by Wade Miller
Then they both wallowed in a keen glow of pain, kneeing and gouging and butting, breaking out every dirty action they had ever used or seen. Biggo tasted the carpet dust in his nostrils. He thought of nothing but the twenty Arabs at first and then of nothing at all. He bit and grunted and groped for joints to smash. "This is what," he said hoarsely. The fierce joy of the fight was all mixed up with the flashes of agony.
In the first minute he was supremely happy; he had been born for this. And in the first minute blood was streaming into his vision from his torn eyebrow. The eye itself blazed where Hardesty's thumb had lost its hold. They broke apart and spun to their feet.
Hardesty's face was wrong, a damp mask with the jaw slipped to one side. He hadn't noticed the dislocation yet. Biggo laughed and charged, bulling the other man against the wall but he couldn't get his arms free to hit him. Biggo rammed the jaw some more with the top of his head. "I'm beating you," he growled and his breath slobbered in and out. "I'm beating you." It was a sweet sound, hearing Hardesty's head bounce against the plaster. "Maybe you'll learn to-"
Hardesty slipped aside and kicked him in the kneecap. Biggo faltered and caught a judo chop across the side of the neck that paralyzed his right arm. He fell down and felt the flame of a kick in the stomach. He grabbed Hardesty's pants cuff and twisted him down on his face. He raised a fist high and smashed it at the back of the exposed neck. He only saw his knuckles crush the carpet nap; that arm was numb. He crouched, staring stupidly at the place on the carpet. "I missed," he said, amazed.
He located Hardesty across the room. The other man's bow-tie was gone and his shirt shredded. His mustache was mixed with nose-blood. He discovered the fault with his jaw and jerked it back into place.
Biggo mumbled, "I missed." He lumbered to his feet, his mouth wide in search of breath, and charged. He cursed, knowing he was moving too slowly. His wind had disappeared. There was nothing within his huge cage of ribs but a dry ache. Hardesty stood there, grinning like a devil, and met his charge and knocked him down. He kicked his shin across Biggo's throat.
Gagging, Biggo scrambled away. But Hardesty didn't bother to follow. He stayed on his feet, secure and confident. Biggo whimpered and struggled to lift the suddenly tremendous weight of his own body. He tried to shake the tired feeling out of his head and saw the red drops spatter on the carpet and charged again.
Hardesty sauntered aside and met him with a heel of the hand. Biggo's head jolted back and he saw the chandelier swimming in the sky above and he thought his spine had come loose. From then on, it was Hardesty's fight.
Biggo saw the white grin dimly. It had bruising force which beat about him everywhere and drove him backwards across the room. He couldn't escape; he could hardly breathe. He would reach deep within his big frame for a breath to help him live and then reach deeper still, all to find nothing. He sobbed for air and fought back without really seeing and forgetting to close his fists.
Then his knees were buckled and his head was propped against the grill of a banking window. Hardesty wove an arm through the grill and levered with it against Biggo's throat. He spoke for the first time.
"Say it," Hardesty commanded.
Biggo strangled. "Not through," the words labored out. Hardesty tightened the arm and Biggo couldn't feel life in any part of his body. He forgot about everything but air and how sweet it was. He lost sight of the white-grinning face above his as the clouds rolled in.
"Say it," he heard the voice.
Biggo moved his lips a good many times. Finally, the words came in a croak. "Ezzy yellallah."
Hardesty let him fall. When Biggo came to, Hardesty had buckled the holster on again and was adjusting his coat to hide his tattered shirt. He cleaned his nose and mustache and then came over.
"How you feeling, Biggo?" he said without rancor.
Biggo grunted.
"You're over the hill, that's all. You'd better stay in your own class after this." He helped Biggo to his feet. "Come on, Dad. I'll take you home."
Biggo swayed on his feet and laughed without heart. He let Hardesty wipe off his face and they shook hands as they had always done finally. "Good fight," Biggo mumbled. Leaning on Hardesty, limping, he let himself be helped out of the casino. They went out a side door and along the beach front of the hotel in the blinding sun. They managed to stay away from people.
