I thought of edging around the pyramid, in the hope that the moat would stop. But it was too dangerous. If I moved much to the right or the left I might get into the orbit of the man guarding the track from Peña Pobre.
I had to make the best of what there was.
Above me, to the left, I could see Mrs. Snood’s vague little form and the burning cigarette. Damn the cigarette! It made a target. She was coming towards me. In a few seconds she would be immediately above me.
I half opened my mouth, ready to give the signal, swallowing to clear my throat. I kept my finger on the trigger of the colt.
One… two… three…. She was directly above, about thirty feet up.
“Lena,” I whispered. “Lena, it’s Peter.”
The sound of my voice almost deafened me. There was an echo. It picked up the whisper and tossed it around the pyramid like the hiss of a giant snake.
She had stopped dead above me.
“Run,” I whispered, cursing the echo. “To the main road. Vera’s there. The car.”
The snake hissed again. The air all around that monstrous devil’s bun seethed with the sound of my voice.
Lena was still rigid above.
“Run, Lena. Drop the cigarette. Run.”
Suddenly she gave a little cry as if the emotion in her, pent up so long, was stronger than her will.
“Peter,” she screamed.
The scream was like the yell of a thousand devils rocking around the pyramid.
There was nothing I could do about it now.
“Peter,” she screamed again. “Look out. He’s behind you. Quick…”
Instinct in me reacted to her warning. I dropped flat on my stomach. Instantly a shot rang out from the darkness behind me. Lena had been right. One of them must have detected me, and been stalking me through the scrubland. Her shout had probably saved my life.
I swung round and sent an answering shot through the darkness. Above me on the pyramid Lena had started to run along the ramp. She hadn’t heard what I’d said about the cigarette, or it hadn’t registered. She still clutched it, waving it like a beacon.
“Drop the cigarette,” I yelled.
As I did so two more shots rang out. This time they came from the top of the mound. I saw Lena’s cigarette spurt through the air like a firefly. There was a high, shrilling cry. And no more running footsteps.
Cold with anxiety, I sent another shot into the dark scrubland behind me. I heard a vague curse, then a scurrying. Dimly I caught a glimpse of a figure dashing away through the cactuses over the lava-land towards the Peña Pobre track.
I’d scared him away. A couple of shots, and he was running like a fool. I sent a third shot after him, but I couldn’t give chase. There was Lena to think of—the cry, the thudding footsteps which had suddenly stopped.
I leaped down into the dry moat. Clinging to jagged stones, I swung myself up on to the first ramp. There was no sound now. Nothing. Unless the whine of the crickets was sound. There were two more ramps before I could reach Lena—and a second gunman at the top of the mound.
I climbed the next wall to the next ramp. I climbed to the third. I stood for the fraction of a second, silhouetted against the sky behind, deliberately presenting myself as a target.
But nothing happened. I fired at the top of the mound. There was no answering shot.
Had the second man run away, too?
Not caring any more, I dashed down the ramp towards the place where Lena must be. The single star was blazing. It gave a sort of false, miniature moonlight. Ahead the ramp curved round the stone wall. Something was there, something on the curve, dark, huddled on the ground.
I ran to it. I dropped down. I heard a little moan. My hand went out and touched hair. It moved on and touched something else, smooth, waxy.
The camelia. The pink camelia Lena Snood had bought in Xochimilco.
My heart seemed caught up in my throat.
“Lena….”
I slid my arm round her and eased her into a sitting position. I couldn’t see her, not really, only a vague blur that was her face and something pale, dangling, a hand.
She stirred in my arms. “Peter.”
“Yes, Lena. It’s okay. It’s me.”
“Peter.” The voice was thin, like a ghost’s voice. “I had to do it. They made me. They made me phone you. I…”
“I know, Lena. I know.”
Far off in the Peña Pobre direction I heard a car start. Fury, as I’d never known fury before, took me by the scruff of the neck and shook me. They’d expected me to walk meekly into the trap. Because I’d come with a gun, I’d scared them off. They were flying for their lives with their job half done. They’d shot Lena. That was their speed—to shoot a little woman with no way of defending herself. But they’d run from a guy with a gun.
“Peter….”
It wasn’t really Peter. It was a blur of sound trying to be Peter. She went heavy against my arm. I couldn’t see where they’d shot her. I couldn’t see anything. But I knew they’d done what they wanted to do.
She wasn’t going to be able to tell me what she knew.
My mouth was like lava ash. I was trembling, out of control. I wanted to kill them. If they’d been there I’d have done it, picked them up with my naked hands and split their skulls against the stones.
“Lena,” I managed. “Lena, don’t worry. It’s okay.”
But she didn’t answer. The body slumped back on my arm. Somewhere, off on the road, a shot rang out. I hardly heard it. Certainly I didn’t think about it.
I lit a match. Then, before it illuminated Lena Snood’s face, I shook it out.
What was the point of looking at her?
I didn’t want to look at a woman that I knew was dead.
XVI
I had to see, of course. I lit another match. The frail light flickered. As I looked down, I forced myself not to feel. Both shots had got her, one through the heart, the other lower down. Lucky marksmanship.
Lucky!
