The Second Longest Night

by Stephen Marlowe

  I awoke to the whining of mosquitoes. Dawn was pink in the eastern sky and red on the water of the river. I slapped at a mosquito and my hand came away with a little smear of blood on it. There was a hungover taste in my mouth. I worked my way through the growth of roots down to the river and drank.

  In Washington, Del Rey had killed Alex Lubrano as a warning to me. I had not taken the warning. I had come down to Venezuela. I was snooping. Del Rey's man had tried to kill me. Because Del Rey was a Communist? But he had to assume Alex Lubrano had already told me that. Because I was going to Lake Maracaibo with Lydia Homerson? Senator Hartsell had been very definite on that point. I was not to investigate his oil interests down here. He wanted me to investigate Deirdre's death but had never thought the trail would lead me down to Venezuela. When it did, he told me to lay off. Maybe Lydia knew part of . the answer. Maybe it was waiting for me in Lake Maracaibo. Del Rey had done his best, but it looked as if I would get to Maracaibo anyway.

  I followed the river upstream. Tropical birds with improbable faces scolded me from the lower branches. They seemed to have a relay system: everywhere I went, they knew I was coming and were ready with their screeching.

  At the point where the jungle thinned to clumps of moriche palms on the edge of Del Rey's pink beach,' I waited. The camp had stirred late yesterday, but they were up early today. They were all down on the beach— Del Rey, Jaime, a handful of Indians, Lydia, the Polish expatriate with the alto voice, and the other guests.

  Del Rey was saying, “I can't understand it. Why should he go for a swim in the middle of the night?”

  “He could have taken a walk,” Lydia suggested.

  Del Rey shrugged and pointed to my loafers and socks on the beach. Jaime must have taken them down there after he returned from our little boat ride. “That does not look as if he took a walk,” Del Rey said. “I hope he is a good swimmer, Senora Homerson.”

  Lydia shouted my name. The Polish alto took it up and her voice was much louder. They walked up and down the beach yelling for Chester Drum. I began to feel like Tom Sawyer must have felt at his own funeral. I waited there among the moriches until they sounded hoarse.

  “Take the boat out, Jaime,” Del Rey said grimly. “If we find it at all, we will find his body downstream.”

  “His body?” Lydia gasped.

  Jaime shoved the rowboat off into the current and rowed downstream with long, easy strokes. It was something to remember. Del Rey had given, his command in English and Jaime had obeyed it promptly. Yesterday Lydia and I had thought Jaime had no English. I watched the progress of the small rowboat. If Jaime had English, maybe there was something we could talk about, provided I got him alone and scared enough. I turned back into the jungle and walked downstream swiftly for about half a mile. Jaime was a couple of hundred yards upriver, rowing smoothly, steadily. He would row far enough and remain away long enough to make it look good.

  When Jaime was quite close I picked up a rock and heaved it. Twenty yards upstream, it hit the water with a big splash. Jaime looked in that direction but could see nothing more than ripples. When he settled down to his rowing again, I threw another rock. He was close now, almost abreast of me, but facing in the wrong direction. The splash brought him to his feet now. The boat rocked.

  I waded out quickly. I grabbed the prow of the row-boat as Jaime began to turn around, still on his feet. He went over the side awkwardly and hit with a great splash and much flapping of arms and legs. I clambered into the boat while he was still splashing around.

  I lifted one of the tholepins from its hole and brandished the oar. When Jaime's hands gripped the side of the boat, I let him have the oar across his broad bare back. “Cabron!” he screamed. “Hijo de perra!” He began to flounder away from the boat.

  I raised the oar overhead with both hands and slammed it down again. The edge of the heavy paddle struck Jamie's shoulder with a dull sound. He shouted and flopped over on his back in the water. I wondered if they had been able to hear him back at the camp.

  He drifted for a while. Then I brought the flat tip of the oarblade down on his stomach and pushed. He clawed at it feebly with his left hand. His right arm hung limp in the water. I thought his shoulder was broken. I pushed the oar and Jamie went underwater, making a terrible face.

