Run to Death

by Patrick Quentin

  There was still no sign of him as I eased Vera out into the anonymous crowd beyond the cemetery gates. We wended our way through flowers and pigs and beer-parlours to Vera’s parked car. It was a glossy new station wagon coupe, and I remembered that I had noticed it parked that morning on the Calle Londres. Just as she was climbing in, Vera Garcia saw the ferris wheel in the carnival ground.

  “Oh, the big wheel. I am crazy for the big wheel. Up, up in the air. We go to the wheel? We…” The great lashes dropped piously. “No. Comes first the poor old man, my husband.”

  She backed recklessly, and headed the station wagon away through a complication of babies and dogs. I kept down low in my seat, but before we left I glanced back.

  There was no sign of Junior.

  I felt relief and an exaggerated affection for my new friend. She was just what I had thought her—a feather-pated ballerina—but she wasn’t spoiled. In spite of the frou-frou there was a rustic solidity. She was fresh and appetizing as a glass of raw milk begged at a farmhouse door.

  Once out on the main highway she drove with suicidal abandon through the barren countryside, where grey, dusty mountains edged the horizon. I listened contentedly to her babble of chatter until at length a great bleak church loomed on a hill. In front of it, supported on a high stone column, was a huge painted crown.

  “Ah, the crown of the Lady of Los Remedios,” said she. “Already we are here. I make the good time, no? I drive the car well, yes?”

  “Like a jet-propulsion plane,” I said.

  She asked: “What is it, this jet-propulsion?”

  “Fast,” I said.

  Although I had never visited Los Remedios, I’d heard about it. It is one of Mexico’s most revered shrines. Vera parked on the outskirts of the inevitable market, and we moved into the spacious church square. Indians were streaming into the huge cathedral through piles of pottery and heaped, sizzling spare-ribs. The squeaky sound of a reed organ trailed out, warring with the juke-boxes on the market.

  We went into the church, which was tall and penumbrous, with a foam of flowers at the altar. No service was in progress, but the church was crowded. All the benches were occupied. Groups of men, women and children knelt in the aisle lost in prayer or staring, wide-eyed, at richly clad saints in candle-lit niches.

  Vera Garcia whispered: “The shrine is in the back.”

  We went down the aisle and through an archway into a chamber beyond. It was vivid with the costumes of Indian pilgrims from all states. They were crowding, waiting their turn, at the foot of a stone stairway which led up to the shrine which contained the little miraculous figure of the Lady. The figure is believed to have come from Spain with Cortes, and its subsequent history, coloured by legend, has built up for it a mighty reputation of power.

  On the walls were hundreds of naïve paintings which had been sent in gratitude by the recipients of miracles. They showed the accidents or diseases which the Lady had mercifully neutralized—bloody automobile crashes, green, sickly babies in cribs, gaunt cripples with crutches.

  “I go to say please for the poor old man,” breathed Vera. She smiled me her dazzling secular smile, and then proceeded reverently to take her place in the line of waiting pilgrims.

  An open door beyond showed an iron balcony which looked down on a sun-splashed patio. There was, I knew, a disused Franciscan convent attached to the back of the church. Leaving Vera to her devotions, I stepped out on to the balcony. A passage led into the convent. No one was there. The massive, deserted solitude was pleasant. I went idly down the passage. It turned twice, with empty, cell-like chambers on either side. I came to a great nail-studded door which looked Moorish. It was half open. I went through it.

  I found myself in a large storeroom filled with ecclesiastical objects which had either been discarded or were waiting to be repaired. Old confessionals, benches, dark sombre canvases and broken plaster saints were huddled dustily together. Sunlight slid through a high, barred window. A fly droned lazily.

  I paused to inspect a three-foot plaster figure of a monk which stood on an old refectory table close to the door. I didn’t know who he was. But he had real hair and a real cassock of coarse brown cloth. One of his arms had been broken off, perhaps by revolutionary soldiers or perhaps by the carelessness of a dusting-woman. The other arm was stretched towards me as if in benediction.

