Marchand Woman

by Brian Garfield

  She said, “You can still be a master of the gentlemanly shiv when you want to be,” and icily put her shoulder to him.

  The queue began to move again. Carole placed handbag and overnight case on the moving belt. “Try to keep me posted, will you?”

  “Yes, I’ll try.” He wasn’t quite being evasive; he was just staying low-key in order to counterbalance her. She knew he wasn’t her enemy. Looking back from beyond the checkpoint she caught the gentle worry in his face. He still had a hopeless remnant of feeling for her.

  Howard waved; and she ran to catch her plane.

  Incidents could be remembered but it was hard to recall a passion that was dead. She had loved, or been infatuated with, or had fond affection for, or perhaps merely sought refuge in Howard; but what she remembered most vividly from their marriage was the moment in Alexandria when they had looked at each other and realized they were stuck with each other. It was too depressing; not a word had passed between them but after that they had gone about embittering each other’s lives until there was no possibility of re-warming the soufflé of pastel dreams with which they had fed their initial illusions. The question of blame didn’t come into it: Vindictive-ness had consumed them both. Now it was burnt out and she was grateful for that because she was able to view him as human.

  Nothing remained between them except a distant fondness, as for a cousin who lived two thousand miles away with whom you exchanged Christmas cards and perhaps a biennial phone call. They were still wired tenuously to each other by memories of the dead child. Robert—Robert, she thought, we owed you a better chance than you got. She knew in her intellect that nothing she could do would make up for it. But all the same she was on this plane.

  Crobey collected her in the midst of a chattering mob. He looked a bit surly. Making no offer to carry her bag he led the way outside into a drizzling rain that matted her hair in seconds. Crobey trudged across the parking lot without talking to her at all and she felt as if she were an errant schoolgirl being tugged along by the ear. He folded himself in behind the wheel of a little bullet-shaped car, not opening the passenger door for her, waiting stone-faced with his hand on the ignition until she pushed her case into the back seat and got in. Then Crobey turned the key; the starter meshed brutally; he jerked the lever into drive and the car lurched forward.

  She said, “You’re bilious tonight.”

  “Yeah. I had one of those submarine sandwiches. It keeps surfacing.” Finally he came out with it. “I don’t recall inviting you.”

  “I don’t recall giving you a choice.”

  He drove it onto the expressway. An amazing traffic of suicidal imbeciles zigzagged all around them. Carole composed herself. “Do you think you could be an angel and give me a progress report?”

  “Not much to report.” The wipers batted back and forth. Red tail-lights swam in the windshield. A huge baroque old car fish tailedpast, swerving, cutting in too soon, and Crobey had to stab the brake. She warded off the dashboard with her palm. “I made a little progress,” he conceded.

  She let the silence run until it was clear he wanted prompting. “I’m not just here to feed you lines. What progress?”

  “Somebody seems to be interested in me.” He had his attention on the rear-view mirror.

  “The Rodriguez gang?”

  “Or anybody. My ex-wife’s private detectives, who knows.”

  The expressway ended in a muddy rubble of construction. Crobey maneuvered it through the side streets onto Avenida Ashford. The tall beach-front hotels might have been in Miami Beach. Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet pavements. A fool blocked Crobey’s progress, leaving them stranded at the stoplight. When the light changed Crobey kicked the pedal; the car shot forward half a block and abruptly, without signaling, Crobey turned it into a narrow passage.

  Street lights shone pale along the empty alley; at the far corner a traffic light blinked red, on and off. Crobey pulled in to the curb and extinguished the lights.

  She reached for the door handle but Crobey stayed her. He kept watch on the mirror. After a while he said, “All right,” and switched on the lights and drove on.

  “Were we being followed?”

  “No.”

  He was still driving with half his attention on the rear view. She had been in San Juan before but only as a tourist; he was driving through sections she’d never seen—stucco slums, open-front shops blaring an astonishingly loud cacophony of strident recorded music.

