Vultures in the Sky

by Todd Downing

  The young man was leaning forward, one hand resting upon the edge of the seat opposite him. The ice of his eyes was clouded by bewildered frustration as he stared at her.

  Behind them a door slammed and Radcott came into the car. He was perspiring profusely but his cheeks bulged with a boyish smile. Across one arm he held draped a large sarape with alternating stripes of brilliant reds and purples and yellows framing a huge purple eagle poised upon a cactus and devouring a writhing brown snake.

  He came to a pause before them and held the sarape out. “Look what I bought out on the platform!” he said proudly.

  Jeanes looked up and seemed to be trying to concentrate his thoughts. His right hand moved over the surface of the seat and came into contact with the fiber bag.

  Miss Talcott was regarding the sarape with an attempted show of interest. She turned her head as Jeanes started to his feet. She looked at him for a moment with a puzzled frown. He was staring fixedly down at the bag and his lips were bloodless. “Pardon me,” he murmured and walked uncertainly down the aisle.

  She stared at his back for an instant, before turning her attention to Radcott again.

  “How much did you pay for it?” she asked, her thoughts elsewhere.

  Rennert walked through the sunlight toward the steps of the Pullman. The platform was deserted now save for two or three men who were regarding the windows of the train with flat black eyes.

  At the foot of the steps stood the woman in jade green. Ed Spahr had joined her and they were examining some pieces of pottery which a smiling Indian woman held in a basket. Spahr was delving excitedly into the basket and holding up jars for the woman’s inspection. She shook her head from time to time with an air of patient boredom and brushed away a fly with a little bunch of yellow wallflowers which she held in her hand. She made some remark to Spahr and turned toward the steps. He thrust the jar which he had been fingering back into the basket. As Rennert came up he turned to him and remarked: “Awfully cheap ugly stuff they have for sale here, isn’t it? Miss Van Syle says that one can pick up much more artistic things in Indo-China.”

  Rennert wondered afterwards exactly what expression had been on his face, for Spahr laughed rather self-consciously and said: “Oh, you haven’t met Miss Van Syle yet, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “Miss Van Syle,” Spahr called eagerly, “I’d like to present another of the passengers in the Pullman.” As she turned her head slightly, “Miss Van Syle, Mr. Rennert.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Rennert?” her voice was low and resonant (with, Rennert couldn’t resist the thought, a slightly affected cooing quality) but her eyes held the same look of languid boredom as she gazed for an instant into his. She turned then and resumed her way to the steps.

  “Miss Van Syle is of the Long Island Van Syles,” Spahr whispered to Rennert as he moved forward with alacrity to assist her.

  Rennert followed them. They turned to the right, in the direction of the diner, while he started down the passage toward the Pullman. Here he met the porter, who was moving forward with his quick short steps, a folded sheet thrown over his arm. Rennert stopped him, his eyes on the sheet.

  “Has the Pullman been cleaned out this morning?” he asked.

  The brown little face moved from side to side in negation. “No, sir. The berths have been made up. That is all.”

  Rennert looked at him thoughtfully. “You closed the window beside the seat in which the dead man sat before the train entered the tunnel, did you not?”

  “Yes, sir,” the black pebbles held no expression whatever.

  “Are you sure that he was alive then?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did he make any motions or say anything to you so that you can be positive of this?”

  “Yes, sir.” A pause. “He moved his feet so that I could reach the window.”

  “You saw this man when he got on the Pullman in San Antonio last night?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what time he retired?”

  The man’s small dry lips seemed to move like those of an automaton. “No, sir.”

  “Did you see him after most of the other passengers had retired—say along about midnight?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Last seat on the right, sir, number twelve.”

  “It is unoccupied, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was he alone?”

  He thought for an instant that there was about to be a shifting of the pebbles. They remained motionless, however, as the toneless reply came: “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you to think carefully now, over the time before the train arrived in Laredo. Did you see anyone near this man or talking to him?”

  The wrinkles on the brown forehead deepened and the clawlike little hands moved about among the folds of the sheet, as if the effort of thinking moved responsive muscles in his body. “I did not see anyone.”

  “You came into the Pullman when the lady got off at Laredo, I suppose?”

  The clanging of a bell and the sibilant hissing of steam echoed into the narrow passage. Wheels turned protestingly. Rennert glanced sideways at the slowing moving platform of Saltillo.

  He turned his head to meet the steady unblinking gaze of the pebbles. An odd light glinted against them now, however, almost but not quite penetrating their opacity.

  Rennert repeated his question.

  The little man shifted his weight from one short leg to the other, tightened his grip upon the sheet and said: “But no lady got off at Laredo, sir.”

  5

  Quantity X (12:20 P.M.)

  Rennert stared at him. “You are sure of that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You were awake, of course, when the train stopped at Laredo?”

  The porter’s head moved quickly up and down. “Yes, sir.”

  Rennert started down the passage past him, stopped and asked: “Was there a lady with the man in berth number four, behind mine, when the train left San Antonio?”

