A Deadly Shade of Gold (15 page)

I told her about the fine parties, now over. And then I said, "What we're both thinking becomes pretty obvious after a while."

"Garcia. That's like calling yourself John Smith, isn't it?"

"Instead of Carlos Menterez y Cruzada."

"But wouldn't that be terribly difficult for him to arrange?"

"Expensive, maybe. But not too difficult. He had to scoot out of Havana nearly five years ago.

A man Ilke that would be thinking ahead all the time. Mexico is a lot less corrupt than other Latin American countries. But immunity is always for sale, if you have enough money, if you work through an agent who knows the ropes. He would be afraid of people wanting to settle old scores. A remote place like this would be perfect. Big house, wall and gate, guards. Enough money to last forever. But he'd want a chance to live it up. Raoul told me about his taste for celebrities when he lived in Havana. And for American girls. He could make cautious contact with friends in California. He'd be afraid to go where the parties are, so he'd have to bring them here. Big cruiser at the dock over there on the other side. Goodies shipped in. It probably would have been impossible for him to get into any kind of business venture in Mexico. Is he dead? Is he sick? Has somebody gotten so close to him he's had to slam the gates and stop the fiestas? Maybe the people who sold him the immunity have kept on bleeding him. Sam worked for Garcia. Sam got hold of the Menterez collection. And somebody knew he had it and took it away from him. We find that somebody by finding out what went on here."

"How?"

"We nudge around until we find somebody who would like to talk about it."

"Felicia Novaro?"

"Maybe. I'll try her, alone. Tomorrow night."

"Why not tonight?"

"I saw that cantina. It's just off the square. I want to do a little window trimming tomorrow afteriuoon. With your help."

"Like what?"

"I'll tell you as we go along. It'll be more convincing."

An hour later Nora got sleepy and went yawning back to her room to take a nap. With a vague idea I went down the steps to the boat basin. It was the siesta lull. I padded slowly around, looking at the boats. The dockmaster had a shed office and supply store at the end of the basin, beyond a gas dock. They looked as if they were set up to do minor repairs.

The sun was a palpable weight against my back and I squinted into the water glare. Some fish I couldn't identify hovered close to the cement pilings. I went to the office. A man with red-grey hair and a perpetual sunburn sat sweating at a work table, copying figures from dock chits into a record book. He turned pale blue eyes at me and said, "Ya?

"You the dockmaster?"

"Ya."

"Pretty nice layout you've got here."

"Something you want?" he asked. He had a German accent.

"Just looking around, if you don't mind. I live aboard a boat. In Florida. I wish I could get it over here, but there's no way, unless I want to deck-load it on a freighter."

"Big boat?"

"Barge type houseboat. Custom, fifty-two feet, two little Hercules diesels. Twenty-one foot beam. I've got a four hundred mile range at nine knots, but she won't take much sea."

"Not good for these waters. Better where you are."

"I guess so." I wandered over to the side wall and began to look at the pictures. They were black and white polaroid prints, scores of them, neatly taped to the composition wall. Boats and fish and people. Mostly people, standing by fish hanging from hooks from a sign saying La Casa Encantada, smiling, sundark happy people, and limp fish. And I saw Sam Taggart. In at least a dozen of them, off to one side, grinning, always with a different group of customers, a raunchy yachting cap shoved back on his hard skull, his teeth white in his deep-water face. In most of
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them he was wearing a white, short-sleeved sport shirt, open down the front, the tails knotted across his waist.

The dockmaster had gone back to his records. He kept the office very tidy. I saw the books on a shelf, four of them, each labeled by year, each titled Marina Log.

"Mind if I see if I know any of the boats that slopped here?"

"Go ahead."

I took the one for three years back, and sat on a crate by the window and slowly turned the pages. The sign-in columns were for boat name, length, type, port of registry, owner, captain. I found it for July 11th, over two months after Sam had left Lauderdale. Quest IV, 62 ft, custom diesel, Coronado, California, G. T. Kepplert, S. Taggart, Capt. All In Sam's casual scrawl. It jumped out of the page at me. Business wasn't tremendous. Page after page was blank. I put it back and took down the more recent book and went through that and put it back.