  They emerged onto a narrow blacktop road that two-laned away to the end of what appeared to be a swamp; then it began to climb into the hills. The rain had stopped. She rolled down the window and heard the pneumatic hiss of the tires on the wet asphalt.

  They passed a white paddock fence—horse stables—then ran up along a curling track through a dark tracery of trees. The road had sharp bends and the headlights kept flashing across gnarled tangles of leaves and wood. Sensitive to shadows and compositions, she felt suddenly aware of her position: the dark mysterious hill road, the car in the night, the silence—nothing but the rush of the car—and her companion: half civilized, as coarse-edged as rough hand-hewn woodwork, as secure (she suddenly feared) as a three-legged chair.

  “Where are we going, Crobey?”

  “Well it ain’t the Ritz.”

  “You could have booked me into a hotel—”

  “No,” he said, “I couldn’t.”

  They ran slowly through a village: a little row of shops, an intersection. Everything jerry-built and as shabby as the sets for a nonunion movie; corrugated metal roofs, tattered remains of circus posters, here and there a yellow pool under a naked light. A small dog barked at the car. For a little way it chased them, yapping alongside Carole’s window; then Crobey accelerated and the dog fell behind and they were out in the lonely darkness again.

  “Where are we?”

  “The interior. Up-island.”

  “Specifically.”

  “Does it matter? You wouldn’t find it without a guide.” He was slowing, looking for something—he leaned forward to peer out over the wheel. There was a gap in the trees on the left. He turned the car slowly, easing into the narrow opening. A pair of muddy ruts curled into the trees. Crobey hauled the stick down to low and the transmission whined as the car lurched forward.

  “Crobey, this is absurd.”

  He was concentrating only on the driving; he didn’t reply. His massive corded forearms fought the wheel. A wet leaf pasted itself to the windshield. Branches scraped alongside, flicking moisture in her face; she rolled up the window. The car pitched and bucketed, the rear wheels spinning at times on the slick mud but momentum carried it through each time and finally they emerged—one last bend and they were in the open, grass on the slopes to either side, dark hulks grazing: cattle or horses, she couldn’t tell in the night. Just above the horizon she could see a patch of stars but the sky overhead was dark. She sat rigid with alarm and the uneasy speculation that Crobey night have sold out. Why else would he drive her so secretively into the wilderness? She drew the handbag into her lap—it was heavy enough; perhaps she could club him in the face with it; fling the door open and dive from the car.…

  A shabby little house loomed in the headlights. Crobey said, “We’re here.”

  She braced her feet against the floorboards, pushing herself back stiffly in the seat as if it were a dentist’s chair. Too late to run now. Her eyes went dry and she began to blink rapidly; there was a taste like brass on her tongue.

  He ran the car across the grass, around behind the house. When he switched it off there was abrupt silence broken only by the pinging of heat contractions in the engine. The darkness was almost total. She had trouble drawing breath. Then Crobey opened his door and stepped out. “Come on, then.”

  She let herself out. On rubber knees she lurched a few paces and then waited for him to guide her. He chunked the door shut and took her elbow.

  “Crobey—”

  “Relax. You’re ti
ght as a drumhead.”

  His grip was light; he didn’t squeeze her elbow. She hadn’t the presence to pull away. Crobey took her around the house—she had an impression of clumped shadows, a barren yard, another building over to the right (a barn?), the steamy smell of manure and livestock. A cowbell jingled distantly. There was a heavy weight in the air—the rain hadn’t refreshed it but only matted it down, like her hair which felt pasted on her skull and wet against the back of her neck.

  “Mind the steps.” Just the same she nearly tripped; she felt blind—had she ever known such complete darkness outdoors? She felt tentatively with each foot, scraping the rough surface of the steps. Four of them and they were on the porch. Then Crobey’s fist was thudding—the rattle of a screen door’s frame. Heavy footsteps within. A man’s rough voice: “¿Quien es?”

  “Crobey.”

  And the door opened, throwing light.