* * *
Jinny sat mending a stocking by the window which overlooked the parking lot. She just looked at Biggo as Hardesty brought him in. Nobody said anything. Biggo slumped down on the nearest bed. Hardesty left.
Jinny got a washrag out of the bathroom. "Come on over here to the window." Biggo did. She tried to be careful of his face. "It hurt?"
"Uh-huh."
"You deserved it."
She helped him out of his coat. Even her gentlest touch was agonizing. She got her nail scissors and snipped away the rest of his shirt. She found angry marks on his body to press the cold cloth against. He began to feel like all one being again. He said thanks.
She shook her head, working on his mangled eyebrow again. "I suppose you're satisfied now, now that you've gotten yourself hurt."
Biggo grunted. He touched her arm and pointed. Across the parking lot, two figures had met suddenly, collided, and broken apart. One was Lew Hardesty on his way to his Chevy. The other was Adolfo, stepping suddenly from between two parked cars. The seeming accident over, Adolfo was hurrying away. Hardesty opened his car door, then felt hastily inside the coat. He looked around helplessly for the vanished Adolfo.
"There you are," Biggo said through swollen lips. "It all works out in the end."
"What was it? Did that Mexican pick his pocket or something?"
"What else is Lew going to think?" Biggo reached in his own hip pocket and pulled out the pearl-handled Mauser automatic. It cuddled in his hand. "I'm back in business again," he said. He chuckled proudly.
Jinny stood up and looked down on him, pitying. "Sure, sure, that's why you went and just let him beat you up. Go on, tell me," she said. "Oh, you're so damn clever." She went into the bathroom.
Biggo tried his best but he couldn't feel clever. He couldn't feel anything except a million years old.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Saturday, September 16, 5:00 p.m.
He tossed around on the bed, feeling the need of rest but unable to get any. In the middle of the afternoon, Jinny said she was going out to wade and left him alone. He grumbled to himself.
Not that he hadn't been beaten before in his life. But he'd never been left without a good excuse before. All he could think of was what Hardesty had said: He was getting old. So, as if one fight a day wasn't enough, he fought that idea and later on cat-napped a little and was awakened about five by a knock.
It was Valentin, Pabla's accompanist, at the door. He sneered at Biggo's half-dressed battered appearance as if it might soil his greenish lounge suit. He said, "A message from Senorita Ybarra."
Up to then Biggo had been ready to kick him the length of the hall for waking him up. Pabla's name made the difference. "Sure. Let's have it."
"Since you did not see fit to attend the concert last night," said Valentin, "the Senorita Ybarra will play for you in her rooms." Having done his painful duty, he strolled away.
Biggo blinked, then yelled him down. "Not so fast. Say it again." Valentin gave him a reptilian look and repeated softly. Biggo asked, "Right now? Where's her room?"
"Her suite," said Valentin. He gave a second floor number in the waist of the hotel. "You will doubtless be able to find it." Obviously, he hoped Biggo would be struck dead first. Biggo let it pass. Obviously, this was Pabla's idea over the objections of her two chaperons.
Biggo gazed at himself in the mirror. "You," he said.
"Si."
"You she wants to see." His smile looked awful. His face wouldn't win any prizes today. But most of his aches had gone already. He dressed swiftly. He hid the stolen gun in a bureau drawer but stowed the Bible in his coat pocket. C
lean clothes made some difference. He left the room briskly.
Jinny was coming down the hall, carrying her shoes. She was windblown and sunburned and cheerful again. "Oh, boy!" she said at the sight of him.
He ducked his head. "Uh, I'm going out for a walk."
"I'll hold my breath, you can bet."
He growled something and kept going. He thought about how unfair it was to contrast the two women. Pabla made him feel as big as he was and young. She had a spell about her. She was the one.
* * *
Mamacita opened the door for him. The old woman was about as friendly as Valentin. Biggo couldn't blame either of them. Their job was to watch over a young girl. To them, Biggo was just another man, without honor. They didn't know how special he felt.
