VI
Outside the Hotel Yucatan the manager of the inn bade us a relieved good-bye and drove away. Mrs. Snood and Halliday went up to their rooms to change. I stopped at the desk to see if there was any mail from my wife. There wasn’t, but as the desk clerk handed me my key he said:
“I see your friend found you yesterday, sir.”
“What friend?”
He nodded towards the stairway up which Mrs. Snood and Halliday had disappeared. “The American gentleman—Mr. Halliday.”
“Halliday?” I tried to sound casual. “Was he asking for me yesterday?”
“He arrived from the airport just after you’d left for Chichén with the young lady. He’d seen you driving off, and wanted to know where you were going. I told him. You were old friends, he said.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Thanks.”
I moved away from him along the edge of the lush, tropical patio. Yesterday, when he hadn’t known me from Adam, Halliday had inquired about my movements and claimed to be an old friend of mine. At last my suspicions had something definite to go on. Halliday had been at the airport when Deborah arrived from Balboa. He had come to the hotel a few minutes after her, and had seen us driving away in my car. Obviously he had been following her from the airport and had used my name to the desk clerk merely as a blind.
This meant surely that Deborah had begged a lift from me in an attempt to escape from him. And if she had been trying to escape from him, everything that had happened afterwards made sense. Deborah had been afraid of every car that came from Merida because she thought Halliday might be in one of them. Later, on the terrace, her fear had reached its climax because she had actually met Halliday face to face.
I dropped down into a wicker chair in front of a wicker table under whose glass top photographs of the Chichén-Itzá ruins were displayed. One of the waiters turned on the radio, and a blare of danson came. If Deborah’s fear of Halliday had been an ordinary fear (if, for example, she had been running away from home, and Halliday had been a friend of her father’s sent to bring her back), the whole problem would have resolved itself there on the terrace of the Mayan Inn. But the fact that they had both pretended not to know each other showed that the situation had been far more complex and, probably, far more dangerous than that. I remembered the figure crouching under Deborah’s window. Had it been Halliday? And had Deborah been so eager to spend the night with me because she was afraid of what Halliday might have done to her alone and defenceless in her own room? If that were so, although she hadn’t trusted me enough to confide in me, she had clung to me for protection. And the moment she had been left without me, she had died.
A fat little Mexican girl in a pink dress slumped into a chair beyond me, dangled bare legs and ordered a coca-cola which she sucked noisily through a straw.
The whole picture was ominously different now.
I heard American voices. I looked up. Halliday and Mrs. Snood were coming down the broad tiled staircase together.
They joined me at the table. Mrs. Snood summoned a waiter and ordered drinks for all of us. She swayed unrhythmically to the radio.
“I’m crazy about the rumba. Took a course in it once. Five dollars an hour. They fleeced me. Never got my derrière operating properly.”
Halliday was sitting immediately opposite me. He was still wearing the nondescript sports coat with a white shirt open at the throat. Behind the shell-rimmed glasses, his pale eyes were without expression. He was smiling his dimpled, almost fatuous smile. In spite of my suspicions, it was impossible to think of him as sinister.
“They sure go for the rumba down here,” he remarked. “Can’t turn on the radio without rumba, rumba, rumba.”
Looking at him, I said, “At the desk they told me you were making inquiries about me yesterday.”
Halliday’s reaction was perfectly in character. His face lit up with a raconteur’s delight at an unexpected chance to hold the floor.
“Why, yes. What d’you know? Completely slipped my mind. It’s the craziest thing.” He leaned forward and tapped Mrs. Snood’s knee. “This’ll interest you, Lena. Yesterday I’d just arrived in this car they send to the airport and I saw Peter driving off in a blue sedan. Just got a glimpse of his profile. I could have sworn it was an old pal of mine. Johnny Ross. In the advertising business in Cleveland. Quite a boy, Johnny. Wonderful after-dinner speaker. Known him for years. I asked at the desk where the blue sedan was headed and, when they said Chichén, I was expecting to meet up with old Johnny out there.” He turned back to me. “Ever run across him? Johnny Ross? With Pierce, Dolan and Styles?”
