A Deadly Shade of Gold (9 page)

"I'll be damned!" I said, and she gave a husky laugh of delight.

She moved closer and pointed to one. "This is my favorite. Will you just look at the fatuous expression on that sly devil's face."

"And she looks so completely innocent."

"Of course," she said. Her smile faded as she looked at me. She turned and with exaggerated care placed her empty glass on a small ornate table with a white marble top. It made a small audible click as she set it down. She turned back with her eyes almost closed and groped her way into my arms, whispering, in a private argument with herself, "I'm not like this. I'm really not like this."

The physical act, when undertaken for any motive other than love and need, is a fragmenting experience. The spirit wanders. There is a mild feeling of distaste for one's self. She was certainly sufficiently attractive, mature, totally eager, but we were still strangers. She wanted to use me as a weapon against her own lonely demons. I wanted information from her. We were more adversaries than lovers. The comments of old Samuel Johnson about the pursuit of women kept drifting into my mind. The expense is damnable, the position ridiculous, the pleasure fleeting.

But it went very well for her there in the faint night light under the yellow ruffles of the canopy, very well on a physical basis, which is, perhaps, the least important part, sufficiently well to induce her, in the post-tempest euphoria, to give myriad little kitteny affections, a purring gratitude.

"This is the last thing I expected to happen," she said, with a luxurious stretching. "You're very sweet."

"Sure."

She took my wrist, guided my cigarette to her lips. When she exhaled she said, "Did you expect it to happen?"

"Let's put it this way. I hoped it would. Life is full of coincidences, Betty. Some of them are nasty. Some of them are fine. I guess they're supposed to balance out sometime. I suppose, in a sense, that guy brought us together."

"Who, darling?"

"The guy who collected the little gold people."

"Oh," she said in a sleepy voice. "Carlos Menterez y Cruzada."

"Who's he?"

I made it a bored question, as indifferent as her response had been.

"Sort of a bastard, dear. A Cuban bastard. Very close to Batista. A collector. Those five you picked out, he bought them from us." She yawned, snuggled more comfortably against me and gave a little snorting sound of derision and said, "He collected me, too. In a sort of offhand way.

I guess women were a lot more abundant than gold for Senor Menterez. I hated him a while. I don't any more."

"How did it happen?"

"Because I was a stupid young girl and he was a very knowing man. It was when I was working at the place, before I married Tony. We had two items he was interested in. I was on salary and two percent commission. He said he couldn't make up his mind. He had a suite at the Waldorf. He called up just before we closed and asked me to bring the photographs over. Drinks and dinner in the suite, of course. He was very charming, very amusing. He didn't make the mistake of begging or insisting or arguing. He just seemed to assume that I was going to go to bed with him, and that I wouldn't have come to the suite if I wasn't willing, and it all seemed to be so settled in advance, I just didn't know how to handle it. I couldn't seem to find the right moment to set my heels and pretty soon, there I was in bed, scared, confused and apologetic. A knowing man can manage it that way with a green girl."

"How old was he then?"

"Mmm. Eight years ago. Early forties. Twenty years older than I was."

"Nice-looking man?"

"No. Not very tall. Sort of portly, even. Thin little mustache and going bald. Very nice yes. Long lashes. Beautiful suits and shirts, and beautiful grooming. Manicures and facials and cologne and massages. A car and driver picked me up after work the next day too. He was in New York on
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business with several other Cuban businessmen, but he had the suite to himself. He bought me an absolutely beautiful gown. He wanted me to go back to Havana with him. He said he could set me up with a little shop of my own there. He had me in such a confused daze, I almost made that much of a fool of myself. I didn't even really like him. I couldn't understand why I kept doing exactly as he asked me to do. He didn't seem... very intense about me. Just sort of jocular and fond, like people are toward dogs."

"Was he married?"

"Yes. After he left it took me about two weeks to come out of the fog. You know, I had always wondered how reasonably attractive girls ever got themselves into entanglements like that with older married men. I just had a kind of anxious, earnest desire to please him. I didn't want him to be disappointed in me in any way. A vassal state. Then I woke up and knew it had been a very dirty business."