I looked round. The detective story wasn’t there. Or the carnations. They had, of course, taken her to some other place first, from which they’d made her telephone me. They had the book now. They’d only brought her here as a lure to trap us.
And they’d been too cowardly to make any real effort to get us. A couple of shots from a man in the dark and they’d scuttled away.
I let the match burn out. Anger surged up again, half choking me. I’d done what I could. But what was the use of saying that? Maybe I’d killed her. Maybe if I hadn’t come they’d have let her live.
I thought: She’s lying here dead on an old, desolate Mexican pyramid. She’s never going back to Newark.
But even pity for her couldn’t grow in the heat of my fury.
Then slowly, as I crouched in the darkness, with the crickets scything around me, I regained some sort of control and remembered the shot which had sounded from the road. They must have fired at Vera. That was the only explanation. It was typical of them, too, to fire at an unarmed woman while they ran away from me.
I jumped up, urged into activity by a new anxiety. There was nothing I could do for Lena. It was Vera now who needed me. I swung myself off the wall and dropped to the ramp below. I scrambled down the other two ramps, pulled myself up out of the moat and started to run, tripping and stumbling, across the cactus waste-land in the direction of the road.
I wasn’t thinking. There was too much hate and anger in me for that. Ahead, against the sky, I could see the clump of eucalyptus trees which marked the edge of the road. I reached them. The dark station wagon was parked where it had been when I left. Vera wasn’t at the wheel.
The anxiety welling up, I called: “Vera.”
Her voice answered immediately from beyond the car. I hurried round it, and found her squatting by the back wheel. A jack and an extra wheel were lying on the road at her side. She got up and ran to me.
“They shot the car as they go by. They shoot to puncture the tyre, to stop
us from following. But I change the wheel. Is ready.”
“But you’re all right?”
“Yes, yes. But the scream, the shots…”
Relief that she was unhurt floated somewhere above my horror at Lena’s death. “Who was in the car?”
“The boy, Junior; he is driving. But there is another. In the back. I see the hat of the man. No more. It is he who shoot.”
“Halliday.”
“But Lena.”
I said: “Lena’s dead.”
“She called out to warn me. She saved my life. She ran with a cigarette. They shot her.”
Now, in my numbing anger, I was obsessed with Halliday. Why had I ever tried to complicate the picture? The truth had always been simple. Deborah Brand had been escaping from Halliday. She had fled him to Chichén. He had wanted the detective story. She had not given it to him. He had killed her.
And now he had killed Lena.
Suddenly I couldn’t control myself any more. I started to shake. “They shot her down like a dog. She didn’t have a chance. And it’s my fault. I—I…”
“Peter.” Vera took my arm. “Is not your fault. What are you? The Joan of Arc, that you have to save the world? You did what you could. You risk your own life.”
But I could only think of Lena sprawled back there in the wilderness on that evil mound, alone with one pink camelia for a wreath. I said: “I’ve got to go back to her.”
“No.” Vera’s voice was sharp. “Leave her alone.”
I broke away from her and started towards the trees. She ran after me. “Peter, you are half crazy from the shock. What can you do? Take the body to the police? You think they believe when you come on with a body and your story? Leave her, I say.”
“I can’t leave her.”
“But she is dead. Is terrible, but is true. Is like the poor old man in the cemetery. Does he smell the lilies, the tuberoses? Come.” She was pulling me towards the car. “Later, when we get back to town, I call from the booth to tell them to find her, to take care of the body. But don’t go back now.”
Her words registered enough to make me realize that I was acting like a clown. There was absolutely nothing to be gained by going back to where Lena lay. And, with our elaborate and implausible story, there was little good in going to a foreign police force congenitally suspicious of Americans.
This had gone far beyond the point where it could be turned over to the police.
I felt exhausted, as if I’d run ten miles. But I was sensible again. I picked up the spare wheel and the jack and put them back in the car. Then I followed Vera inside. As she started to drive back to town I only half listened to her voice rambling on. I knew she was talking to distract me from myself. But I was calm now, and I knew what I had to do.
Once we got back to Mexico City I would go to Halliday’s apartment and smoke him out. The time had come to turn the tables, to be the hunter for a change, instead of a fugitive.
“Peter.” Vera’s voice broke into my thoughts.
“Yes, Vera.”
“Listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“From Mrs. Snood they get this book, and yet still they want to lure us in the trap. Why?”
“To kill us.”
“No. If they want to kill us, why do they not kill me when I am there in the car alone? Or you at the mound? Or earlier in the convent? Is something else. Even with the book they do not get what they want. There is more.”
“More?”
“They think you know more. That is why they want to lure you to the pyramid, to get you and make you tell. Think, Peter. This Deborah Brand, you are sure she not tell or give you something else?”
“Sure.”
“Think. Tell me everything. Begin from the beginning. Everything. We try to think.”
It was something to do, something to keep me from thinking about how I wanted to kill Halliday. While we sped through the dark suburbs I tried to reconstruct everything Deborah had said to me from the original pick-up through the time she had rubbed my back to the other time when she had spent the night and to the final walk to the cenote.
Vera kept prodding me with questions.