“No,” I said.
He studied me soberly. “When you come to look, there’s not much of a resemblance. Just a trick, I guess, seeing your profile in the car. I could have sworn…”
“It’s funny,” broke in Mrs. Snood. “All the time I keep thinking I see people I know, too. Why, down in Guatemala City in the market—they have the cutest market—there was this American woman. Blonde, about thirty. Until she turned around, I could have sworn…”
Mrs. Snood was launched. The waiter brought the drinks. Halliday smacked his lips over his, saying: “Boy, is this going to hit the spot?”
The whole thing had been glossed over.
Halliday’s explanation had been so glib that I might almost have accepted it. But I didn’t because I no longer quite believed in the vapid business-man front. It was a little too well done. And, now that I had started to look for it, there was an intelligence behind the ambiguous eyes which he wasn’t able to conceal. I thought I could trace a wariness, too, beneath the casual, sloppy manner. I was sure then that, whether it did or did not connect with Deborah Brand, Bill Halliday was posing as something he wasn’t.
And, as he went on drinking and talking, I began also to have the uneasy feeling that he was keeping me under unobtrusive but constant observation. It was as if, with that one remark of mine, the relationship between us had completely changed. We were entering, as it were, the second round. Though what the first round had been or what the second round was going to be I hadn’t the slightest idea.
We were all leaving for Mexico City the next day. Mrs. Snood and Halliday went with me when I returned my rented car to the garage, and we turned in early. Halliday was the first person I saw the next morning. His tap on the door woke me. I let him in. He was dressed in a grey suit with a vague necktie. Although he was tidied up for the flight, he still looked completely nondescript. He was carrying a brown gabardine bag like mine.
“Better make it snappy, Peter,” he said. “Mrs. Snood’s already downstairs eating breakfast. The honeymoon couple, too.” He glanced casually round the room. “Want me to help you pack?”
“No, thanks. You go down. I’ll be right with you.”
I dressed, packed my bag and descended to the dining-room. The red-headed bridegroom nodded to me. The pretty bride with her great swimming eyes smiled. I joined Halliday and Mrs. Snood. By the time we had finished breakfast and paid our bills the car from the airport had arrived.
There are, as yet, no roads to link Yucatan with the rest of Mexico. The airport, therefore, is the focus of all traffic. But that day it was relatively deserted. There were only a handful of other passengers in the four-motor plane to Mexico City. Mrs. Snood insisted that we be chummy, and we settled together in a seat for three.
Sleep had not dispelled my doubts about Deborah’s death. Nor had it altered my conviction that Halliday had been connected at least with her fear and was now unhealthily concerned with me. As the plane droned over languid jungle and Mrs. Snood chatted, the closeness of his knee to mine became oppressive. I would have been more comfortable if there had been something definite against him other than my own distrust. I could have done something then. As it was, there was nothing except that one slim fact of his having inquired about me at the desk.
His behaviour was completely normal. He slouched, smoked and kidded Mrs. Snood, who was reading Deborah’s detecti
ve story, and told long, dull stories about dull friends in Ohio.
But whether I was inventing the mystery around him or whether it in fact existed, I was sick and tired of him. I was even getting tired of the poor, pale ghost of Deborah Brand. Why should I worry about her? She hadn’t trusted me. I was only someone with a car to drive her to Chichén and a bedroom to keep her safe from—what?
My one desire was to reach Mexico City and be rid of them all, particularly Halliday.
But when we landed it was Halliday himself who seemed to be eager to get away. The moment our bags came through he picked his up and wandered off through the crowd.
Mrs. Snood, fussing around her own bags, murmured: “Nice man. Funny, though. Did you notice? He never told us what he did. And, come to think of it, he never gave us his address here in town. Did he give it to you?”
“No,” I said.
She had assembled her luggage and was supervising a porter. “By the way”—she smiled her sudden, infectious smile—“we won’t lose touch, will we? I mean, back in the States, you won’t be too high and mighty to come out to Newark?”