"What kind of business was he in in Cuba?"

She yawned. "I don't know. Lots of things. After the roof fell in on all those people down there, I used to wonder what happened to the Menterez collection. I suppose he got out with it. And whatever else he could carry. I wondered if we would ever hear. Or if he would show up to peddle it all back to us. But somebody got it away from him, and you got it away from somebody else?"

"Something like that."

"It doesn't matter does it, darling? Whether he's alive or dead. I'm so deliciously sleepy, dear.

Let's sleep for a little while."

Something awakened me, perhaps the little tilt of the bed as she left it. I turned over, feigning sleep, and through slitted lids saw her, nude-white in the small amber of the night light, staring back at me, her body slightly crouched, the dark hair tangled across her pale forehead. After I took several deep breaths, she went plodding silently over to the chair where I had tossed my clothing. Though I could not see her clearly I knew she was going through the pockets. She would find cigarettes, lighter, change and a thin packet of bills. All identification was back in the bureau drawer of my locked room in the Wharton.

When she was through, she came stealthily back to bed, lay silently beside me for perhaps ten minutes, and then set about gently awakening me. When she dropped off into sleep again, I could sense that it was a very deep sleep. I tested it by shaking her, speaking her name. She made querulous little sounds that faded into a small buzzing snore. Ten minutes later I flagged down a hurrying cab on Third Avenue, in the first grey of a tomcat dawn. At the Wharton, I got my key at the desk and went up and took a shower.

After the shower, I sat on the bed and went through the envelope of photographs I had taken from her purse as I left her apartment. I took out the five pictures of the statues which had definitely belonged to Carlos Menterez y Cruzada and stowed them in my suitcase. I printed her name and address on the outside of the envelope in square block letters. It is an old caution, and the only way any person can completely disguise their own handwriting. Merely hold the pencil as straight up and down as possible, use all capitals, and base them all on a square format, so that the O for example, becomes a square, and an A is a square with the base line missing and a line bisecting it horizontally. No handwriting expert can ever make a positive identification of
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printing done in that manner, because it bears no relation to your normal handwriting. After I awoke, I would get it sealed downstairs, buy the stamps and mail it.

I slid between the hotel sheets and turned out the bed lamp. There was a brighter morning grey at the windows. I tried to sort out the facts I had learned. Facts kept getting entangled with textural memories of the woman, so gaspingly ardent. The facts and the woman followed me down into sleep, where the little gold figures came alive and one of them, an East Indian one, a woman with six graceful arms, made tiny little cries and fastened herself to my leg like a huge spider, bared little golden teeth and sank them into the vein while I tried to kick her away.

Seven

I CAUGHT an early afternoon flight out of Kennedy, after phoning Nora from the terminal.

She was waiting at the gate, and as I had just my hand luggage, we went directly to her little black car in the parking lot. It was a warm beautiful afternoon. She looked very trim and chic in a pale grey dress, a light yellow cardigan.

"You look better," I told her.

"Shaj took charge," she said. "It was a lovely afternoon, and I spent all of it in the side garden, soaking up the sun. I was beginning to look mealy. The sun exhausted me. I slept twelve hours, had my hair done this morning, and I had a drink while I was waiting for you, and I feel almost human for the first time in a long time. You didn't find out anything, did you?"

"A little bit."

"Really? What?" The sudden intensity gave her that hawk look, the dark eyes very fierce, the lips thinner, the nose predatory.

I drove out of the lot. When I was clear of the airport area, I said, "A rich Cuban, a buddy of Batista's, collected the figurines. He bought five of them from the Borlika Galleries. By the best luck you can imagine, one of the five he bought was the one Sam showed me. That gave me the break, and I did a little gambling, and it opened up very nicely. Carlos Menterez y Cruzada.

Businessman, age about fifty now if still living."

"They told you all that? Why?"