  “No, sir. There were eight passengers at San Antonio, seven lower berths and one upper. All of them are still here, except—” an almost imperceptible pause “one.”

  Rennert nodded abstractedly, reached in his pocket for a coin and handed it to the porter.

  “Thank you, sir,” the man inclined his head, revealed small firm white teeth in a smile, and walked on.

  Rennert continued his way. He was confused and angry. The confusion was that of a person who surveys the surface upon which a sudden unexpected gust of wind has disarranged the pieces of a puzzle which he has so painstakingly fitted together. The anger was at himself. Of a vocation which demands unceasing vigilance and the assumption that every individual, however innocent his exterior may seem, is a potential lawbreaker (sometimes, bitterly, thinking of past experiences with customs evasions, he wondered whether the assumption were not well founded) he found it a necessary relief, nevertheless, to indulge in thoughts about the up-rightness of human nature and to view the pillars of society with an unquizzical eye at such times as he could permit himself normal human relationships. That, he told himself severely, was exactly what he had been doing, without being aware of it, in this case. He had allowed the lodge emblem which hung from King’s solid gold watchchain to carry over into his mind a connotation of solid businessmen’s-luncheon-club dependableness. But what, he demanded of himself, could have been the purpose of the man’s fabrication of this tale of a wife who had listened to a half-understood conversation in the middle of the night?

  He stood in the door of the Pullman and glanced down its length.

  In the second seat upon his right King was bending over, trying to unfasten shriveled limes from two thin sticks tied in the shape of a cross. He was frowning in concentration over the task. Jeanes sat rigid in his seat and stared straight in front of him. At the rear Miss Talcott held in both hands the edge of the sarape whic
h was draped over Radcott’s arm. She was smiling pleasantly and loosening thread after thread with her dexterous fingers. Radcott stood in the aisle and stared down at the sarape. His round face looked redder and graver than usual.

  Rennert started down the aisle.

  “But look at the weaving in it!” Radcott was protesting in a hurt voice. “It must have taken weeks of work to do that.” Miss Talcott was saying with a patient smile: “One glance should have told you that it is factory and not hand made. They always sell tourists worthless things like this. You shouldn’t have bought it, at least not in a railway station. What earthly good is it to you? And you paid too much for it. Thirty pesos!” She let the edge of the blanket fall from her fingers. “You could have gotten it for ten, if you had waited until you found some Indian who was hungry or who wanted to get drunk. That’s the way to get things cheap in Mexico.”

  Rennert stepped past Radcott’s obstructing bulk and sat down in the seat beyond, number twelve on the right side. He had been bound here when he had met the porter in the aisle.

  He leaned forward and began a deliberate and minute examination of the seat opposite.

  He had no particular hope of finding anything there but at least the deceased had sat there the night before, with or without a vis-à-vis. Also, it gave him a routine procedure to go through with while he was deciding where to begin fitting the scattered pieces of the puzzle together again. Shaving, he reflected as he surveyed the blank unresponsive surface of the green cloth, would have done as well or better. There was something about the face-to-face communion with one’s self in the mirror …

  Of course, the most obvious explanation was that King had fabricated this story of a mysterious individual who had been in conversation with the Mexican the night before in order to furnish a convenient quantity x in the equation which would result in case the latter’s death, which had not yet occurred, should be attributed to other than natural causes. In that case was he, Rennert, to read some meaning into the words “earrings and cuffs” and “don’t forget the extra edition?”

  He bent over the floor next. There was always the chance that one of those ubiquitous clues which one read about would present itself obligingly for labeling as Exhibit A. Too bad that footprints and fingerprints were out. The butt of a cigarette might do, if it were of an exotic brand smoked by one—and only one—individual in that car. No, that wouldn’t do. In the smoker the unknown might have lit a cigarette while conversing with his intended victim, but not in the Pullman,

  The floor was kinder than the seat. Or, Rennert wondered as he stared down at the objects which lay upon it, was it?

  Below the seat in which he sat were two kernels of molasses-coated popcorn, a crumpled carton and, next to the wall, a cheap brass stickpin. With exaggerated gravity Rennert moved the kernels of popcorn about with the toe of his shoe, studying them. He contemplated picking them up and consigning them carefully to an envelope for future examination by a chemist. There was always poison to be considered, of course, in anything edible which remained on the scene of a crime. But if Señor Eduardo Torner had eaten popcorn here it must have been the night before and not just previous to his death. And that death had coincided so neatly with the passage of the train through the tunnel that Rennert firmly refused to allow the popcorn a place among lettered exhibits. The stickpin he wasn’t at all sure about. He leaned over and picked it up. It was an exceedingly cheap sort of affair. The head of it was a small white horse of what had evidently been intended to look like pearl. Rennert could not picture anyone wearing such an atrocity. He turned it about in his fingers, wondering whether it deserved the primary place among the letters of the alphabet. Considering the lack of any other claimant for the place …

  “Clues?”

  There was pleasant raillery in the voice. He looked up at Miss Talcott, who was standing in the aisle, regarding him with a smile. Radcott had disappeared.

