"Darling, the mail comes to the village by bus, and they bring the mail for those houses out here to the hotel. I... I might put a little note in there for her. My handwriting is obviously feminine. So is my note paper."
"Nora, you are a fine bright girl."
"I don't know what to say. But it should be something that.... She shouldn't be able to rest until she finds out the rest of it. Maybe I should phone her."
"There is one phone in this whole hotel, in Arista's office. I think there are two in the village. There are none on the hill."
"Oh."
"But the idea is superb. Let's give it a lot of thought."
"Shouldn't we make sure of her name? Wouldn't that help?"
"It would help indeed."
It seemed a difficult project, but like many such problems, it turned out to be extraordinarily simple. I found one of the hotel porters at a small table near the lobby door sorting mail, the mail he would carry up the hill and leave at the tenanted house. He was checking the addresses against a tattered, dog-eared sheet. The principal names had been typed. Other names in the household had been written under them in pencil. There was a long list under Garcia, well over a dozen names. Among them was the girl's name. She had phonied up the first name, as girls are inclined to do these days. Almah. Miss Almah Hichin. The porter was trying to tell me I would not find my mail in that batch. I misunderstood him. By the time Arista came over to straighten me out, I had what I needed.
Nora and I spent a long time composing a draft of a very short note.
"My dear Miss Hichin, I have heard so many things about you, I feel that I know you. ST told me rnany things, including one thing I must pass along to you in person. He said it would deeply concern you, and might change your future plans. It does not mean much to me, but from the sound of it I would judge it important. I am at La Casa Encantada, but for obvious reasons, that would not be a good place for us to meet."
"What obvious reasons?" Nora asked, scowling.
"If you don't have any, she will. Or she'll wonder what the hell your reasons are."
"Where should we meet?"
"I saw three cars up there. One is a dark red convertible Ghia. Say this: Drive the little red car down to the village tomorrow at one in the afternoon. Stop in front of the largest church. Please be alone. I shall be."
Her initials, NDG, were embossed in the top corner of the blue note paper. There was no address. I had her sign it with merely an N.
"What if she should know Sam is... dead?"
"She'll wonder what he said before he died."
"Do you think she'll come?"
"She'll have to."
"Tomorrow will mean the day after tomorrow. We can't get it to her until...."
"I know. You'll give it to that old porter, with a lovely smile, and a five peso note."
"Then what do we do with her if she does come?"
"I'm going to take a long walk to find out, dear."
"Can I come?"
I did some mental arithmetic. A kilometer is sixtenths of a mile. "Can you manage ten miles in the heat?"
She could do better than that. She proved it. She became very mysterious, made me wait for her, came back full of suppressed amusement, then led me out to the back of the hotel, to the out buildings lluere, the supply sheds, generator building, staff barracks, back to a place where Jose, our room waiter, stood proudly beside a fantastic piece of transportation. It was an Italian motor scooter with fat doughnut tires, all bright coral, poisonous yellow-green and sparkling chrome. It had a single monster headlight, and two fluffy pink fox tails affixed to the handlebar grips. It had a radio antenna, but no radio, with a blue fox tail fastened to the tip of it. There was a broad black cycle seat, and behind that a padded black lid to the stowage compartment, a place for the passenger to sit. It was incongruous transportation for that severe, polite little man. He would not consent to rent it until he had checked me out on it. It had two speeds. I kicked it on and wheeled it sedately around the area, flatulently snarling. I comported myself with dignity and appreciation. I told him it was strikingly beautiful, and I would treat it with the greatest care.
When the deal was struck, Nora straddled the rear compartment, her dark hair tied in a scarf, and we took off for the village, Jose watching us with an enigmatic expression. There were little cleats for her to brace her feet on. She found that her best way to hold on was to hold onto my belt. She shouted that this experience had come to her about twelve years too late. With the soft tires and the heavy coil springs on the front fork, it was really quite comfortable on the rough road. In high gear, along a relatively smooth area, the speedometer showed a little over 50 kph, or something over thirty miles an hour.
Again I ruptured siesta by making three circuits of the public square. Brown dogs yapped and ran after us, then waited, gasping, for us to come around another time. Children shouted and imitated the art of jumping over an invisible knife. Dark faces grinned. I went down the road which headed in the opposite direction from the hotel, and found the ice plant and more fish docks, some old trucks at a loading platform, and more packs of kids and dogs.
I discovered that the brake was tender. It had a tendency to lock the rear wheel. I made my turn, scattering a flock of white hens, and went back and made two more circuits of the square to the cheers of the populace, and then turned inland over the crude road we had traveled in the blue bus.
After I was over the ridge and across the rocky flats and into the narrow road with the heavy growth on either side, I slowed it and stopped it, turned the key off and set it on the brace.
Nora was amused and indignant. "Really Trav! My God, what were you trying to prove?"