"They got the impression I have the collection. Twenty-eight pieces. They don't care how I got them. We agreed on a price. A hundred and thirtyseven thousand, five hundred. Cash. A very quiet deal."

"Sam thought they were worth more."

"They are, if you can sell them in the open. They're worth less on a back street. Anything is. I don't think Sam's title was exactly airtight."

"Did Sam steal them for Carlos Whosis?"

"That wasn't quite Sam's style."

"I wouldn't think so. Then how?"

"However he got them, Nora, it attracted the wrong kind of attention."

"All right. So you know who used to own them, you think. Does that really mean very much?"

"When we get to the boat I'll show you something."

I fixed her a drink and left her in the lounge. I took my bag into the master stateroom, changed quickly to slacks and a sports shirt, and took the pictures out and handed them to her. "The one on top is the one Sam showed me. The other four are from the Menterez collection."

She looked at them very carefully, lips compressed, frown lines between her heavy dark brows.

She looked up at me. "They're strange and terrible little things, aren't they?"

"I keep wondering how many people have gotten killed over them. I saw a golden toad with ruby eyes in New York, two thousand years old. He looked as if he couldn't count the men he'd watched die."

She rapped the sheaf of cards against her knuckles. "This is something definite. This is real, Trav.

I... don't know much about all the conjecture and analysis and so on. But something I can hold and touch...."

I took them away from her and took them forward and put them in my safe. Any fifty-four foot boat has innumerable hiding places, and a houseboat has more than a cruiser. Once I turned a very accomplished thief loose aboard the Busted Flush. I gave him four hours to find my safe.

He was a friend. I watched him work. He was very very good. When his time was up, he hadn't even come close.

"What will you do with the pictures?" Nora asked when I returned to the lounge.

"I don't know. They're bluff cards. And they'll come as a great shock to somebody."

"What do we do next?"

"Find out a little bit more about Menterez."

That evening, in Miami, it took me well over an hour to locate my friend, Raoul Tenero. He is nearly thirty and looks forty. He was just beginning his career as an architect in Havana when Castro took over. I met him at some parties in Havana preCastro. When he got out of Cuba, he looked me up. I introduced him to some people. He worked for a time, and then went back in and was captured at the Bay of Pigs. He was finally exchanged with the others. His pretty wife, Nita, had a vague idea of his schedule.I finally caught up with him in a youth center building, part of the park system.

It was one of their endless committee meetings, not on political action, not on invasion, but on how to fit their people into the Yankee culture, find the jobs, assist each other. It works. They have that unyielding, unending, remorseless pride. They are the objects of considerable resentment, as is only normal for the human animal when a big batch of people of a different heritage move in. But of all the ethnic groups in the Miami area, the Cubanos have the lowest crime rate.

I spotted him on the far side of the room in a small group of about nine men, chairs pulled into a circle. Raoul has the true Spanish look, the long chalky face, deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks, and elegant way of handling his body when he moves. He saw me and held his hand up, thumb and first finger a half inch apart in the universal Latin gesture of indicating just a little bit more time.

Six or seven groups were in discussion. Some of them were very loud. I moved out into the night and leaned against the building and smoked a cigarette and watched the asphalt hiss of night traffic.

In about ten minutes he came out. "You all sewed up?" I asked him.

"No. I'm through in there. It's a resettlement thing. Winston-Salem. Ten families. Fifty-eight people. I took time off and flew up there and talked to the people who've been working on it.

Nice people, Travis. Now it's all reassurance, prying them loose from here, from the Havana Annex. They think there's eight feet of snow all winter in North Carolina."

"I need some information and a drink."

"I'll watch you drink, Se¤or. While I have milk."

"Still messed up?"

He gave a mirthless laugh. "I gave my stomach for my country. Tried some rum a week ago.

One drink. Broken glass would have been easier. That Havana Yacht Club cruise, it was hard on the inside man. How'd you find me? You see Nita?"

"She looks wonderful."

"How about her English? She's working hard."