East of Suez

by Howard Engel

  “No matter. I’ll send Father Graham around. You can talk about old movies on your way over here.”

  “Thank you, Father, but I don’t think the cops are baying at my door yet. Apart from our little circle last night—was it last night?—I haven’t broken my cover all over town. I’ve got a little time here, I think.”

  “Well, you know best, I suppose. I never took you for a tourist, dear boy. Not for a minute. Most people plan ahead when they come here, they wear their preparations for everybody to see. You came with no holiday kit, nothing bought for the trip.”

  “You should change places with me. You’re better than Father Brown.”

  “I’m not an admirer of Gilbert Keith Chesterton; the clues orchestrate the plot, instead of the other way round. He reminds me of Hemingway on a bad day.”

  “Yes, of course you’d know that. But I didn’t tell Beverley Taylor about your alter ego, Jaime Garcia Ruiz. She’s trying to track you down. At the moment, she thinks it’s Billy Savitt.”

  “She’s the least of my worries. I’m glad you know. But it’s our secret. And you have worries yourself, dear boy, far more serious than mine.”

  “Father, I want to thank you for your offer, but I can’t take you up on it just yet. Some things are getting clearer. My gaffe the other night started an avalanche, but without it, I might have been here till Christmas.”

  “Benny, there are people here who want to see you dead. I can’t put it more plainly than that.”

  “Sorry, Father, I wish I could lie low. After the fiasco at dinner the other night, my useful days here are numbered.”

  “Your days are numbered, whether they are useful or not. But I won’t argue with you, dear boy. You think you know best. Maybe that’s so. But being wrong won’t stop you. You’re like a bit with the horse in his teeth, dear boy. In such a case, the horseman’s only along for the ride. Good luck to you and God bless.”

  “Thanks again, Father. I may need that blessing.”

  The line sounded very dead after O’Mahannay had hung up. After listening to hear whether there would be a second click on the line, I hung up and returned to my makeshift feast. Before I had finished mopping up the rest of the crumbs, the phone rang. I was told that a Mr Fisher was downstairs. Discovering that I was already dressed, I washed my face and hurried down to the lobby.

  It was marginally cooler in the little room with its writing desk and assorted stuffed chairs and sofas, along with enough potted ferns to stock a funeral home.

  “What’s happening?” Clay looked like he hadn’t been to bed.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “You forget, man, I’m like Dracula. I told you that already.”

  “Then you should be in your tomb now. Fiona says that her former roommate hasn’t called.”

  “Yeah. Figures. But that don’t mean she’s dead. She may be hiding out.”

  “And she may have been detained by the police. By now they’re interested in who killed Ranken.” I thought about that for a minute, then continued out loud. “If she was there when they killed Ranken, why didn’t they off her at the same time?” Clay shook his head. “Maybe she knows something they want to know.”

  “Could be.”

  “Hell, this is a bad place to try to keep a secret in, especially when the heavy dudes want to know real bad. The torturers of the world cut their teeth in this neighborhood, Ben.”

  “Torture Beverley? Would they? I mean, torture a foreign woman?”

  “You promoting sexism, Ben? Some dudes would cut up Miss America for a dime. Vive l’égalité! You can afford to have ethics when the kids have had the braces off their teeth and have graduated from college.”

  “Are you going to go into politics next? Let’s try to unravel one problem at a time. Cooperman, think! Simple things first. Are you playing tonight?”

  “Yeah. Same gig you walked through. What’s on your mind?”

  “I was thinking of a drive out of the heat and into the mountains.”

  “You want the Morgan?”

  “I’d love to drive your Morgan, but I can’t. I don’t have any papers, neither local nor foreign. I don’t want to take a chance. It can wait.”

  “You want to go now, I can drive you. So long’s I’m back for the first set. You dig?”

  “I’ve already imposed on you enough.”

  “Please, Ma’rs Benny, put down that whip! Where you wanna go?”

  “There’s a house back of town, up in the hills.”

  “Hell of a time to be getting into real estate.”