“She tell you she was going to Mexico City?”
“That’s what she said.”
“But you never see the tickets of the plane?”
“No. They weren’t in her pocket-book either.”
“Then perhaps she lie.”
“Sure.”
“She mentioned the father, the Finn, the archæologist in Peru. She mention the American mother who is dead. Never she mention who she was going to see? The brother, the sister, the aunt, the uncle?”
When she said Uncle a faint recollection stirred. I struggled to grasp it. Tantalizingly, there remained that sensation of something just beyond the edge of my consciousness. Then, without the slightest reason, it seemed, the remark Vera had made a few minutes before sprang back into my mind.
What are you; The Joan of Arc;
Joan of Arc—Uncle. The crazy combination of images stuck. Then suddenly I knew why. I remembered Deborah lying behind the mosquito netting of the other bed in Chichén-Itzá. Deborah, half asleep, as I had thought, murmuring gibberish. Birds in the road. Waiting for their lovers.
Joan of Arc crowned him in 1462. (That had been the date, hadn’t it?)
Crowned who;
My uncle.
That must have been nice for him.
It was. A new Joan of Arc. Don’t tell. Ever. It’s a secret.
Vera glanced at me expectantly. “What happens? You think of something?”
“Maybe I do. It’s crazy. Something she said when I thought she was half asleep. She was muttering a lot of nonsense. Then she said it.”
I told Vera. She looked blank. “The new Joan of Arc crowns the uncle? What is this? Is foolish.”
Excitement pricked me. “Who did Joan of Arc crown?”
“What do I know of this Joan of Arc?”
I knew. “She crowned the Dauphin of France. She crowned him in Orleans. A new Joan of Arc. In New Orleans there’s a Dauphine Street”
She was excited now. “Yes? But…”
“1462. I can’t remember when Joan of Arc crowned him, but it wasn’t then. It was somewhere in the thirteen hundreds. Don’t tell anyone, she said. It’s a secret. Maybe we’ve got it. Maybe she was telling me where she was headed—to her uncle, Mr. Brand, 1462 Dauphine Street, New Orleans.”
“But why in the riddle? If she want to tell you, she tell you. Why so complicated with the Joan of Arc?”
I thought I saw. “Perhaps it wasn’t meant to mean anything to me then. Deborah knew she was in great danger. Perhaps when she was lying there she suddenly thought it might be a good idea to build me up as a possible understudy in case she failed to get through herself.”
“But why in the riddle?” Vera repeated.
“Because that way, in case she didn’t need me, it wouldn’t have given anything away. But if she did need me later, once she’d given me the detective story and I’d examined it, maybe the whole Joan of Arc business would have become plain.”
“And this explains why they are all the time so eager to kidnap you? And why now they run away when you come with the gun. They are not cowards. They want you alive. They are afraid with the shooting they kill you.”
“I guess so.”
“They have the book, but without this information the book is no use. They do not know the address. They do not know where she was going?”
I was increasingly sure we had blundered on the truth. This way, everything Deborah Brand had done made sense. Something of great importance was at stake. I’d realized that ever since Halliday had started to make my life miserable. Deborah, torn between a necessary desire to distrust everyone and the realization of her own great danger, had done the only thing she could have done. She had told the only available person something which would have meant nothing unless she decided later to hand over the book. She had been groo
ming me in case of need.
The need had come.
And if I had been smarter and examined The Wrong Murder before Lena had taken it, I might have justified Deborah’s faith in me.
And Lena would never have died.
We were heading into the city now. Deborah’s sad little silver-haired ghost seemed very near. I still hadn’t the faintest idea of what she had been trying to do, but, having experienced her enemies, I was on her side. There was no doubt about that.
As the car sped on, a new idea began to form. Wasn’t there still a chance of doing something of what she had wanted me to do, or at least of frustrating Halliday? New Orleans was on my plane route home. If I stopped over there for a couple of hours, I could go to see Mr. Brand. I could give him nothing and tell him hardly more, but I could at least warn him of what had happened to his niece.
My mind made itself up. I said: “Vera, to-morrow I’m going to New Orleans.”
She took it calmly as if she’d expected me to say that. “And I come, too.”
“You?”
“I begin. I finish.”
“Now, Vera…”
Her eyes flashed. “Always it is this: Now, Vera. You do not want me for love. That I know. Only you love this—this woman in New York. But you think I am the female dog? The pat on the head? Then the kick in the bottom? I begin. I finish.”
I opened my mouth, but she cut in:
“You say Now Vera again, and I scream. Here in Mexico is danger for me, too. Thanks to you, they shoot at me. You want to leave me here to be shot with bullets, like poor little Mrs. Snood? Pouff!”
I didn’t argue any more because I realized that I wanted her to come. Once I reached New York I’d probably never see her again. I liked that idea increasingly less. This way there could at least be to-morrow.
“But what about your visa as a Mexican? Can you get it soon enough?”
“Who say I am the Mexican? Through the husband, yes. That is all.”
“Then the Russian visa or the Ukranian visa or whatever you are.”
She laughed, a funny little gurgling laugh. “Already I have the passport. There is no need for visas. I am the American.”
Run to Death Page 13
