A Game for the Living (20 page)

He took out his fountain drawing pen and began to sketch the front of the church on a blank back page of a book he carried. The old red stone columns, on either side of the door, spiraled up like twisted lava. The pointed arch of the shadowed doorway looked like a human mouth, wide open in a cry of tragic agony. The picture under his pen took on a personal quality, a special individuality, like a human face, and Theodore suddenly saw the door as Ramón, screaming at a deaf and non-existent God a cry that might have been as silent as the door.

He put his pen away and his mind slowly focused on the physical again, on the fact that Ramón had been in the church at least fifteen minutes, that there was a two-peso tab under his nearly empty bottle of Carta Blanca, that he was very hungry, and that he could not by the effort of imagining make himself a Catholic for half an hour or even one minute.

Ramón came out of the church and stood for a moment with one hand on the leather door flap, as if he did not want to turn loose of it, or did not know in which direction to go. Theodore raised his arm and called “Ramón!” He took some money from his wallet, waited for change, and left a peso tip. Ramón had crossed the street. He nodded to Theodore in greeting, and they began to walk towards the
pension
in silence. After a block, Ramón said:

“You were not impressed by the mummies?”

“Of course I was.”

“I think you'll find that they'll work a change in you.” Ramón walked with his head up, a little cheered as always after he had been inside a church.

Theodore pondered this for a moment. “Have they changed you?”

“Yes. Not today. I've seen them before. They are reminders,” Ramón went on, looking straight in front of him. “Reminders of the unimportance of the body.”

“Yes. After one is dead.”

“And of the shortness of death and the eternity of life.”

“Eternity of life?” Theodore asked in surprise, then realized this was exactly what he had expected.

“Did I say that?” Ramón asked, smiling. “No, I meant the opposite. Unless, of course, one chooses to call this death and the other life, as some do.”

“And you? Do you?”

Ramón frowned, though his smile lingered. “Maybe I do. Sometimes this life seems only like a waiting for something. Do you know what I mean, Teo?” he asked in a cheerful voice, glancing at Theodore.

“Yes,” Theodore said dubiously. To anticipate ‘life' as an eternity in hell—what kind of perverted joy was that? Or was he possibly hoping for purgatory or something better? Theodore decided to say nothing more on the subject, lest he disturb, by a clumsy question or a statement, the precarious chess game that Ramón was playing with himself in his mind. Ramón began to talk about the beauty of the town.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Theodore made another effort by telephone that afternoon to get a room at the Orozco. The manager blamed the crowdedness of the city on “the end of Carnaval.” He chose to speak to Theodore in English. Theodore's name was on their list, however, and perhaps in five days, perhaps less, there should be a room. Theodore then telephoned Sauzas's office in Mexico, and gave the name ‘Los Papagayos', the
pension
at which he and Ramón were staying. Sauzas was not in.

At a little before five, Theodore returned from a walk that had taken him up to the Hotel Santa Cecilia, where he had made a panoramic water-colour of the town. He thumb-tacked it over his bed, a burst of red and grey in the room of muted and faded colors. His room was identical with Ramón's next-door. Each had a thin double bed with a flimsy but ornate bedstead, a straight chair, a tall brown wardrobe which had lost the same right-hand door, each had a chamber-pot of pink and white under the bed, and each a small metal crucifix over a table on which stood a water pitcher in a basin, beside a glass carafe of drinking water with an inverted glass on top of it. In the patio the parrots chattered and gave an occasional squawk, as if the five or six of them played a card game that caused them all to talk in sequence. Buckets filled slowly at the fountain with trickling sounds that rose in pitch, ended, and began again. Mops and rags slapped constantly on the blue-and-white tiles, which were impeccably clean, as if the family of father and mother and two daughters and two sons who operated the
pension
had lost their minds on the subject of scrubbing the patio.

“Concha, have you seen the mop?”

“The what?”

“The
mop
!”

“No-o.”

Slop!
Water dashed over the stones and hissed to silence.

A boy laughed long and lazily and with relish, making Theodore smile as he heard him. There was a happy atmosphere in the
pension,
and Theodore had nothing to complain about, not even the simple food, but he wished for Ramón's sake that the room were prettier to look at and that the toilet was not on the patio, too, behind a wooden door, because he did not want Ramón to be reminded of his apartment in Mexico.

The inevitable conversation went on:

“Juan, you didn't see the
mop
?”

“No-o. Ask Dolores.”

Trickle, trickle
.
.
.

Theodore lay on his bed, lulled by the voices, which the patio's four walls amplified and emptied of meaning, so they became as hollow as symbols.