  “I’ll fill you in on the way. Maybe we should get something to eat first. We can talk while we’re eating.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE ROAD OUT OF TOWN was dusty and crowded with all colors and sizes of people: single people laden with bags stuffed with produce, family groups carrying ballooning bundles or hefting an ancient stove between them. Dogs ran barking through the throng without getting more than a kick or two for their trouble. Motorbikes and scooters hooted their way into the crowd no less heavily laden than the backs of the pedestrians. They pushed their way along streets that ran steadily uphill, carving a path between battered tenements that lined the streets. Women on balconies, infants strapped to their backs, watched our progress as they stretched bed sheets out to dry.

  We made slow progress inside this mob, which grudgingly parted for us like a Red Sea made of molasses. In the small car, we presented an easy target. It wouldn’t have taken much organized effort to push the little Morgan off the road. I was glad that Clay had a light touch with the horn. A sweating young girl, her earthly goods attached to a tump-line, jumped on the running board on my side of the car and we continued up the hill with the white teeth of her neighbors grinning at her audacity. She was healthy and lovely with spirit enough for ten. She clung to the side of the car for a kilometer up the slope and then jumped down to the road again, sending us a mischievous grin.

  I had filled Clay in on the reason for this trip into the hills. While he made a telephone call we gassed up the Morgan. He didn’t have any immediate comment, but I could see that he had a bellyful of questions. When we had outpaced the crowd of pedestrians and most of the wheeled motor traffic, I asked him what was bothering him.

  “Benny, you know I’m your man on this thing, but damn it all to hell, what do you think you’re goin’ to find up there? You don’ know that girl’s up there, do you?”

  “I don’t know anything for sure, Clay. And I appreciate your coming to give me moral support.”

  “Cut out the horseshit, man. You sound like a lodge meetin’ I walked out of.”

  “All I meant was, I’m glad you’re around.”

  “Yeah, and this ol’ bus might blow a gasket on these hills. This is a gentleman’s car, Benny. It’s not made for rock-climbing.”

  “They were a great little car in their day, weren’t they?”

  “You know how far we are from spare parts, man? We may have to start walkin’ round the next bend in the road.”

  As we climbed higher and higher we had the road almost to ourselves. Soon we passed the occasional car, a farm cart or two—one pulled by a bullock, right out of Kipling—and a few skinny men and women with their earthly possessions in jute bags slung about them. Now there were few buildings facing the road. What places there were were set well back from the road and looked tidier than the sort of thing we’d seen lower down the hill. If there is such a thing as architecture for the high country, this was beginning to be spelled out for us: bigger windows, more screened-in areas, less of that battered and handled look.

  It seemed to become cooler with every kilometer. The built-up areas began to give way to copses and brush, at first plastered with litter and old pieces of clotted cardboard. Clay took a drink of water from a canteen he’d brought and passed it to me. To an observer, we might have looked like we knew what we were doing. But I knew that I hadn’t a clue. And what was a clue anyway? Something missing from its pla
ce, something there that shouldn’t be, something out of scale for the owner of the place? All of the above, but it was more than that. It was the place you forgot to look: an unopened drawer.

  It was an unopened drawer, that’s all. When you search a room, it’s no good just opening some of the drawers. You have to go through all of them. It’s what tries to make what I do into something like a science. It will never make it all the way, but there’s only method between the ideal of order and complete chaos. I know that my methods have always been hit and miss, but I have always tried to be methodical when I could. More honored in the breach, maybe, as my neighbor Frank Bushmill is always saying.

  “You think this might be the place?” Clay was looking at a small beat-up-looking place made out of new wood. It still had the yellow look of raw timber.

  “I don’t think so. If I’m wrong, we can come back. Place in the photo I saw was more like a ski chalet: blond wood and an over-hanging top floor. The cuckoo-clock look. Didn’t I say that?”

  “Like this one?” We were rounding a bend, mostly clear of trees, giving a spectacular look straight down into the blue Pacific, or whatever ocean it was.

  “Yeah, this is the place. The fence is right.”

  “You want I should drive right in or what?” He was already making for a flat bit of land, like an abandoned start of a curve, sheltered by deodars or whatever they call the trees at this altitude. We climbed out and stretched our legs. Below us, we couldn’t see land, and the water stretched out, blue for the most part, but striped with bars of lighter or darker shades which probably indicated the winds or currents out there.