"That we're nutty harmless Americans. Smoke screen, honey. Anybody who went over that wall couldn't possibly clown around in this gaudy machine the very next day. And I think the village damn well knows they had trouble up there last night. And what point is there in looking as if we had any special destination? When we come back, we'll bomb them again."
"It just made me feel so ridic..." Suddenly she began to make squeaking sounds and went into a wild dance, slapping at her feet and ankles. And at the same moment, one of them got me on the leg, a dark red ant with husky jaws and a sting like sulphuric acid. We leaped onto the machine and escaped, slapping the persistent ones off while in transit.
We bumbled along through sunny areas and through the jungly shadows where the trees met overhead. The previous mudholes were cracked and drying. I found that the most comfortable speed was about fifteen miles an hour. And it gave me time to inspect both sides of the road. Pebbles clinked off the festive mudguards. The fox tails rippled in the hot breeze of passage. Dust curled behind us. The woman clutched the back of my belt snugly. Once she shouted and pointed and I saw a flock of small bright parrots tilting and skimming through a shadowy green of the high trees.
We met a bus coming to the village. It came clanking and wheezing and shuddering along, going too fast for the condition of the road. The name on the front of it was El Domador. It blew a squawky horn at us as we waited in the shallow ditch for it to go by and the passengers whooped.
After it was gone, two hundred yards further, I found the place Felicia had probably been talking about. A smaller road, just a trace of a road, turned off to the left. It ended after about a hundred feet, in a little clearing which the jungle was reclaiming. I silenced our vehicle and we got off. The silence was intense. There had been a shack at the edge of the clearing. It had fallen in, and the tough vines were curled around the old poles of which it had ten fashioned. We could have been a hundred feet or a hundred miles from any other road. In a little while the bird sounds began again, tentative at first. Then the bug chorus started. Nora peered carefully and rather timidly at the ground, looking for ants among the tough grasses.
There was an eeriness about the place that made it more suitable to speak in a half whisper.
"This is where they brought that girl?"
&nb
sp; "Yes. Three days after Sam took off."
"Who were they?"
"Nobody from the house. Three days, it would be time to come in from somewhere else."
And you want me to bring that girl here?"
"Yes.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'll be here when you get here with her. I'll have to walk it. I think her nerves are very good. I think she's tricky and subtle. So we have to plan it carefully Nora. We have to make it look very good to her. So I'm going to give you some lines to say, and we're going to go over them, and then you're going to walk away from it, because I don't want to give her a chance to read you."
"Will she read you, dear?"
"I don't know. At least I know enough not to try to overact."
"What do you mean?"
"Sympathy and reluctance are a hell of a lot more impressive than imitation villainy, Nora."
I arrived at the clearing a little before one in the afternoon. I had cut across country rather than going through the village. I had had to take cover from only one vehicle, a burdened fish truck laboring out toward the markets. I had sweated the layer of repellent off, and I rubbed on more. I paced and I worried about Nora. If Almah Hichin showed up, if Nora did exactly as I had told her, as I had demonstrated to her, if she had tried no improvisation, and had kept her mouth shut, maybe it would work.
I paced back and forth in the clearing. I cut a reedy-looking thing and tried to make a whistle. The bark wouldn't slip. I kept stopping, tilting my head, listening. When I heard it, it seemed to merge with the bug whine and die away, and then it came back, stronger than before. Then it was recognizable as the doughty whirr of a VW engine. It turned into the overgrown trace. I saw at last the glints of dark red through the foliage.
It came into the clearing and stopped, ten feet from me. Almah Hichin was at the wheel. She stared at me, frowning slightly as I walked over to the car. I reached in and turned the key off. The top was down. Almah wore a dark blue kerchief, a pale blue sleeveless silk blouse, a white skirt, flat white sandals. She looked up at me with respectable composure and said in a reasonable tone, "May I ask who you are, and what this is all about?"
"No trouble?" I asked Nora.
"None at all." She sat half turned toward Almah, holding my little bedroom gun six inches from Alma's waist. Almah's white purse was on the divider between the black bucket seats. I reached over her and picked it up and opened it. I saw her decide to snatch at it and then change her mind. Combination wallet and change purse, lipstick, very small hair brush, mirror, stub of eyebrow pencil.
I took the bills out of the wallet. Three U.S. twenties, a ten, and three ones. A wad of soiled peso notes. I tossed the money into Nora's lap. I put the billfold back into the purse, snapped it, took a step back and slung the purse deep into the brush. I looked at the girl. Her eyes had widened momentarily. They were an unusually lovely color, a deep lavender blue, and their asymmetry made them more interesting..
"Won't somebody find that?" Nora asked on cue.
"It isn't likely." I knew how the inevitable formula worked in the girl's mind. Nobody expected her to be able to go look for it. I saw a slight twitch at the corner of the controlled mouth.
I took the coil of nylon line off my shoulder, separated an end and dropped the rest of it. "Clasp your hands and hold them out," I told her.