“Of course not.”
The bride and groom went by and waved. Mrs. Snood waved back.
“I’ll give you the address right now, while I think of it.”
She started to fumble in her bag. “Damn, I never have a pencil.”
“I’ve got one in my suitcase.”
I bent and unzippered the gabardine bag at my feet. As it opened, it revealed an untidily folded sports coat. I pushed the coat aside and saw grey flannel trousers, a dirty yellow shirt, an unfamiliar pair of shoes. I realised at once that it wasn’t my bag. It was Halliday’s.
Without waiting to close its zipper, I grabbed it up and, murmuring, “I’ll be back,” to Mrs. Snood, started running towards the entrance of the airport. Taxis were parked outside on the gravel. I was just in time to see Halliday climbing into one.
I hurried to the taxi and pushed my head through the window. “Hey, Halliday, you’ve got my bag.”
He smiled back blandly. “Well, what d’you know? Is that a fact?”
I opened the taxi door and showed him the bag. He blinked at its contents. “Boy, you’re right. Lucky you found out in time.” He picked my bag up from the seat next to him and handed it to me. “I noticed this morning yours was like mine. Darn sloppy these porters.”
“So it seems.”
There was no way I could prove he had hurried off with my bag on purpose. Nor did I have any idea why he should have wanted to make a switch. I stood by the open taxi door, looking at him. He looked back. Then he smiled his meaningless, dimpled smile.
“Well, so long, Peter. See you.”
“See you.”
He spoke to the driver. The taxi started away.
I stood watching it go, wondering….
BOOK II: MEXICO CITY
VII
I drove in a taxi to the apartment on Calle Londres where Iris and I had spent the autumn. That quiet neighbourhood of stately European mansions and formal shade trees was pleasantly familiar. There was a letter from my wife saying that Hollywood was depressing, that the movie, which was almost finished, was moronic, and that she missed me. She asked if I could join her in New York, on a date three days ahead, and talked enthusiastically about my play. The sight of her handwriting and the thought of seeing her sooner than I expected brought warmth and a reminder that my real life belonged in the States. Deborah began to fade. And Mrs. Snood. And Halliday.
I went to the airport office and had my reservation to New York changed to Monday. That gave me two and a half days in Mexico City—which was more than enough for me. I sent Iris a delighted cable. I returned home and telephoned the real-estate office which handled the apartment and told them to try to get a sub-lease for the remaining two months.
I spent the rest of the day comfortably alone. The thought of Halliday did come back when I unpacked my suitcase. I looked at its innocent contents spread out on the bed and decided that, unless he had liked my clothes better than his own, there was no conceivable reason why he should have switched bags on purpose.
Now that he wasn’t visible, the sinister atmosphere with which I had invested him dissipated. He’d just been a bore, and Deborah had just been a girl with a flair for the dramatic who had died. I went to bed and started thinking about production problems on the play. When I awoke next morning, Yucatan was a thing of the past.
Without Iris, I didn’t bother to eat at home. Around ten I went out for breakfast. The clear mountain sunlight dappled the side-walk. A handsome new station-wagon coupe was parked down the street. A woman came by from the market carrying a huge bunch of calla lilies. Two yellow butterflies flapped after her, caught up with the moving lilies, fell off and flapped on again in angry pursuit. An Indian was going barefoot from door to door selling long-handled brooms with feather heads. It was just an ordinary Mexican morning.
Across the street from me a boy in denims lounged against a tree trunk, smoking a cigarette. He was small, quiet. A burlap sack was slung over his shoulder, and he had a newspaper under his arm. As I passed, he glanced at me incuriously from large eyes, brown and liquid as melted chocolate. Although I had never consciously seen him before, his face seemed elusively familiar. The eyes I knew, and the full lower lip and the dark, passive beauty of feature that seemed more vegetable than animal. Pretty. Like a young flower.
I tried to track down the familiarity. It was probably nothing more than the fact that his was the prototype of the Indian face, enigmatic, waiting. Or did it link up with some picture I’d seen? A Covarrubias? The problem nagged at me for a few moments the way half recollections do. Then, because I was hungry, it slid out of my mind.