  There was no car to be seen near the house. No puff of smoke hinted at occupancy. Both of us circled round the front and then had a quick look at the back. For a moment, it reminded me of a cottage in Muskoka. Pieces of an old blue tricycle were stuffed into a box of firewood. Maybe it speaks to my local ignorance, but it seemed to supply a touch of North America to the Orient. This had to be Vicky and Jake’s place in the country. Even though it looked more like an Indian hill station in the movies, it gave me a sudden welcome blast of nostalgia.

  I found the key to the back door in a pickle jar in a box of old magazines and yellowed newspapers under the back steps. The house didn’t seem to be protected with obvious security arrangements. Screens over the lower windows were in need of replacement; they had seen too much weather and were feathering away into red oxide, held together, occasionally, by spider webs.

  Inside were more signs of a North American presence. A Globe and Mail, a Toronto Star, and a New York Times assured me that we were close. A clipping from the Grantham Beacon brought me home. On a white space, where an ad had left room for it, someone had scribbled the following:

  G T W Y I H I S O T O R A O T E H T V R O H A E A A W T K D D N W R Y B U M W A E E Y U E R

  —J

  A message in code! Like the other one; it had the same look about it. That’s what this case was lacking. I rolled my eyes in spite of myself and stuffed the paper into my pocket. I knew that I could quickly unravel it just as soon as I had about eight weeks with nothing else on my mind. Maybe the earlier message would help decode the second. The first message was a child’s bit of fun; this looked less so.

  A search of the place revealed little of value. It was the sort of place that provided slightly worn versions of whatever the family had back in Takot. They could take off for the hills without ever remembering to pack a toothbrush: the perfect get-away retreat.

  Cupboards and drawers revealed more of what I’ve just said: a family of four had been happy here. On my second time round the place, I began looking for breaks in the pattern, things that clashed with this first assessment. The first of these I found in the bathroom. The sink was littered with rusting razor blades. Someone, a man, obviously, had hacked away at his face here, without bothering to turn on the water. (Outside, I had seen that water came from a cistern and hot water was heated in a tank in the kitchen. The tank and cistern were empty.)

  Now I began to notice that the floor was scattered with date pits … they were everywhere, discarded on the floor, on tabletops, and in bowls and saucers. These signs did not belong to the picture of the happy family group with its crokinole board and abandoned craft projects. The cottage had seen recent use by a single person who did not know how to turn on the electric generator or did not wish to.

  Clay came from outside. “There’s a Lambretta under a phony woodpile out back. It’s old but there’s a near-full tank of fuel in its belly. There’s drums of fuel out back too.”

  “Our boy gets around!”

  “Wouldn’t mind havin’ a place like this outside St Joseph or Biloxi.” Clay was admiring the children’s clippings on a bulletin board: drawings and cut-outs.

  “Have you ever been to St Joseph or Biloxi?”

  “Of course I’ve— What’s up your nose, Ben?”

  “I don’t mind your playing any character you like, Clay. A friend’s a friend. But I’d put your home south of Biloxi, south of Tampa, south of Puerto Rico. Around Trinidad.”

  “You put me there?” His laugh was a high descending scale. “Would you believe Tobago? Charlotteville, Tobago.”

  “Your American’s the best I’ve heard. It took me a while.”

  “It’s hard to get clear of the toffee-nosed voice of my schoolmasters, my teachers, in my ear, man. I’m burying a lot of history, Ben. Let’s leave it alone for a while. One long winter’s night I’ll tell you all you want to know. Okay?”

  “Okay. But at least give me a number where I can get hold of you.” We exchanged numbers like Wall Street brokers, and nodded as we put our books away in our pockets. Given the setting, it was bizarre.

  “What you make of this?” Clay asked me. “Does it look like they expected to come back here?”

  “Clean underwear in the drawers, toothpaste in the bathroom. What do you think?”

  “What about all the date pits?”

  “I think that Jake was hiding out here after Victoria left.”