"You get some big ones in here," I said.

"Anything over eighty feet, they anchor out, but it's a protected harbor."

I went back to the wall where the pictures were. A young Mexican in paint-stained dungarees came to the doorway and asked a question through the screen. The dockmaster rattled an impatient answer in fast fluent Spanish and the boy went away. He finished the accounts and closed his book and stood up.

"Lock up here now for an hour," he said.

I had found the picture I wanted. "This man looks familiar to me. I'm trying to remember his boat."

He came over and looked at the picture. "Him? He had no boat. Look, he is in this picture, that one, that one, lots of them. No, he worked for me."

"That's funny. I could have sworn. Haggerty? Taggerty?"

"So! Maybe you did know him. Taggart. Sam Taggart. Yes, now I remember, he was in Florida maybe. He spoke of Florida. Yes. He worked for me here. Find the fish pretty good. Handled a boat too fancy, roar in here too fast, showing off. Hard fellow to control. But the people liked him. They would ask for him first. Maybe once he owned a boat, not when he was here. Maybe in Florida he owned a boat."

"That must be it."

He put his hand out. "My name is Heintz. You want some nice fishing, it's a good time for it now, and I reserve you a good boat, eh?"

"I'll think it over. McGee is my name."

"Five hundred pesos all day. The hotel packs lunch, Mr. McGee. A big man like you can catch a big fish, eh?"

"I can't imagine how Taggart happened to come work here. Is he still around?"

"No. He hasn't worked for me a long time. He took over a private boat. He's gone now."

I sensed that one more question was going to be one question too many. I went out with him and he locked the office door. He gave me an abrupt nod and marched away, and I climbed the steps back to the pool level. Nobody was in the pool. The brown bodies looked as if a bomb had exploded nearby. I climbed on up to the sun deck. I looked at the sea glitter, and then looked at what I could see of the pink house, near the crest of the small tropic slope beyond the boat basin, just a small pink peak, an angle of wall, a fragment of white slanting roof.

Sometimes, when things are coming together, when fragments start to fit, you can get the dangerous feeling of confidence that you are hovering over the whole thing, like a hawk unseen, riding the lift of the wind. Like all other stimulants, it is a perilous thing to rely on. It makes you reckless. It can kill you.

That night, at dinner and in the bar afterwards, Nora was strange. She wore a slate blue dress so beautifully fitted it made her figure seem almost opulent. She was very gay and funny and quick, and then she would get tears in her eyes and try to hide them with hard little coughs of laughter.

At last, in the bar, the tears went too far, and when she saw she could not stop them, she said a strangled goodnight and fled. I did not stay long. I took a walk in the night. I thought of ways things could be done, ways that seemed right and ways that felt wrong. Slyness has no special logic. Sam had done something wrong. Knowing the shape of his mistake could help me. I took the problems to bed, and they followed me down into sleep.

But sleep did not take hold. I got hung up on the edge of it, caught there by something just below the threshold of my senses, too vague to identify. I was an Indian, and somebody was snapping twigs on the neighboring mountain. I have learned to respect these indefinite warnings.

Once upon a time I had been stretched out on a rock ledge watching a cabin. Without thought or hesitation, I had suddenly rolled away into a thicket of scrub maple, then saw the stain of bright lead appear on the rock, heard the faraway smack of the rifle, the banshee ricochet. We know that in deep hypnosis a good subject can hear and identify sounds far below his normal threshold of hearing. Perhaps a customary state of caution is a form of autohypnosis, and, without realizing it or remembering it, I had heard the remote snickety-click-clack of the oiled bolt as the man had readied himself to kill me.

I got up, barefoot on cool tile, and made a soundless circuit of the room and stopped at the interconnecting door and, holding my breath, heard the faint sound that was disturbing me, a tiny little smothered keening, the small frail noise of the agony of the heart. I put my robe on and tried the door. It opened soundlessly into the other darkness of her room.