"I will not!"
"Miss Hichin, you can't change anything. All you can do is make a lot of tiresome trouble. Just hold your hands out."
She hesitated and then did so. Her wrists looked frail, her forearms childish. I lashed them together, swiftly and firmly. I opened the car door, gave a firm and meaningful tug at the line and she got out, saying, "This is altogether ridiculous, you know."
Nora slid over into the driver's seat and pulled the door shut.
"Enough gas to make Culiacan?" I asked.
She turned the key on and checked. "More than enough."
I reached and plucked the dark blue kerchief from Almah's blonde head and handed it to Nora. "This might confuse things a little."
She nodded. She glanced at Almah. "How about her blouse too?"
"I'll bring it along," I said. "You don't want any part of this do you?"
Her little shudder was very effective. "No, dear."
"Neither do I. Park it up there in the shade, just short of that last bend. Okay?"
"Yes, dear. Miss Hichin? Please don't be stupid about this. You see, we have a lot of time. The plane doesn't come until eight to pick us up. You're such a pretty thing. It will be very difficult for him if you... let it get messy."
"Are you people out of your minds?" Almah demanded.
"I'll handle this. You get out of here," I ordered.
She spun the little red car around deftly and headed back out again. The motor sound faded, and then it stopped.
I picked up the rest of the line and led the girl over to the spot I had picked, near the ruin of the shack. I flipped the line over a low limb, caught the end, took it over to another tree, laced it around the tree and then carefully pulled until she had her arms stretched high over her head, but both feet were firmly on the ground. I made it fast. I went to her and reached and checked the tension of the line above her lashed wrists. I wandered away from her and lit a cigarette and stood with my back to her, staring off into the brush.
"You're making some kind of fantastic mistake," she said.
"Sure," I said and went back to her. She looked sweaty but composed. Small insects were beginning to gather around her face, arms and legs.
"No need for you to be eaten alive," I said. I took out the 6-12 and poured some into the palm of my hand. "Close your eyes." She obeyed. I greased her face, throat, arms and legs with the repellent. I made it utterly objective, with no slightest hint of caress. She stared at me and moistened her lips. I knew that the small courtesy had shaken her more than anything which had gone before.
I walked away from her again. I wanted to sag against a tree and give a great bray of laughter. I had properly anticipated most of it, but not the comedy of it. The most wretched melodrama becomes high comedy. This was a little darling, a little lavender-eyed blonde darling, trussed up like a comic book sequence, and I could not harm a hair of her dear little head. And, of course, she could not believe it either. Nobody hurts the darlings. So our spavined act was balanced on that point which was just beyond our comprehension or belief. She was right. It was some kind of a fantastic mistake. Nora had bought it more readily than blondie or I could. Her Mediterranean acceptance of the violence just under the surface of life, perhaps.
I turned and looked at her. She stood sweaty and indignant and uncomfortable, reaching high, ankles neatly together. She was, of course, weighing me most carefully, estimating my capacity for violence, even though she could not believe this was real. It was a ponderous, embarrassing joke. She was angry and wary. She was trying to guess if I could hurt her. I saw myself through her eyes-a great big brown rangy man, wiry hair, pale grey eyes, broad features slightly and permanently disarranged by past incidents.
I went close to her, and looked through the hypnotic impact of so much prettiness, and got a better look at the details of her. Caked lipstick bitten away, fingers narrow and crooked and not pretty, nail polish chipped and cracked, the thumbnails bitten deep, a furzy little coppery stubble in her armpits, little dandruff flakes in the forehead roots of the blonde hair, slender ankles slightly soiled, pores enlarged in her cheeks and a blackhead near the base of the delicate nose, a tiny hole burned in the front of the pale blue blouse, a spot on the hip of the white skirt. She was lovely, but not very fastidious. It made her seem a little sexier, and more manageable. The signs of soil were slightly plaintive.
"You and that woman are going to get into terrihle trouble about this," she said. "I'm an actress. A lot of people know me. Apparently you don't know who I am."
"I think you got mixed up in a lot of things, Almah, without knowing how serious they were. I gues
s it works sort of like the law. Ignorance is no excuse."
"You don't make any sense. I am a house guest."
"That's what Carlos Menterez y Cruzada called a lot of his shack jobs, I guess. House guests. But you'd be a little young for the Havana scene. Actually I guess you aren't any different than any of the rest of them. But you are the last one he had. And when he had no more use for you, in that sense, you should have gone back where you belonged. The big mistake was hanging around, Almah."
She stared at me as though she was peering at me through gloom, trying to identify me. She started to say something and stopped and licked her lips again.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"I'm just somebody who's been ordered to confirm a few things. Double check the details. They'll think you left when the going got rough. We sent some people in there last night to look around. It's all falling apart now. It's over for him, Almah. And it's over for you."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 05 - A Deadly Shade of Gold Page 19
