I threw my sore right hand at his face. It missed him and I slipped and nearly fell. He began putting his hands on me. He found a nerve center under my collarbone and drove me down onto my knees. I cried out with the wicked pain of it. As I lifted my arm, he drove his fingertips into my armpit. I tried to scramble back away from those big, white, well-kept hands. Something was going wrong with the script. He dived toward me, scrambled along the floor onto me, thumbed the back of my elbow, and sent a lance of pain down my arm that numbed my fingers.
A shadow moved across the light. I was on my back, writhing, shutting my teeth against the pain. He had hold of my left arm. He looked dignified, remote, amused.
He glanced up into Emily’s face from his sitting position and said, “You see, my dear, application of pain can bring a—”
Her white arm moved like the flick of a lizard’s tongue. It darted out and back and then she moved back, step after step, until her back was against the wall by the door. The pressure on my arm was gone. He was still holding it, but gently. I yanked it out of his grasp and spun onto my knees. He sat there, his eyes bulging, terrible. At first I couldn’t understand what the object was that I saw. It protruded from the hollow at the base of his throat. And then I saw that it was the silver handle of an ordinary table fork. The tines were in a horizontal line, buried as deeply as they would go, buried in the hollow of his throat, just above where the strong black hair curled crisply from the open throat of his sports shirt.
She whispered huskily, “I took it from the table. Nobody was watching. I was waiting for a chance.”
I moved back, away from him. We both watched him. He tried to form a word with his lips. He stood up with the exaggerated care of a man who dares to get to his feet on a tiny platform hundreds of feet in the air.
He looked down, just with his eyes, not moving his head, at the silver handle glinting in the light of the bed lamp. He reached one hand up and touched the handle, gingerly, delicately, almost lovingly.
He took two slow steps toward the door. Emily took sideways steps, sliding along the wall. Suddenly, wrenchingly, he coughed. The bright blood arced. He coughed again, more shallowly. He bent from the waist and hugged his chest and coughed some more. He dropped to his hands and knees and, staring down at the tiles, coughed and gagged and bled until, quite gently, quite solemnly, he folded himself down onto the floor, straightened his legs out, kicked sharply, twice, at the hard tiles with his right foot, and then was still.
Emily held her arm across her eyes. I went over and shook her. The sheer net tore, exposing her ivory shoulder, baring the chalky conical breast that now looked meager, impoverished, icy.
“No,” she moaned.
I slapped her until her eyes slid out of focus and her cheeks flared red with finger stripes. “Snap out of it!”
Sanity came back to her. Sanity and new strength. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said.
“They planned to kill me tonight. Not Flores. That captain and his people. The gate is no good. That’s guarded. Can you swim well enough to swim out around that wire? It goes out for a hundred yards.”
“Can we climb it?”
“Not with those lights on it. We’ll have to swim straight out, if I can’t find that dinghy, and cut around the fence once we’re out of the lights. The beach guards stay on the roof.”
“He … told me we were going tonight. He said he was almost certain this place was being watched. We were going to fly north.”
“Get some clothes on.”
“Where is the money you were to keep? The fifty thousand?”
“In my room.”
She looked around. “I don’t know what he did with all the rest of it. I wish I knew.”
“Come on. Don’t waste time over that, Emily.”
“Go get the rest of the money, Kyle. I’ll be dressed. Tap on the door.”
“No I’ll wait. You come with me. We can leave my room by the beach door.”
She pulled open the closet. She ripped off the revealing nightgown, pulled on the dress I had bought for her in Mexico City a thousand years ago. She moved like an automaton. Both of us avoided looking toward Flores. As we left the room I glanced at him. He seemed to have settled closer to the floor. He had lost the shape of a man, had become something flaccid, wrapped in clothes, like a dummy.
She ran and turned out the bed lamp, then rejoined me. We moved carefully down the hall to the corner, walked down toward my room. Just as we neared the door, Captain Schumann stepped out of the shadows.
He was naked from the waist up, as before.
“About time, Cameron,” he said nasally.
“I’ve changed my mind.”
The butt of the gun was against his shrunken belly, held in place by the waistband of the white cotton trousers.
“You don’t say.”
As he grasped the gun butt, there was a soft quick movement in the deeper shadows behind him. His mouth flew open, showing broken yellowed teeth. He gasped and tried to turn. In the process of turning he seemed to loose his balance. He went down onto his face, the gun clinking on the corridor tile. Adela stepped out of the shadows, stepped over him. There was a knife in her hand with redness along about an inch of the tip. There was a corresponding redness at the nap of Schumann’s neck.