  I released the pressure. He bobbed to the surface. “Can you understand me?” I said. He didn't answer. He was choking on water. I nudged him underwater with the oar.

  Something in his right arm was 'broken, all right. He never even moved it. When I let him up a second time he wasn't calling me names. His eyes were beseeching.

  “Hold the side,” I said. He managed it with his left hand while I paddled toward the riverbank with one oar. I dragged him ashore. He lay on his back, exhausted. His legs drummed the ground feebly, and his face twitched.

  “So far,” I said, “we're even for last night. I'm going to take the lead now, Jaime. If you still make believe you can't understand me, I'm going to kill you.”

  “Cabron!” he said once more.

  I raised the heavy oar overhead and brought it down as hard as I could in the mud a few inches from his face. It left an imprint half a foot deep. It made a sucking sound as I lifted it clear. “It's too heavy to aim very well,” I said. And it was.

  Jaime looked at me. Fear chased hate from his eyes. I raised the oar again. “What you want?” he growled.

  I slammed the blade down again and rested on the shaft. “Why did Del Rey want you to kill me?” I said.

  He shrugged his left shoulder. His right shoulder was dead. “I dun . . . no,” he said.

  I raised the oar.

  “I dun . . . no!” he screamed.

  “You do anything Del Rey tells you?”

  “Si.”

  “Even murder, without knowing why?”

  “Si . . . si.”

  I believed him. I got the oar overhead again and said, “If we changed places, you'd kill me. Wouldn't you?”

  He didn't know how to answer that one. I might hit him with the oar if he lied.. I might hit him with the oar if he told the truth. I brought the oar down slowly. He had been looking death right in the face and knew it. I lit a cigarette. It was still wet from my swim in the river last night and it drew poorly. Jaime's face twisted with pain. I crouched near him to give him the cigarette.

  And the bastard pulled a knife on me.

  He swung it in a short blurring arc before I could spring away from him. The blade sliced across my forearm, bringing blood. Jamie hacked with it again, but this time he hacked air. I got the oar over my head and there flashed through my mind the memory, unexpectedly vivid, of a party in Georgetown. The hostess had discovered a large black roach in the kitchen and went chasing it around the house, stamping her feet after it with a frenzied lack of co-ordination. When she finally got it, squashed to a wet black pulp, she was almost hysterical. Here on the bank of Del Rey's nameless river in Venezuela, I suddenly knew how she felt. I slammed the oar down but it was too heavy for accuracy and all it did was break Jaime's other shoulder.

  Then I walked toward camp without looking back at him.

  Chapter Ten

  THEY ALL CROWDED around me. For an instant Del Rey looked astonished, but if you were not studying his face at the time you would have missed it entirely.

  “There,” said die Polish expatriate in very good English, “the American girl was right. He was off taking a walk somewhere.”

  Lydia didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Del Rey must have painted a bleak picture for her. He probably already had them dredging the river or firing artillery pieces over it or whatever they did in Venezuela. “You're here,” Lydia said. “You're here!”

  Del Rey offered me a cigarette. “Poison?” I said. He laughed. I didn't. But what the hell, it was his country. I had absolutely nothing on him unless Jaime would tell his story to the police. I took the cigarette and Del Rey lit it for me.

  Lydia said, “What happened to your arm?” Del Ra
y sent one of his Indians scampering off for the first-aid kit. The iodine, which Lydia applied liberally, hurt more than the knife wound. After she bandaged my arm and the blood seeped through, she said, “I think it needs stitches.”

  I said it would be all right and told Del Rey, “Incidentally, you'll find your man Jaime about half a mile downstream. He had some kind of an accident, I think.”

  “A serious accident?” Del Rey's face was all concern.

  “Yeah. Some broken bones.”

  Del Rey spoke in Spanish to a few of his Indians, who disappeared among the moriches. Lydia looked at me strangely. You have a lot to tell me, the look said.

  “It seems we won't be able to go to Maracaibo,” Del Rey said. “Since Jaime can't fly us there.”

  “But you told me you have a pilot's license,” the Polish expatriate reminded him.