“No-o, Maria,” came a girl's voice. “You mean the mop with the long handle?”

“Ai,” said the girl in calm despair.

“Look in the kitchen, Maria!”

“
Awr-r-rk!
” A parrot expressed horror at some move in the game.

And Theodore thought of the strange moment that morning when he had felt a physical attraction—perhaps for only ten seconds, but very strongly—for the girl who had shown Ramón and him their rooms. She was barely eighteen, he thought, a little plump, modest and docile and without artifice, and there could have been no other reason for his attraction except that she was female, and he could not remember ever having been attracted to such a simple kind of girl before in his life. It had been the first time since Lelia's death that such an emotion had stirred in him—and actually the same stirring might have happened if Lelia had still been alive, so transitory and purposeless it was—yet this morning there had been the feeling that if he had touched this girl, his desire would have evaporated, because of Lelia. And so it might have, but it would not always be so. And the real source of the depression that had followed his attraction was the knowledge that he would go on in a state of being physically alive, that there would be another woman some day, or women, and that he did not even want her, or them.

He would write something about it in his diary, he thought, and
while he was thinking of how best to say it in English, he fell asleep. He had a dream that Lelia was sitting at the long table in her apartment, which had been transported to the blue-and-white patio of the
pension
. She wore a bright purple-and-yellow
rebozo,
or stole, which he had just made her a present of, and she was pleased and in a good humor. They were waiting for someone, and they listened for a knock at the door, but all they heard were the parrots' squawks, which made Lelia smile. Then Lelia said that at last he was getting somewhere, wasn't he? “What do you mean?” he asked. “You are about to find out who is responsible for all this,” Lelia said with laughing dark eyes, “but it doesn't matter in the least, Teo, not to me. It's just a silly game—a game for the living.” She looked at her door, hearing something he did not; and then Ramón opened the door suddenly and came in, in high spirits, with his arms full of rum bottles piled high as his chin, and the bottles rested on a bed of red carnations. Theodore asked him why he had not brought white, and Ramón looked bewildered, and asked him to repeat the question.
.
.
.

Theodore heard a knock at his door, and sat up with the dream in his head. “Ramón?” he asked.

“No, señor,” said a girl's high-pitched voice. “A señor outside would like to speak with you.”

Theodore stood up. “One minute,” he called, smoothing his hair with one hand. He opened the door, and looking past the girl he saw a young man standing in the sunlight on the sidewalk just outside the
pension's
gate. Theodore had a sudden feeling of having seen him before, a feeling that he knew him—and then he realized that it was the boy with the incipient moustache who had been with them in the corridor of mummies.

“
Buenas tardes,
” said the young man as Theodore approached him. “Señor Schiebelhut?”

“
Sí,
” Theodore said.

“There are two rooms available for you at the Hotel Orozco.” He gave a small, jerky bow.

“I called them just two hours ago. There weren't—”

“I have just found out,” the boy interrupted in his twanging, adolescent voice. “They are not available today, but tomorrow morning sure.”

“I see. Thank you very much,” Theodore said politely, not knowing whether to believe him.

“For nothing,” the boy said, waving a hand airily, sticking out his soft, moist underlip. “I am a friend of the manager.”

“Oh.”

The boy lingered, perhaps awaiting a tip, standing on one leg and swinging a key-chain around his forefinger.

Theodore abruptly decided not to tip him. “Am I supposed to call to confirm the rooms?”

“I can do that for you.”

“Oh no, thank you. I'll do it,” Theodore said, turning away.

“Okay.
Buenas tardes,
” said the boy.

Theodore went at once to the only telephone in the
pension,
which was in the family's living-room to the right of the entrance door. He asked permission of the grandmother, who was crocheting, and then called the Orozco. The man who answered left the telephone to check on his name, as if he had never heard of him, and then returned with the information that Schiebelhut and Otero had a suite reserved for the following morning.

“Thank you,” Theodore said, pleasantly surprised. “We shall be there—say by eleven?”

“
Muy bien,
señor.”

Theodore hung up and crossed the patio towards Ramón's door to tell him the news. He stopped to look at a handsome blue, green, and yellow parrot who was sidling up his ring with a foolish expression. The parrot hung upside down by its feet and swung himself, the picture of health, happiness, and self-esteem. Just the opposite of Ramón's lonely little parakeet. Though the parakeet had no range of facial expressions, Theodore thought of him always as wide-eyed, round-mouthed—which he was not—and lost, like a face in a painting by Monch. Theodore looked into the brazen, yellow-ringed eye of the happy parrot, and saw the boy standing on one leg in front of the door. And there was something so familiar in the stance, the doorway. He thought suddenly of the boy who had spoken to him about a muffler, on the day of Lelia's funeral. The peddler who had reminded him of his stick-figures.