There was something savage and Azteca in her face. “Like a pica for the bull,” she said. “Run, querido. Hurry. Leave this place.”
She melted away, soft-footed, saying out of the darkness, “The other one too, that Joaquín, he is dead.”
We went into my room. I pulled the suitcase out. Emily opened it, threw out my clothes, touched the money, closed it again.
“I can swim with it,” she said.
From the discarded clothes she selected a necktie. She looped it around her neck, tied it through the handle of the suitcase. We ran across the soft sand that slid under our shoeless feet, and then across the damp packed sand, and then into the warm water, aglow with phosphorescence.
She went in quickly, thrust her way through the breakers that tried to drive her back, began swimming strongly. The suitcase, full of trapped air, floated high. I followed her. My arm was still numbed from the painful stab in the armpit, and I had to swim in such a way as to favor that arm. She continued to draw ahead of me, the suitcase against her shoulders, her white arms lifting.
Over the sea sound I heard a distant shout and I looked back. Dark figures were running across the sand, running toward the light that shone on the nearest fence.
“Faster!” I yelled to Emily.
She had widened the gap between us. I saw that the suitcase was floating a bit lower in the water. Suddenly the light shifted, and it was directed toward us.
Another thin shout floated across the deep voice of the sea. A shout and then the penny cracker sound of a shot, flattened by the open beach. I did not see where the slug hit. I tried to go faster. The next time I looked back, I saw that the figures on the beach were uniformed in tan. One of them, in front of the light, was stripping down.
I looked ahead toward Emily. I could no longer see the suitcase. She seemed to be swimming more laboriously She was sixty feet away.
Suddenly she stopped swimming and disappeared. She came up at once and began to whip the water with her arms, and she shouted, “Kyle! Kyle, it’s pulling me down. Help me!”
She went under again. I swam as hard as I could. I seemed to stay in one place. She came up and gave a harsh, hoarse, meaningless cry, like the sound of one of the sea birds. “Hold on,” I yelled.
I watched as I swam. I reached the place where I thought she had disappeared. She did not come up. I made a surface dive, reaching for her. I touched nothing. I came up and took a deep breath and tried again.
I tried until the other swimmer came up to me. “Swim to shore!” he order.
I dived for Emily again. When I came up he cracked my face with his palm. “Swim to shore!”
I turned and swam to shore. My arms were like lea
d. As I waded through the surf I turned and looked out at the empty black sea.
There were many of them. They were police. The other light had been turned around and all of the servants and guards were lined up against the glass wall of the outside of the living room, looking sullen. I saw Adela among them. She alone looked composed, almost happy.
A fat, hard, brown man with a Buddha face swaggered over to me. “You are Cameron?”
“Yes.”
“Where is the girl?”
“She drowned out there.”
“And where is the money?”
“Flores has most of it.”
“He is dead. And where is the rest?”
“It was with her. Tied to her.”
“Ah, so. And you killed Flores?”
“No. She did.” I moved closer to where Adela stood. I raised my voice. “The girl killed Flores and she killed Schumann and a Mexican. I witnessed it and so did that girl there.” I pointed to Adela.
Buddha turned to her and spewed staccato Spanish. Adela answered in kind. Buddha turned to me. “It is as you said. She saw it.”
He gave another order. Two of the khaki men stepped up behind me, twisted my arms behind me, snapped steel around my wrists.
I pulled away from them, lurched toward Adela. They grabbed me again. Adela ran to me, saying something to Buddha.
He gave the men an order. They let go of me. I looked down into her face. It held all the warmth in the world.
I said, “One day I will come back.”
“I know that.”
“We will be very old.”
“No importa.”
“Where will you be?”
“In Sola de Vega. Ask for the Señora Cameron. Is it a name I can use?”
“Of course. And if I write?”
“There will be someone to read it. And one day the niño will write to you in this English.”
“Take care of him.”
“With these hands, querido.” She held them out. I bent quickly, awkwardly, and kissed the palm of her right hand.
They took me away. I didn’t look back. There was no need to look back. It would be a long sentence. Years in which to think. Years in which to prepare myself, in which to try to rebuild enough decency, enough heart, and enough hope so that I would be at last worthy of one who thought of herself as a stupid village girl, and who was, in reality, one of the last of the queens of the Aztecas.
THE END
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
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