  I stooped to study the monk’s hand. As I did so, I was conscious of a faint sound behind me. I turned. Instantly there was a glitter of metal in the sunlight, and before I could straighten I felt the violent impact of a blow on my temple.

  I staggered. But I could still see. For a split second of exaggerated clarity I gazed at the figure of a boy in denims, young, pretty, like a flower. His eyes, watching me, were as expressionless as an image’s.

  He was holding a revolver by its muzzle. Under his other arm was something else. What was it?

  A sack? A burlap sack?

  I tried to step towards him, but everything started to blur. I twisted back in an attempt to cling to the refectory table for support. My hand groped and missed. I was dimly conscious of the plaster monk’s arm thrust out towards me with its dead plaster fingers. I felt myself falling.

  Then everything blacked out.

  IX

  I was conscious of sunlight on my lids, pain in my head and coldness. I opened my eyes. Above me loomed the figure of the monk, bizarre from that angle with his doll’s robe and his snapped-off arm. He helped me remember. I thought of the boy’s flat, uninterested gaze, the gleaming revolver and the blow. I lifted a hand to my sore temple. My fingers traced a swelling. It didn’t seem to be anything worse than a bruise. But as my arm crossed my field of vision I stared at it stupidly. It was bare. I half lifted my head, looking down at my body. I understood the coldness then.

  Except for my shorts, I was completely naked.

  I got up unsteadily from the dank stone floor. I shook my head, trying to clear it. I thought of the burlap sack. So that was what it had been for. Junior had been following me all morning for a chance to steal my clothes. He, like Halliday, seemed to take me for the glass of fashion and the mould of form.

  Gee, that’s a good-looking suit. Let’s sock him and own like it.

  Black rage rose up in me. I was mad at myself for underestimating Junior’s talents as a shadow. I was even madder at the humiliation of being abandoned naked, in a Franciscan convent.

  I looked round for something to put on. There was nothing. Only the benches, the carved confessionals, the indifferent plaster figures and the shaft of sunlight from the high, barred window. Then I remembered that my plane ticket, my tourist card and about eight hundred pesos had been in my wallet. I swore under my breath. And then, as I stepped away from the refectory table, my bare foot struck against something. I looked down. My wallet was lying on the stone floor under the doll monk.

  I stooped and grabbed it up. I searched through it. Its contents were intact. The tourist card, the plane ticket, the money were all there.

  For a moment I felt relief and nothing else. Then suspicion started to flare up. The wallet had been buttoned into my pants pocket. I was sure of it. However clumsy Junior had been in undressing me, he couldn’t have dropped it out by accident. He must have left it there deliberately. Eight hundred pesos and a plane ticket to America would have been more of a temptation for a boy like Junior than the apple to Eve. He must have been working under very strict orders Someone—Halliday—had told him to get my clothes but on no account to steal my wallet. Why?

  Out of kindness? I laughed out loud. A surly laugh. They’d left me my wallet because they had some reason for wanting me to keep my ticket and money. That was the only answer to that one. And why had they taken my clothes? Because this “thing” they imagined I had been given by or had taken from Deborah was small enough to be concealed somewhere in a suit?

  I was too mad to think it through any farther than that. But there was one thing that forced itself brutally on my conscious
ness. They’d killed Deborah and they’d slugged me to get what they wanted. The fact that I didn’t have it made no difference. I couldn’t go to them and say: “Listen, chum. You’ve got the wrong guy. They thought I was their man, and they were going to go on thinking that way. Whether I liked it or not, I was in this up to the neck.

  It wasn’t any longer a question of: I’m leaving in two days. The question was: Am I going to stay alive long enough to make the plane? I paced up and down the room, cold, embarrassed and smouldering.

  The door creaked. I turned.

  Vera Garcia hurried in, her silver-fox cape swinging round her shoulders. She took a step towards me and then gave the hammiest Russian double-take I had ever seen.

  “Gods!” she exclaimed. “What happens with you? You take the sun bath?”