  She only saw the man’s silhouette—thickset, massive; and the hard outline of a revolver in his hand.

  Crobey made an impatient noise in his nose and she felt herself propelled through the door. The man with the gun stepped back, lowering the weapon to his side—an exchange of glances with Crobey; the screen door slapped shut and Crobey leaned back against the solid door to close it.

  Crobey said, “Santana—Miss Marchand.”

  The other man smiled a bit and dipped his head to her. He put the pistol away in a pocket of his baggy pants. She heard him mutter something—“con mucho gusto”—and then Crobey walked past to drop her case on a rickety old parson’s table.

  The room hardly registered on her awareness; it was a basic enclosure—rustic, beaten up, more than lived-in. The air smelled of garlic and sweat. Santana in the light was squat, shorter than she’d thought at first—no neck; jowls; dark unruly hair; a swarthy face. His little eyes kept watching her and she wondered if she was going to scream.

  Santana said something in Spanish. Crobey said, “Talk English now.”

  Santana shrugged and gave an apologetic smile. With a thick accent—annyWHAN for anyone, jew for you—he said, “Did anyone follow you?”

  “No. I guess they weren’t looking for me at the airport. Well they wouldn’t care if I left—it’s my staying here that burns them.”

  Carole drew a ragged shuddering breath. Crobey said to her, “If you want to wash up there’s a pump on the kitchen sink. The privy’s just outside the back door.”

  “Talk to me,” she said. “Am I your prisoner here?”

  “What?”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Santana? He used to be my ground-crew mechanic.”

  Santana beamed at her. “I used to keep Crobey’s planes flying.” She barely understood him. “Then my brother, he died and I inherited this place.”

  “I see.” She looked at Crobey. “And what do you and your old buddy here have in mind for me?”

  “Maybe you’d rather sleep out in the rain?”

  “It didn’t occur to you they have hotels in Puerto Rico?”

  Crobey glanced at Santana, who only grinned infuriatingly; Crobey’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling, seeking inspiration from the Almighty.

  “Crobey, tell me what’s going on.”

  “We’re staying out of sight—I’d have thought that was obvious. It won’t kill you to spend the night here. Tomorrow we’ll put you back on a plane home.” He picked up her case and walked out of the room. She counted four doors: the front one through which they’d entered, one that led into a hallway through which she could see part of a rudimentary kitchen, two others. Crobey went through one of these and she glimpsed a cot before he blocked the view with his body. “This’ll be your room for tonight. I’ll bunk down on the couch there. Now sit down.”

  With his gravelly manner Crobey made the most innocuous command sound like a ferocious threat. She backed up to the window and hiked her haunch onto the sill defiantly. She was still trembling slightly.

  On his way to the couch Crobey’s limp seemed more pronounced; maybe it was the rain. He sat down, gave her a hostile grin and picked up the drink Santana had left on the table. Crobey said, “I’ve been making waves since I got here. Apparently I splashed the wrong people. I was at the Sheraton like any other tourist until yesterday. Then I went down to breakfast and a cop pulled up a chair at my table. Very polite, very diffident and the personality of a closed door. No threats, but a visit from those folks can be a threat in itself. He asked questions and I told lies, the kind where I know he knows I’m lying—he wanted to know what I was doing in Puerto Rico and I told him I was working for a movie director, which was true, and that I was down here scouting locations for a movie about the Bay of Pigs, which was not true. He wanted to know why I was going around asking peculiar questions and what gave me the idea I could pester citizens without an investigator’s license. The hint was that there are people here who can make their wishes known in official circles and that it wouldn’t take too long for the order to come down, and when it did I’d probably be collected by the security police and escorted to jail or the airport or something. We’re very sorry but you understand, señor, an irregularity in your papers. It’s funny in a way, if that kind of thing amuses you—I feel like I’m running out of places to hang my hat. Nowadays it seems you can tour all the friendly countries with an overnight bag.”

