two at a time, apparently quite at home in the maze of subterranean passages.
On the bottom landing Salvator did not turn on the light as once before but, after a moment’s feeling about with his hand, opened a door to Ms right and strode on along a dark corridor. There were no steps there and, despite complete darkness, Salvator was going very quick now.
I hope to God there are no man-traps here, Cristo was thinking, hurrying after Salvator. They had been going quite a long time when Cristo felt the floor begin to slope down gently. He thought he could hear a faint splash of water. Then their journey was over. Salvator who was well ahead of them had stopped and switched on the light. Cristo found himself in a large cave, standing on a piece of stone flooring set into the big oblong of water that converged with the sloping ceiling at the far end. On the water, at the edge of the flooring Cristo saw a midget submarine. The little party went on board the boat. Salvator switched on the light in the cabin, while one Black was battening down the upper hatch and the other revving the engine. Cristo felt the boat shudder, slowly turn round, submerge and as slowly move forward. After two minutes or so they surfaced. Salvator and Cristo came out on deck. Cristo had never been on board a submarine before and looked round with interest.
Alexander Beliaev Page 12