  “Yes,” I said. “There’s nothing like a convent cell for getting a delightful nut-brown tan.”

  She said: “Is this true?”

  “No,” I said. “Our friend, Junior. He followed me here, slugged me and stole my clothes.”

  “The pretty boy with the cage of the bird?”

  “The pretty boy with the cage of the bird.”

  She giggled. She thought it was funny. “I come from the shrine. I wait. All the time I am waiting for you and wondering.”

  “You didn’t see him go by with the sack?”

  “I notice no one. So many all the time, back and forth.” She came and put her hands on my bare arms. She studied me appraisingly, a frankly female smile moving her lips. “It is the good body you have. A man’s body. Strong.” She noticed the swelling above my ear, and her smile fled before Slavic indignation. “You poor darling! He hit you.”

  “What did you think he did? Ask me to pose for an art photo?”

  “The thief,” she cried. “The murderer. We catch him.”

  “Right now,” I said, “you’d better rustle me up something to wear. I’m tired of being an ad for Strength and Health.”

  “Yes, yes.” She swung the cape off her shoulders and put it around me. “You take my animal.”

  I glanced down. From above, it didn’t look good. “A silver-fox wrap and a pair of shorts,” I said. “What sort of an outfit is that?”

  She shook her head in solemn agreement. “No. Is not good for a man. Wait. I find something.”

  She hurried away. A few moments later I heard a turbulence of scurrying feet and excited voices outside. Vera’s voice rose above the others in high Spanish. The door was thrown open and Vera ran in. Behind her was a priest in a white cassock, four black-eyed little acolytes, three labourers in denims and an old, old woman with her head wrapped in a blue rebozo.

  Her eyes flashing, Vera pointed at me as if I were an exhibit and jabbered, waving her hands up and down. Her Russian soul had no concern for modesty. It never entered her head, I was sure, that an audience made me uncomfortable. The acolytes giggled. The old, old woman crossed herself. The priest came to me, examined my head solemnly and returned to Vera. Everyone gesticulated.

  I could not follow the course of the argument, but I noticed what looked like the edge of a pair of pants protruding from the bottom of one of the labourer’s denims. I took a twenty-peso bill from my wallet and handed it to her. “He has pants on,” I said. “Buy the denims.”

  Vera took the money, concentrating on the one labourer, jabbering and shaking the bill at him like a fist. He simpered and hung his head.

  Over her shoulder she cried to me: “Off with the denims, I say. He say he shy.”

  The priest, left out of the argument, was watching me disapprovingly over steel-rimmed spectacles. One of the acolytes tugged at his skirts. He knocked him away with his hand. The old woman had sat down on the floor and was blinking at me from under the rebozo.

  Vera, abandoning persuasion for more direct tactics, fell upon the bashful Indian and started to undo the buttons which held up his denims at the shoulders. The denims dropped to the floor, and the Indian, decent in a pair of pants, stepped sulkily out of them. Vera pushed the money into his hand and brought the denims triumphantly to me, laughing her great bell laugh.

  “Atta girl,” I said.

  “I tell you,” she said, “when I am mad, they are all afraid.”

  I put on the overalls. I managed to button them at the shoulders, but they were grotesquely small. They clove to my thighs, and the legs stopped somewhere half-way down my calves. Vera studied them and my bare feet delightedly.

  “Oh, is so pretty. Like Nijinsky.”

  “Gee,” I said. “Tanks loads.”

  “What is this, tanks loads?”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  The priest had seized his opportunity to escape from such disturbingly eccentric foreigners. The acolytes had gone with him. The stripped Indian suddenly decided that everything was very funny. It must have dawned on him at last that twenty pesos was enough to buy three or four new pairs of denims in the market. He was showing the bill to the other Indians. They were all grinning.They filed out of the room. Only the old woman was left, sitting on the floor. I think she had forgotten why she was there and was just going on sitting because she was tired.

  Vera was an excitable girl. Now she started getting maternal about my bruise.