  Rennert had to laugh. “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t know. I’m afraid I am in the awkward position of not being able to recognize a clue when I see one.” He extended his hand, upon the palm of which rested the stickpin. “What would be your verdict on this?”

  She took the pin and glanced at it. She frowned slightly and her eyes became a bit vague. “If it were found on the scene of the crime now,” she said, “it might mean something. But found back here where no one was sitting.” She looked at him oddly. “Why were you searching the floor back here?”

  “I understand that the man who died this morning was sitting here late last night, before we reached Laredo.”

  “Well?”

  “I thought, Miss Talcott, that perhaps he were talking to someone here.”

  The fixity of her gaze became disconcerting. “A peculiar time to be indulging in conversation,” she said.

  “Exactly, Miss Talcott, a very peculiar time.” He glanced across the aisle. “Your berth is the first one forward, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t suppose you heard the sound of voices back here?”

  She smiled slightly. “No, but that means nothing. I usually sleep very soundly at night.” She gazed down at the pin, as if fascinated by it. Her absent expression did not change as she said quietly: “There’s one explanation, of course, for this.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s the white horse. Do you know what one means in Mexico when he says that someone rides a white horse?”

  Memory stirred in Rennert.

  “It means,” she went on without waiting for his reply, “that the person referred to is going to his death.”

  Rennert nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “I had forgotten.”

  She handed the pin back to him. “That sounds like something out of a thriller, doesn’t it?” Her eyes were searching his face. “I’m surprised that you don’t laugh at me for suggesting it.”

  Rennert pushed the pin into the cloth of the underside of his lapel. “In Mexico,” he said candidly, “one gets accustomed to the fantastic.”

  She had turned to pick up the fiber bag from her seat. At his words she looked at him quickly. “You’ve had experience with Mexico?”

  “A great deal, Miss Talcott.”

  She slipped the handle of the bag over the white starched cuff of her left sleeve. “No wonder you don’t laugh at me then,” she said quietly as she started down the aisle.

  Rennert sat with his head half turned and watched her disappear in the direction of the diner. He moved then to the seat opposite and sat by the lowered blind, staring thoughtfully down the car, deserted now save for Jeanes, whose motionless gray head projected above the rear of his seat.

  Earrings and cuffs. Don’t forget the extra edition. It was nonsensical, he told himself. The whole business verged on nonsense so blatant that it was insane. By no stretch of the imagination could the earrings and cuffs belong to anyone except this quiet Miss Talcott. And if King had intended to implicate her in the affair why hadn’t he said simply that it was a woman’s voice which had been heard? But no, he had been insistent upon the fact that it was a man’s voice and that it had had a “foreign” accent. There was nothing masculine about Miss Talcott’s soft tones and nothing that could be termed foreign-sounding.

  The extra edition. Rennert drew the San Antonio newspaper from his pocket again and carefully went from paragraph to paragraph of it, rereading every item that might by any chance have a bearing upon the business in hand. It seemed to him that the pages were remarkably sterile in reader interest, as if, with the heat, doldrums had settled upon Texas, the Southwest, and the nation. There was a great deal about the drought and governmental plans for aiding the stricken regions. Cattle were dying of thirst and hunger on the West Texas plains. In a syndicated article a well-known scientist advanced a complicated theory to account for the unprecedented heat wave, something about sunspots which appeared over long periods of time. The Governor of Oklahoma had proclaimed a day of prayer for relief from brazen skies. The Hopi Indians o
f New Mexico were holding a snake dance for the same purpose. Even politics, which in Texas usually rise in fervor with the thermometer, seemed to be in a state of temporary lethargy. The sensational Montes kidnapping case, which for so long had been a godsend to news-avid reporters appeared to have been drained dry of material for copy. The nurse of the abducted boy had been released from custody at last, for lack of evidence of her implication.

  On the next to the last page, below the comic strips, a signature over a feature article caught Rennert’s eye. The name was that of Ed Spahr.

  Rennert ran his eyes down the lines.

  As Aztec drums beat again in remote mountain villages of Mexico, what strange rites will be performed unseen by the eyes of white men? the writer queried.

  Does the strange stone altar recently discovered on a mountain peak in Michoacan await some bloody oblation to unforgotten gods?

  Will the approaching eclipse of the sun bring forth from its centuries-old hiding place the obsidian sacrificial knife or its modern equivalent—the machete and the bayonet?

  These are the questions that are being whispered in the cities of Mexico as astronomers adjust their instruments to study the eclipse of the sun, which on May 27 will be total in the arid section of north-central Mexico lying about the Tropic of Cancer and embracing portions of the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Durango, and Sinaloa.

  The white man’s culture is at best but a thin veneer in Mexico and the districts which the eclipse will plunge into total darkness at midday comprise some of the least known parts of the country.

  It was in this region that there appeared a few years ago the Child Fidencio, whose fame as a healer grew so rapidly that the government was forced to send troops to keep in order the frantic throngs that sought to reach the worker of magic cures. And the Child’s string laid upon the sands proved more potent than the guns of the State!