  She had grown impatient with him. “You had a visit from a policeman and he didn’t actually threaten you but you read between the lines and as a result you seem to have spent the past twenty-four hours changing into dry pants, and now you run me through a wringer of mystery and intrigue and when I ask you what it’s all about, all you do is stick your jaw out at me and do an impression of Charles Bickford playing a warden who’s glaring at the convicts. Let me tell you, Crobey, the acting stops right now.”

  She clapped her lips shut and glared.

  “Let me remind you,” he said quietly, “that I’m not your lackey. For a thousand a week I’m not going to die in the service of the memory of a dead kid I never met. If the precautions seem excessive you’ll just have to humor me. Now I’m not entirely as Mongoloid as I look and I do understand a couple of things—I understand that you have this habit, when you get rattled you just tend to keep talking until you think of something to say, and I understand that flip snide insults are to you what fodder is to cannons and I don’t expect to break all your unpleasant habits for you overnight but I want you to keep a curb on your tongue because otherwise things could get a little dicey around here. There are people I take insults from but you don’t know me well enough to be one of them. You’re completely out of your element here and you’re scared—you’re a city kid out in the wild jungle and every last thing is going to cause fear and trembling until you get used to it. Mostly right now I expect you’re scared of me. I don’t have a lot of polish, I haven’t got any cocktail party chitchat, I’m not the kind of domesticated house-pet you can put in his place with wise-ass remarks.”

  His insight startled her—she was, above all, afraid of him. There hung about him a kind of menace; the type of quality that might emanate from a dozing predator. It wasn’t just her private reaction; she saw it as well in the way Santana watched Crobey. And Santana was his friend.

  Fear was something she wasn’t used to. She fought it and this brought out the anger in her. Knowing it was foolish she blurted, “I’d be more impressed with all that if I thought you were doing an acceptable job of chasing the mice. I didn’t ask you to lay your life on the line for a thousand a week but I did ask you to do a job. I don’t see much sign you’ve been doing it. For instance maybe you’d better run that Glenn Anders business past me one more time. Maybe you can explain who authorized you to make cozy deals with the CIA.”

  “Apparently I was under a misapprehension—I understood I had a free hand.”

  “Did you honestly think I wanted you to share everything with the CIA?”

  “The CIA has facilities that I don’t have. It’s my in
tention to use them to provoke Rodriguez. When he learns they’re sniffing around his backtrail he’ll get nervous and a nervous man makes mistakes. It may provoke him into showing himself and when that happens I plan to be there.”

  “Even though you’ve given the CIA the inside track.” She snorted theatrically.

  “It’s no great trick to get there ahead of those jokers,” Crobey said mildly. “They move like slugs. Anders is all right by himself but he’s lugging all the dead weight of the bureaucracy behind him.” Then his voice turned hard. “Did you listen to anything I said before?”

  “I heard you talking.”

  “Right. Look. I can’t do a job for you if I’m chained up in a dungeon or thrown out of Puerto Rico. The only way I can make any progress is to go to ground. If they can’t find me they can’t deport me, you dig? That’s why we’re out here instead of drinking banana daiquiris at Dorado Beach. I don’t know if you were tagged at the airport but we have to assume you were. By coming here you’ve exposed yourself and that makes my job harder. If they can reach you it’s the same thing as reaching me.” Then Crobey showed anxiety: “You’re dealing with terrorists—people who kill people. If Rodriguez gets the idea you’re putting him in jeopardy—” and he shrugged without finishing it. Then: “Maybe it’s time you put paid to this thing. Go home to the world you know, don’t try to mess about with things you can’t handle—you’re a guppy trying to swim through a school of piranha. If they’re hungry they’ll have you for breakfast and they won’t even belch afterwards.”

  “Have they got you scared, Crobey? Is that it? Do you want me to call it off because that way you won’t have to think of yourself as a coward?”

  “Believe that if it makes you feel better.”

  “My son isn’t any less dead now than he was when I hired you.”

  “When we get too close to Rodriguez he’ll do something about it. You understand that?”