  “Quick,” she said. “Quick. We go to the doctor.”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” I said. “I have a thick skull. What I need is a suit and a pair of shoes. Unless you’ve any more devotions on your mind, let’s get back to my place.”

  We returned to the room where the shrine was situated and passed through the crowd of patient pilgrims into the church itself. It was still full of worshippers. They weren’t interested in the spectacle of a gorgeous girl in silver fox walking with a barefoot man in skin-tight denims. Even in the market no one paid us any attention. Mexicans have learned to expect or accept anything from foreigners.

  But Vera Garcia was not a Mexican, and she had the theatre in her blood. She was eating up the drama of the situation. This was Her Adventure. On the drive home I was swamped with suggestions and questions.

  My answers were non-committal because I was too busy figuring what to do. I couldn’t forget the whole thing. That was obvious now. There was too great a chance of something even less pleasant happening later on. Apart from anything else, they must know where I lived, because Junior had started to tail me from my front door. Even if it were possible, I was much too mad to abandon the apartment and skulk in a hotel until the plane left.

  Yet it wasn’t easy to decide on a plan, when I knew so little of what I was up against. Vera was chattering about the police and the Embassy. But this was something much more complicated and dangerous than a casual encounter with a thug. The police might make a half-hearted attempt to locate Junior. They might even recover my clothes from The Monte de Piedad—the national pawn shop. The Embassy, certainly, would be sympathetically incredulous, and talk about the delicate balance of friendship between the two countries.

  None of that would bring me closer to a solution of the mystery of Deborah Brand and Halliday, or make me safer.

  No. For better or worse, I was on my own. At least from now on I’d be on my guard, ready for anything.

  If Mr. Halliday started anything new, I’d give him back as good as he gave.

  When we reached the apartment, Vera Garcia came up without being invited. I wasn’t in the mood for dizzy glamour girls. I wanted to be alone to think some more. But she’d stuck by me valiantly, and I didn’t have the heart to throw her out. I opened the front door and let her pass ahead into the hall.

  As I paused to take my keys out of the lock she hurried inquisitively forward. “Gods!” I heard her exclaim. “Such a mess! In your life you need the woman.”

  I joined her at the threshold of the living-room and saw exactly what she meant. The room had been ransacked. All the drawers in the desk were open. Papers were scattered on the floor. The cushions had been tugged off the couches and tossed around.

  I hur
ried into the bedroom. Here the chaos was even more complete. All my suits had been taken from the closet and were piled at random on one of the beds. The bureau drawers were open, with handkerchiefs and shorts sticking out of them. Even my suitcases had been lugged down from the top of the closet and lay open on the carpet, their lining had been systematically ripped out.

  Before I got too mad, I felt a pinch of awe. There was nothing small about Halliday—if it were Halliday. While one of his stooges had dogged me through the city, another had broken into my apartment. He certainly wanted whatever he wanted badly.

  I thought of Deborah’s silver hair streaming below the green water of the cenote. Part of me began to wish that I had gone with Iris to Hollywood and never seen Yucatan. But another part—the part that was mad—started slowly to champion Deborah’s cause. Now I was beginning to get a personal taste of what she’d been up against, and I felt a genuine pity for her. This was too rugged for a kid of twenty. I remembered her young, clumsy lips against mine. I wasn’t going to be happy until I’d done something very nasty to the person who’d thrown her down that cenote.

  Vera had come into the bedroom. I heard her voice, high with indignation. “What happen? This is not the untidiness. They burgle, no? They hit you. Now they burgle you.”

  She came round me, put her hands on my denimed arms and looked up at me, half astonished, half fascinated. “What is it with you? Why they chase you and hit you and burgle you? Perhaps you are the spy? Yes? Or the big gangster?”

  I wasn’t going to tell her any more than I could help. It was too early for allies.

  “So far as I know,” I said, “I’m just a tourist.”

  “You do not understand why they burgle and hit?”

  “No.”

  She turned to the phone. “We call the police.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”