  “He’s the dude you don’t know whether he’s dead or alive?”

  “Yeah. I know Vicky’s alive, because I’ve seen her. But, as far as Jake goes, he could be alive or dead. Anyway, the more drawers I go through, the better I’m getting to know him. And he’s beginning to interest me.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s the reason I came to this bog,” I said.

  “You got moss for brains.”

  “Hell, I suppose he could be tucked away inside the Central Prison.”

  “That’s as good as being dead from what I hear.”

  Clay and I shared half of a shawarma-like sandwich we’d picked up on the way. After a third look around, we locked the door behind us and replaced the key in its hiding place. I thought of the kids as I caught a last glimpse of the bike. They’d be needing newer, bigger bikes when they came up here again. If they ever did.

  The ride back was passed mostly in silence as the heat of the coast began to overwhelm us by increments. We bumped along the downhill leg of the journey. Whenever the Morgan hit a particularly big bump, Clay shot me a look to see whether I was blaming him. Or maybe the look was on behalf of the damage this trip was inflicting on his ancient heap. I grew drowsy as I watched the way the little car responded to the smallest touch of the wheel. The car was fragile, but it hugged the road like a truss. In fact the topography was transferred to my backside through the medium of the bucket seat. I reviewed the whole of the last few days as we came down to tidewater. Clay let me off at my hotel and went on to wherever he was living. I think I knew, but, for the moment at least, I had forgotten. Before I closed the door to the lobby, he called over to me from the car: “Ben! You might try to find some clothes that don’t attract so much attention in daylight.” I looked down at my rumpled, creased dinner jacket.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I CALLED FIONA first thing, but again she’d heard nothing. “You’ve got the wrong girl if you think anyb
ody tells me anything. I have no radio or TV and live with my head under water most of the time.” She wanted to know what I had been up to all day, but I put her off with a tale of exotic meals and tourism. She didn’t close-question me, but let me escape with my unconvincing lie.

  When the phone rang as soon as I’d hung up, I had a sudden fright. It came too quickly after the preceding call. And no one was on the line. I know my reaction was irrational, just a feeling behind my knees that experience had taught me to trust. A look out my window showed me a small cluster of people staring at the front of the building. What could be of interest? That it might be me scared the hell out of me. I turned my white shirt back-to-front, put on my light jacket, checked the mirror to see if I could pass for a vacationing clergyman, and took the stairs to the lobby. That’s when I saw the first of the policemen. Were they Tom-toms, or cops of another flavor? I dived into the library, or whatever they called it, off the lobby. Three elderly women, one with blue hair, were writing letters as though time would never end. I sat down in a big chair and pretended to be reading a newspaper written in German. The pages of the Frankfurter Zeitung were big enough to mask my face from the two cops who came to check out the library. Meanwhile other policemen came and went up and down the elevator. I tried to think what was in my room that might interest them. Thank God I’d left the diamonds where they were. The key, along with my spare change, might not attract too much attention.

  When I had convinced myself that mere exposure to the German language did not automatically turn me into a German scholar, I dug in my pocket for the two code messages I’d collected in my travels, examining the longer one again behind my newspaper. At first, the message was as impenetrable as the newspaper. “Bum” was a good old English word, but none of the other groups of letters made sense. The signature “J” was almost certainly Jake’s. One of the children could have written the shorter note. Jake was using a code he and Vicky had picked up from their kids.

  The message must have been intended for Vicky. I sat and stewed about the code for about twenty minutes, working out which letters occurred most often. There were five “e”s, “a”s, and “t”s. Only two “i”s. This wasn’t a code where “a” stands for “c” and “b” stands for “d.” Otherwise there would be more “x”s and “z”s than normally occur in English. So it wasn’t a substitution code. By the time I’d finished this preliminary study, I was sure that the language used was English and that the words consisted of the scrambled letters of undisguised English words. I could call Vicky at her mother’s house to ask her what the message said. It was an end run, a bit of a cheat. Of course, I was guessing that the message was important. Wasn’t there an old novel in which something that was taken for a message in code turned out to be a laundry list? I’d have to put that to one of the literary types when I got home.