For a moment, he thought he must be mistaken. But he remembered very well the standing on one leg and the way the slight body had curved in a line with the relaxed leg, even the way he tipped his head back and sideways as he spoke. He was better dressed now and more self-assured. And Theodore did not remember the moustache. Once again he tried to convince himself that he was mistaken, but his mind slid sickeningly down to certainty again. He imagined that the voice was the same, and the weak, forgettable face the same. He did not think he was mistaken. And what did it mean? Theodore thought of the silent telephone calls. And the postcard.

The boy might even be the murderer.

Theodore went into his room and shut his door. What was the boy up to, following them here to Guanajuato? He knew both their names, or had troubled to find them out. In the corridor of mummies, he had been more interested in him and Ramón than in the mummies. He looked like a young crook, slippery, quick-witted, and as if he would be able to tell a lie as naturally as breathing. Able to rob a house, to crawl along a narrow ledge and rob a house without leaving fingerprints. Able to tell a story and get into a woman's apartment before she became alarmed. He should tell Sauzas immediately, he thought.

Then the feeling returned that he could be wrong, and he decided to wait until tomorrow to tell Sauzas. If the fellow had really followed them here, he was not going to disappear suddenly. Theodore went to the cupboard where his jacket hung and automatically felt for the lump of his wallet. It was there, and even through the jacket he could tell that his money was still in it.

He went out into the patio and knocked on Ramón's door.

Ramón was lying on his bed with his arms behind his head, a book open and face-down on his chest.

“We can get rooms at the Orozco tomorrow,” Theodore said. “They sound like very pretty rooms. There's been a cancellation.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was a comfortably sprawling hotel, built without a thought of economizing space. Giant trees sheltered it from view until one was almost in front of the door, and then vines with stems as thick as a man's arm ran above the doorway and between the windows of the lower floor. The lobby was paved with sedate, well-worn tiles. A bell-boy met them and escorted them to the first floor and then to a corner suite with two entrances and a common sitting-room overlooking gardens of mangos and bougainvilleas. There was a fireplace in the sitting-room, and on a round, polished table sat a bowl in which floated a large orange cactus blossom. Clear droplets of water stood like dew on its petals. There was a smell of flowers, sunlight on wood and wool, and the pine that lay ready to be burnt in the fireplace.

“Don't you think it's pretty, Ramón?” Theodore asked.

Ramón nodded, smiling. “It's beautiful, Teo.”

“Which room would you prefer?”

“That doesn't matter,” Ramón replied, as Theodore had known he would.

“Take your choice. I'm going downstairs to buy the newspapers.”

Theodore went down to the lobby. The Mexico, D.F., papers had not come in yet, but were due at noon. He went to the main desk and asked for a call to be put in to Mexico. The lines were very busy, they told him, and it might take ten minutes or more. Theodore had given the clerk his name and room number, and had been overheard by the middle-aged man in the grey suit, who, Theodore thought he remembered, was the manager. Theodore nodded to him and said:

“Thank you very much for the rooms. But I thought I was seventh on your list.”

The manager gave a surprised smile. “Señor Schiebelhut. Yes. I think I remember that you were,” he said in English. “Your rooms are satisfactory, sir?”

“Very satisfactory,” Theodore said, in English, too. “I was interested to know how I got them. The young man who reserved them for me—” He hesitated. “Do you know him?”

The manager looked at him quizzically. “I was not on duty yesterday afternoon. When I came in this morning, I saw your name had been moved up.” He tapped with a pencil the open register in front of him. People's names were written there on cards slipped into isinglass slots. “I would guess, señor,” he said quietly, “somebody received a little gratuity and moved your name up.”

“Nobody got a gratuity from me,” Theodore said.

“Well—perhaps from your friend, eh? There is no harm done, but I don't make it a practice of this hotel ordinarily.” He smiled in a friendly way, as if to say it was done now, and the other people on the list did not have to know anything about it.

“Not from my friend, either. I am sure of that.”

“Well, señor, I can't explain it, but we are very happy to have you, and we hope you have a pleasant stay.”

Theodore noticed that a bell-boy, standing by a column a few feet away, was watching them. “Thank you, señor.”