The suite was the hotel's best. There was a baby grand piano and the violin lay on the piano's shawl. Pabla came in smiling; she didn't play at keeping him waiting. She had on the same pale blue satin gown and the same misty scarf around her shoulders as the night before. Her hair was brighter gold in the westering afternoon. "See, Senor Biggo? For your concert, I wore-"
She saw his face. "Biggo-you've been hurt-"
"Huh?" Admiring her, he had forgotten. He felt his bad eye. "I had a little accident."
Pabla moved her hand and Mamacita went into the bedroom obediently and closed the door. They were alone. Only then did the girl cross the room to him. She was deeply concerned. "Oh, my poor friend," she murmured. Her fingertips moved over his face, unbelieving. "It must have been a very tremendous accident."
"My own foolishness, I'm sorry to say."
"Does it pain when I touch it? Did I hurt you?"
"No." Biggo had shied away when the firm ends of her breasts encountered his chest. It embarrassed him that she didn't know what she did to him. "You make it feel better."
"Thank you," she said but she drifted across the room again and he wondered if he had done the wrong thing. She was a new sensation to him and he wanted her so badly-he meant to have her-he didn't know quite how to cope with her unworldliness.
Pabla tickled her parrot in the corner. The bird, like a gaudy Mamacita, said nothing and watched Biggo beadily. The girl turned around gravely. "I'm sorry you couldn't attend last night."
"I'm more than sorry. But the tickets were-"
"Then it wasn't another woman."
"No. No, there isn't any other." The thought of having to explain Jinny sickened him. Using her for a shield didn't seem like such a clever idea now-not if Pabla found out.
"I knew. I don't know why I said that, Biggo." She was smiling at him and things were all right. "The other American-your friend-was there. I played to him. I always have to forget the audience and play for someone in particular."
Biggo learned what the worst kind of jealousy was. But she said, with her shy candor, "You were the one I wanted to play for in particular, though."
"Why?"
"Because there is religion in music."
He grunted.
"Because I think we like one another. Because, somehow, I don't think we're so very different." The words escaped her hastily and she bit her lip. "Sending for you to come here, that was not the proper thing."
He had a hundred confessions of his own, feelings he wanted her to know about. He fumbled for them and all he said was, "Yeah, I got the idea that Mamacita and Valentin don't approve." Because he didn't have ten thousand dollars yet; nothing to offer her; not until the peacock appeared.
Pabla shrugged, glancing at the bedroom door. "We can have our privacy until I choose to summon them. Perhaps I'm headstrong because I understand more than they do. At least, I think I do. Surely, living is something more than rules, isn't it? It's not a finger exercise but a melody to enjoy for its beauty. Beauty is everything." She tossed her head and laughed suddenly. "Even if I'm wrong, I don't want to know I'm wrong."
"I'm not the man to argue with you. Especially you. Especially now."
Pabla made a sweeping curtsy and laughed again. "Now that we agree, I shall play for you. Please sit down, over there. You've stayed in that very spot ever since your arrival." She got her violin and tuned it deftly. Biggo sat and watched her movements.
She took her stance before the west windows. "Please," she murmured, "your requests must be ones I know. To read music I would have to put on my glasses and I feel foolish in them."
His musical knowledge was limited and earthy. "Uh, play what you like. I'll like it too."
He did. He recognized none of it but absorbed it into his big body so that there were moments of tingling deep in him, climaxes. Maybe it was the music or maybe it was the sight of her with the light streaming in past her. She had flung aside the scarf to make place for the violin on her bare shoulder. Her sheathed body swayed slightly with the rhythms in unconscious seduction. Biggo clenched his fingers into his palms, bitter with himself for thinking that. Yet he hadn't had much experience with evening gowns and there was always the idea that beneath the satin was not a stitch of clothing unless perhaps stockings. He did his honest best to concentrate on the soaring music but in front of his eyes was live satin over the round of her hips.
However, for a while, he forgot people like Jinny and Lew Hardesty. He forgot that he carried Jaccalone's fate in his pocket. And that Silver Magolnick's assassin waited for him somewhere away from here.