I had adopted the Mexican habit of breakfasting on coffee and sweet bread. There was a pasteleria which I patronized a couple of blocks away. When I reached it, I found that tall stylized skeletons had been painted in yellow across the plate-glass windows. Under the bony, beckoning arm of one of them had been written: Hay pan de los muertos.
The bread of the dead itself was heaped in the window, and alongside of it was a neat pyramid of little candy skulls with red, luminous, paper eye-sockets. Pink curlicues of sugar wreathed their craniums. There were larger skulls, too. These had individual names written in sugar across their frontal bones: Carlos, Arturo, Guadalupe, Carmen.
I had not realized that it was the date on which Mexico celebrates its annual fiesta for the dead. While I lingered at the door of the pasteleria, a small boy came out, licking the jawbone of a skull. A woman followed with a loaf of the bread of the dead in a wicker basket. It was round like a coffee-cake and stubbed with crystallized sugar.
On Hallowe’en Americans are apt to get drunk at raucous parties while their children play with pumpkin heads. Mexicans spend the day eating candy skulls and little candy corpses in candy coffins and taking loaves of sweet bread to their dead relatives in the cemeteries. Their custom, if more macabre, is also more imaginative. But that day I found the mixture of sardonic humour and hopeless denial of life, symbolized by the candy skulls, depressing. A faint gloom descended on me. The sunlight seemed flat. I began wondering if my play was as good as Iris thought it was.
I glanced back down the street. The boy with the burlap sack and the beautiful blank eyes was strolling behind me.
I went into the pasteleria and had a glass of coffee with hot milk and a couple of slices of the bread of the dead. It tasted pleasant, sweet. I thought of Mexicans all over the country offering it on the flower-strewn graves of their “dear departed”. The habit showed a touching courtesy to remembered friends and relatives. It was practical, too, because later, when the buried had shown themselves indifferent to the light fingers of bakers, the family returned and ate the bread themselves.
A girl came into the pasteleria, took the stool next to me and ordered in rapid, voluble Spanish. I glanced at her, and then looked back again quickly, because she was so completely unlike the
sort of girl who would be having breakfast in a small Mexican pasteleria. She was Slavic, probably White-Paris Russian. I was almost sure of that from the broad cheekbones, the milk-white skin and the huge violet-blue eyes with lashes that might have been braided out of black wool. She was wearing a perfectly matched silver-fox cape over a black suit with handsome lines. But there were too many pearls, and a frou-frou of fur around one wrist made the whole effect rather corny. There was even a fur Cossack cap on her glossy black hair, and her perfume was so heavy I expected it to drop to the floor with a thud. Her legs, however, in sheer nylons, were beautiful—long and slender with the firmness of a ballet-dancer’s legs.
In fact, she looked like a ballet-dancer. I knew the type well in New York—exotic creatures with the brains of orchids who squabble cliqueishly in the Russian tea-room and drink sweet cordials in the bar at the Met. while they pan each other’s performances.
Like most ballet-dancers, too, she had a terrific appetite. She was eating her way into her third pastry when I paid my bill. She glanced at me once out of the corner of a large, bright eye. It was a completely female glance which said: I’m a girl. You’re a man.
She was still eating when I left.
As I emerged on to the street the boy with the burlap sack was lounging on the corner opposite, gazing indifferently at nothing. I began to wonder about him. I had nothing particular to do that morning. I went down a sidestreet towards the Avenida Chapultepec. I turned sharp right and then sharp left and waited on a corner. In a few minutes the boy came into view again, strolling down the other sidewalk.
If you are an American, and therefore automatically a millionaire, it is not unusual to be followed for blocks in Mexico by someone who wants to sell a silver watch chain, or maybe a handbag with a reproachful-looking baby alligator attached to its side. But this boy had made no attempt to accost me, and that aroused my suspicious curiosity. He had stopped in the middle of the block.
Run to Death Page 5