His telephone call came through. Theodore asked to speak to Sauzas, as he always did. Sauzas was there, and he had only a minute's wait before Sauzas came to the telephone.

Theodore cupped the receiver with his right hand, though everybody behind the hotel desk seemed too busy to be listening. “Have you any news, Señor Capitán?”

“No, señor,” Sauzas said. “I am sorry to say we have not recovered any of your stolen property. We are still trying to trace the typewriter, of course—” His voice trailed off tiredly or indifferently.

Theodore felt suddenly depressed. “I wanted to tell you that we shall be at the Hotel Orozco in Guanajuato for a few days.”

“And then?”

“I don't know yet. Perhaps to my house in Cuernavaca. I'll let you know, of course.”

“
Muy bien.
Señor, we are working. That is all I have to report.”

Theodore wandered around the lobby for a few minutes, then on an impulse went back to the telephones on the desk and called Inocenza.

She was in, and so delighted to hear from him that Theodore felt immediately better. She asked about Ramón and then the cat.

“Is the guard still in front of the house?” Theodore asked.

“
Sí,
señor.”

“And you are not afraid?”

“Not in the daytime. I would not like to spend the nights here. I am very glad to go to Constancia.”

“Have you had any calls when nobody speaks? Like the ones I had?”

“No, señor.”

“Good. I shall call you again in a few days, Inocenza.”

“Are you going to take a little house somewhere?” she asked hopefully.

“I have not decided yet. If we go to Cuernavaca, you can come with us.” Even as he said it and heard Inocenza's happy reaction, Theodore knew that this was what he would do.

Then he began to feel depressed again as soon as he had hung up. He walked to a counter in the lobby and bought a guide-book of Guanajuato and one of Lake Chapala, because the book looked attractive and the lake was fairly near. But he knew Ramón would simply agree to go, if he proposed going, and that he would not propose it for that reason.

Theodore walked slowly to the staircase and began to climb it, thinking of his conversation with Sauzas and of the fact that he had not mentioned the strange boy, though he had told himself yesterday that he would tell Sauzas about him today. In the cool clarity of this morning, at ten o'clock at least, it had not seemed important or definite enough to tell Sauzas. But detectives thought that anything was important, Theodore reminded himself. He stopped on the stairs and turned. He was three-quarters of the way up, and now he looked down on the entire lobby. He wondered if he should go down to the telephone again and call Sauzas now, when he was sure he could reach him.

The boy came into the lobby through the main door, walking slowly with a hand in his pocket and a newspaper in the other hand. He went directly to the desk, and Theodore saw a clerk give him a key. Then the bell-boy who had been staring at Theodore—the one who had taken the boy's gratuity, Theodore supposed—slid closer to the boy along the front edge of the desk, whispered something, and nodded in Theodore's direction. The boy looked up, saw Theodore, and smiled and nodded in greeting. Then the boy pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, lighted one and tossed the match in the direction of a big pot of sand beside a pillar. He looked cocky, like a street boy on an expensive holiday. Theodore thought of a woman at once, a wealthy woman who might be keeping him. But what woman would have him? On the other hand, who could account for tastes?

Now the boy was approaching the stairs. Theodore leaned casually against the banister, and though he intended not to stare at the boy as he climbed towards him, Theodore could not take his eyes from his small, slight figure. But the boy did not look at him until he was perhaps six feet away, and then he smiled, a one-sided, self-conscious smile.

“
Buenos dias,
Señor Schiebelhut. You like your rooms?” He spoke in English, with the staccato, flat-vowelled accent of Mexicans who have picked up their English in the streets.

“
Sí,
” Theodore said. “
Gracias
.”

The boy nodded, and licked his thin lips. The sight of his tongue near the soft moustache was peculiarly disgusting to Theodore. “And your—”

“
Hablemos en español,
” Theodore said matter-of-factly. “I don't think I know your name.”

“Salvador. Salvador Bejar, at your service.” The Spanish courtesy rolled off his tongue automatically. He frowned a little, and the frown and the wary eyes under it looked false. “You are the Señor Schiebelhut whose friend was recently killed, are you not?”

“
Sí
.”

“And your friend is the gentleman who confessed.”

“He is not guilty,” Theodore said calmly.

“But—well—” He shrugged and squeezed the newspaper. “I wanted to ask if the police have found the murderer yet.”

“No.”

“All I know is what I read in the newspaper,” he said with a flickering smile. “Not much. They have no new clues?”

“Oh yes, lots of new clues.”

“Important ones? What are they?” Now his frown was meant to be one of polite attention.