  “Yes. Indeed, yes. I am confused. I am thinking of poor Jaime. He has been with me so long. As soon as they find Jaime, we'll leave for Maracaibo. We can drop Jaime off in Ciudad Bolivar for treatment if he is in as bad a way as you claim, Mr. Drum.”

  They were all waiting for me to say something, so I did. “How about breakfast?” I said. . . .

  An hour later, Del Rey's Indians brought in Jaime. They carried him as gently as they could but he was unconscious, probably from pain, by the time they reached camp. I wondered if Jaime had told them anything before he blacked out. They didn't look at me.

  While the Indians were loading baggage into the DC-3 and Del Rey was turning over his engines and everyone else was walking among the moriches for a final look at Del Rey's jungle paradise, Lydia led me down to the river and said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well, don't just stand there. What happened last night and this morning?”

  “Look. You're down here on vacation. Right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Are you or aren't you?”

  “Yes.:'

  “I'm not; I'm working. I'm not even working for pay and the work stinks. You wouldn't want to hear about it.”

  “Unless it has something to do with my sister. Did Father ask you to find out how she died?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But that's all over. I'm not working for the Senator now.”

  “He doesn't think it was suicide?”

  “He doesn't think so. He said he thought some other people he knew might be capable of suicide. But not Deirdre.”

  “Like Blairy?”

  “Like Blairy. Why don't you just forget about it, Lydia? I couldn't find out what your father wanted to know.”

  “But you came down here.”

  “That's something else. I can't talk about it. To tell you the truth, I wish I could stop Chinking about it.”

  “Why was Paco so sure you were dead?”

  “You,” I said, “are a very observant young lady.”

  “Why was he, Chet?”

  “If I answer that one question, will you promise not to ask any more?”

  “I promise.”

  “Because your friend Paco thought that Jaime killed me last night.”

  “But Chet, he ... you . . .”

  I tried to smile at her. I was suddenly very tired. “You promised,” I said.

  Del Rey waved at everybody from the high control cabin of the DC-3. He shouted something, but it was lost in the revving of the engines. A cot was brought into the plane for Jaime. The Indians carried him aboard as Lydia and I walked up to the landing strip. At the last moment the Polish expatriate went rushing down the river bank with her movie camera. She swung it in a wide circle and came bouncing back up the pink beach. She held the camera aloft triumphantly as if Sam Goldwyn or someone like that would be interested in what she had inside.

  She was the last one to enter the plane. I hauled up the flimsy wooden ladder which took the place of flight stairs. Del Rey's Indians were backing away, waving. We took off into the wind.

  I watched the river fade away behind us, a slender silver thread winding its way through the green jungle from the great cataracts a few miles above Del Rey's I camp.

  We exchanged Jaime and some money for gasoline at Ciudad Bolivar, then started on the long western leg of our flight. It's just short of six hundred air miles from Ciudad Bolivar on the south bank of the Orinoco River to Maracaibo on the western' shore of the lake of the same name. The flight, including the first leg from Devil Mountain to Ciudad Bolivar and the stopover at the river port, took us almost six hours. Then, finally, we were sweeping in low over the brackish water of the lake. Near the eastern shore, it looked like a forest of black oil derricks thrusting up at us from the water. We flew over the floating oil city quickly—the barges, the tenders, and underneath it all the rock-imprisoned oil.

  The city of Maracaibo had been a tropical hellhole until some thirty-odd years ago, when someone discovered that the pitch with which the natives had been caulking their canoes since before the days of Columbus came from rich, untapped petroleum deposits. Then health officers and a modicum of sanitation came to Maracaibo but, except for the air-conditioned Hotel del Lago, where Ralph Homerson met us, they could do nothing about the oppressive heat and the year-round high humidity which will have a man wringing wet in seconds.

  Ralph wore seersuckers, and his sunburn had faded to a faint pink. Lydia gave him a quick hug and a peck on the lips outside the hotel and then, while the Polish expatriate and Del Rey's other guests went their separate ways, the four of us—Del Rey, Lydia, Ralph and a perspiring private detective named Chester Drum—went inside to the delightfully cool bar.