"Nora?" I said in a half whisper, so as not to alarm her. The answer was a hiccuping sob. I felt my way to her bed, touched a shoulder, thin and heated and shivering under silk. I sat with her. I stroked the lean firm back. She was down there in a swamp of tears and despair, where I could not reach her. Much of lust is a process of self-delusion. If I stretched out with her, could I hold her more securely, could I make her feel less alone? If I gathered all this straining misery into my arms, tucked the hot fierce salty face into my throat, gave her someone to cling to in the night?

These caresses were merely for comfort, were they not? They had absolutely nothing to do with the spectacular legs, and the clover-grass scent of her hair, and her lovely proud walk. This was just my friend Nora. And if all this began to turn into anything else, I had the character to walk
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away from it, didn't I? And certainly she could sense that seduction was the furthest thing from my mind, wasn't it?

But there was one place to stop, and then the gamble of waiting just a little longer, and just a little longer. She had long since stopped crying. Then another stopping place passed, and beyond that there was a slope too steep for stopping, a slope that tilted it all into a headlong run. After the peak of it for her, she said something blurred and murmurous, something I could not catch, and fell almost at once into a heavy, boneless, purring sleep.

Back in my own bed I said surly things to jackass McGee about taking rude advantage of the vulnerable, about being a restless greedy animal, about piling more complication on the shoulders of somebody who had enough trouble. I tried to tell myself this was no green kid. This was a mature, spirited, sensitive, successful woman, and grown up enough to do her own accepting and rejecting. But the intense wanting had come almost without warning, and together we had been more complete than I could have possibly guessed. Anxiety makes dreams all to vivid. In one that woke me up, I was in a small secret room, hot and murky as a steam bath, with a red battle lantern set into the ceiling. There was something there I did not want to find, but I had to look for it, knowing I was doomed if I could find it. I opened dozens of drawers and cupboards and they were all empty. I opened the last drawer, a great long low heavy drawer, and in there, wearing tall red shoes, were the severed glorious legs, side by side. As I stared at them, I knew the one with the knife was directly behind me, waiting for me to turn. I turned slowly, and Sam was grinning down at me out of his chopped face, and I lurched sweating up out of sleep.

At nine-thirty showered and dressed, I wondered if I should knock at her door. I decided against it and went to the dining room. Eduardo said she had not yet arrived. Just as I finished the papaya, I glanced up and saw her approaching the table, walking with a slightly constricted demureness, her head a little on the side, her smile crooked. She wore dark green bermudas and a green and white striped blouse. I stood up for her, and Eduardo hurried to hold the chair for her. A flush darkened her face as she looked at me with eyes vast, dark and quizzical and said,

"Good morning, darling."

"Good morning." Eduardo took her order. She ordered a huge breakfast. When he went away, I leaned toward her and lowered my voice and said, "Nora, all I want to say...."

She leaned and reached across the small table very quickly and put two fingers against my lips, stopping what I had rehearsed saying to her. "You don't want to say anything, Trav. There isn't anything you have to say."

"Are you sure of that?"

"I know things. I know we are very fond of each other. And I know that words don't do any good. Words fit people into categories, whether they belong there or not. Then they have to keep explaining themselves. It was a lovely and beautiful accident, and I cherish it. Is that enough?"

"Yes," I said, "But I just wanted you to know that...."

"Hush now."

There is no man so assured that he cannot be made to feel slightly oafish if a subtle and complex woman puts her mind to it. She wanted no sex lectures from Father McGee, no apologies, no
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explanations, no resolutions for the future. They have an awesome talent for the practical, for the acceptance of the inescapable, for almost instantaneous adjustment.

During our sun time and swim after breakfast, no sensitive observer could have been left in doubt about our relationship. She was not obvious about it. She merely related herself to me in an entirely different way, with a dark adoration of Mediterranean eyes, hanging on my every word in a way that turned me pontifical, making small affections, walking in a changed way for me, posing herself for me, her voice slower and heavier and furrier. She was focused on me like a burning glass in the sun. I was surrounded by her, and though the talk was never personal, never intimate, never explicit, we were carrying on a second dialogue all the time, in words unsaid. And when we went back to the rooms, she came to me sun-hot, eyes heavy and blurred, lips swollen and barely moving as she murmured, "No accident this time."