At last Pabla's pink mouth stopped dreaming over the violin. The sun was nearly down. Her hair, as she pushed it back, was the brightest thing in the room. She put the violin away and returned to the window, looking out, looking troubled.
Biggo got to his feet awkwardly. "That was about the nicest thing that ever happened to me, Pabla. That was beautiful."
"Yes, it was," she said, not boasting. "Music is beauty distilled. You want to catch hold of it, touch it." She pointed out the window. "There is more beauty."
He came over and stood slightly behind her. Together, they looked silently out across the sand and the scalloped surf. A half mile out a long white power yacht posed against the sunset.
Pabla sighed. "My father's," she said. "La Carlota. I only came in to the Riviera Pacifico because of the duties of the fiesta. Tonight the ceremonies will end and tomorrow I must go back to my home out there."
"You mean you're leaving town?"
"Shortly, Biggo. I am so hungry for beauty, perhaps the way I was raised or reaction against it. I don't know. I know all my life-that's not long, is it?-I've run after it. How do you catch up with it?"
"I don't know." The room was darkening. He didn't know. Her hair was not too far from his cheek but he didn't know. "Are you sure you have to go? Why?"
She shrugged gently. "Because I have always gone." There was the matter of her fragrance; she was closer to him than she realized, he knew. When he made a gesture of anger with his helplessness, they were touching accidentally. The line of her back against his coat. His heart pounded. He wanted to tell her she couldn't go and why but he was standing too close behind her to speak at all.
He knew she was thinking of the yacht and not of their touching yet when he looked down past her naked shoulders there was the cleft deepening between her young breasts and becoming out of sight under the satin. And Biggo knew exactly what he was going to do next.
First, he would turn her around and find out what the pink mouth was like. And he would bend her back, tightening her supple body against his while his hand stroked her. The satin would pull down or up and there would be no more wondering about her breasts or her golden legs. If she wore anything at all under the dress it would only be a wisp to be torn aside. Pabla nude on the couch or on the carpet beneath this window; would she succumb because of his overwhelming passion or because she dimly realized in her innocence that she wanted to do exactly what he was about to do?
He put his hands on her warm arms. He thought she trembled and was aware of their touching then. Her hand crept up to her throat. Her nervous habit-before a crisis, she had told him.
"I'll be d
amned if I will!" he growled and snatched his hands away. Pabla whirled with a gasp and he stepped back so she wasn't near him. He had startled her.
He muttered something about leaving. Pabla was regarding him. Against the west sky he couldn't make out the expression on her face, fright or tenderness or what. Did she sense what had nearly passed between them? He hoped not.
She spoke softly. "Thank you for coming to hear me play." Then she called, "Mamacita!" The duenna appeared in the room by magic. She and the parrot stared balefully.
As the old woman opened the door for him, Biggo gave her an arrogant grin. Someday, when things were settled, he might tell her about the close call. He might have soiled the ribbon in his wallet but not, by God, Pabla. He was tough enough to wait for rightness.
"I'll be seeing you," Biggo said to the girl by the window. "Soon."
"Yes, Biggo. Thank you. Please do."
* * *
On the way back to his own room, he bought the daily papers at the cigar shop. They soaked up the dampness in his hands. Desire and Pabla were still with him. "I still got my chances," he whispered. "I didn't wreck anything."
Jinny had to unlock the door so he could get in. She had just finished bathing and the room was steamy. Her bathrobe showed her plump thigh, rosy-white from scrubbing, as she walked. "Where've you been, anyway?"
"Around." He stripped off his coat in the moist warmth and tossed the papers on the bed. He looked at her soft curved body. She didn't notice the indiscriminate desire in him.
"A likely story. How's the face?" Jinny padded up to him and examined it. "Um, not so bad." The robe was loose in front. He drew in his breath and his chest swelled and bumped the gentle nubs of her breasts.
Then she saw what glinted in his eyes and she tried to say, "No," but her voice wouldn't come, Biggo clamped her to him and pulled the robe down. Her mouth shrieked open just as his mouth met it, searching. Roughly his hand groped down her naked back.