  We tried the native beer, which is brewed in Caracas. It was good and it was cold and so was the interior of the Hotel del Lago. I hated the idea of going outside. “Unfortunately,” Del Rey said, “I cannot remain here long. In the morning I'll be leaving for the oil fields on business.”

  Lydia grinned at him. “We didn't come to Maracaibo to see the native huts on their stilts, Paco,” she said. “We came to see what it's like, bringing oil up from the lake. Didn't we, Ralph?”

  Ralph nodded, but Del Rey said, “It's hardly a tourist attraction. It's all a hard, sweaty business. It has earned four billion dollars in the last ten years or so for the Venezuelan government and four billion more for the oil producers. It does not have time for tourists, I am afraid. The Venezuelans, you see, are not interested in rich norte-americanos with cameras. They are interested in rich norte-americanos with money.”

  That got a laugh from Ralph, who assured Del Rey he did not have much. But Lydia said, “I remember what you told Father once about that fifty-fifty split between the government and the oil producers.”

  “Do you?” asked Del Rey. “Do you, indeed?”

  “Yes. There are ways of getting around it, you said. The government can't watch everybody all the time. That's what you said.”

  They looked at each other. Ralph, who was gazing into his amber beer with myopic concentration, missed it entirely. I didn't, but I was left somewhere in the vicinity of first base while Del Rey and Lydia were heading for home. Their eyes locked and Lydia's tanned face lost a couple of shades of color when Del Rey said, “You have a most unusual memory, Senora Homerson.”

  I didn't see why. If Del Rey had said that in her presence, of course Lydia would remember it. Her father had interests in Maracaibo oil, even if those interests were tied up with Del Rey.

  “Well, anyway,” Lydia said hastily, “I'd like to see the oil fields.”

  Ralph was the last to finish his beer. We all had another. Ralph said, “I'm sorry I didn't meet you at the airport, Lydia.”

  Lydia patted his hand. “You didn't have me worried,” she said. “By now I ought to know how absent-minded you are.”

  Del Rey fired a miniature cigar and said, “An interesting family, the Homersons. The husband cannot remember enough. The wife remembers too much. Is it not so, Lydia?”

  It was the only time I had heard him use her first name. I could
sense a difference in their relationship, brought about suddenly here at this table, and I didn't know why. Del Rey had been polite, formal, almost diffident where Lydia was 'concerned. Now, though, he seemed to be taunting her.

  Lydia pretended the question had not been asked. “Is it settled then, Paco?” she asked. “May we go with you to the oilfields tomorrow?”

  Del Rey showed his flashing teeth. “Si. But of course. Now I would almost insist that you be my guest. We have much to talk about.”

  “It was a long flight,” Lydia said. “I'm very tired.”'

  She didn't look very tired. She excused herself and stood up. Ralph started to get up with her, but Del Rey said, “Allow me, Dr. Homerson. I am known at the Hotel de Lago. I will escort your wife to your room and at the same time see that your reservations are satisfactory.”

  Ralph nodded, and we watched them go. I felt uncomfortable. After what had almost happened between Lydia and me on Del Rey's river, I wouldn't relish a tete-a-tete with Ralph Homerson. For a while we were silent. We finished our beers and ordered others. Ralph stared silently into his drink. I watched the flow of people in and out of the bar.

  And then Ralph said, “Hell of a vacation, isn't it?”

  “How's that?”

  I mean, coming down here to Venezuela. It wasn't my idea, but Lord knows I couldn't let Lydia go alone, not the way she was.”

  I thought it was your idea.”

  “This place? No. I only thought she should have a long rest somewhere. She wanted to mix business with pleasure, I suppose. But I certainly couldn't let her come down alone, could I?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “Did she want to?”

  “Yes. A complete change was what she needed, she said. Get away from everyone she knew. That sort of thing, you know.” Ralph finished his beer, I gulped mine in a hurry because the beer was loosening his tongue and I wanted to keep up with him. I suggested we switch to rum-soda. Ralph nodded and the switch was made. We had one round, and another.