“I don't think they are to be let out. Not if they're not in the newspaper.”

The boy nodded. “She was a very pretty woman—judging from the photographs.”

Theodore said nothing. The boy's shirt was brand new, he saw from the way the collar stood out in a corner on either side of his neck, and it was of fine, cream-colored silk. “Why are you interested?” Theodore asked in a polite tone. “Did you know her?”

“Oh no! Well—you are her friend. You know all the people she knew—I suppose.”

“I doubt that. She had too many friends for me to keep track of.”

The boy smirked, and looked at Theodore with an intense and greedy curiosity. He looked as if he did not quite dare utter something that was bursting in him to be said. “Are you—You are going to stay here a few days?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“I think so,” the boy replied, with a quick nod, smiling. “Maybe we'll see each other in the dining-room. Let me know if I can be of service to you in any way, because I should be honored,” he said, a clumsy combination of his own words and a traditional courtesy of the language. He shifted his weight from foot to foot on the step. “So they have no clues. I'm sorry.”

“Oh, they have a few such as—such as that my house was robbed a few days ago. A few things were stolen, including the house keys.”

Theodore saw the boy's eyes waver and grow swimmy, though the eyes still tried to look straight into his face. “It was not put into the papers. The police got a fingerprint which may be useful.”

“A fingerprint!” the boy said with a self-conscious laugh, or perhaps it was a laugh of amusement. “You mean, that's the only clue?”

“Yes, but it's a good one,” Theodore said, excited by the eagerness in the young man's face, which seemed to him guilt. He turned to go on up the stairs, and the fellow came with him.

“I hope you recover what you lost. Are you going to have lunch in the hotel?”

“No, I think we are going into the town,” Theodore said, nodding good-bye as he turned towards his room.

“
Adíos,
” murmured the boy, and awkwardly turned, as if he had to force himself to move in an opposite direction from Theodore, and went on towards the next stairs.

Ramón was unpacking his suitcase in one of the rooms. Leo greeted Theodore on an everyday note and continued his quiet examination of the rooms. Perhaps Lelia's words in the dream had a meaning after all. Perhaps they were getting somewhere. He wanted to blurt it out to Ramón. But Ramón would not want to believe it. Ramón would have to have every fact laid out before him before he believed anything, and as yet there were no facts at all.

Theodore lit a cigarette, walked up and down the sitting-room a few times, then went quietly out to telephone Sauzas.

He called from one of the booths, from which he could see the clerks and bell-boys and the switchboard, the only place where he might be overheard, he thought. He got Sauzas. He told him the boy's name, described him, and said he had first seen him loitering around his house in Mexico on the day of Lelia's funeral. The money he might have got from pawning the stolen goods, Theodore suggested, would be enough for him to buy new clothes and to live well for a month or so. And he told Sauzas of the boy's interest in Lelia's murderer. To Theodore's disappointment, Sauzas did not sound enthusiastic about investigating the young man.

“Well—he may be the robber,” Sauzas said. “If he is staying in the hotel a few days—Well, I can come up tomorrow morning, Señor Schiebelhut. Don't do anything to arouse his suspicion, or he may not be there when I get there. And I have my reasons for preferring to question him myself rather than the local police.”

“Very good, Señor Capitán.” Theodore hung up well satisfied.

He bought the papers, and again there was no item on the Ballesteros case. But on the editorial page of the Excelsior a professor of law had written a long and impassioned article advocating the return of the death penalty to Mexican jurisdiction, and among the cases he cited was the Ballesteros case, for ‘wanton brutality, sadism, and barbaric fury'. Another case mentioned was that of an elderly priest, slain within his church by a man who had then stolen a few valuables from the holy edifice. That had, of course, roused the passions of the Catholic populace, and rightly, and yet the kifier had been given only ten years, even though it was not his only murder. Theodore removed the page, though it meant removing the front page, which was on the other side, because he did not want Ramón to see it. Ramón would agree with the professor, Theodore supposed, unless he thought that to live with a murder on one's conscience was more painful than to die at once and so meet the fires of hell sooner. Theodore read what he wanted to of the paper and, on second thought, decided to throw the whole thing away.

At one-thirty Theodore and Ramón drank a
tequila limonada
in the garden, while Leo wandered about among the trees; then Theodore took the cat back upstairs and rejoined Ramón in the dining-room. Theodore looked around for Salvador Bejar, but he did not see him. Perhaps he came in fashionably late.

Then, as they were awaiting their dessert, the obvious occurred to him, and he suddenly stood up and excused himself.

Theodore ran up the steps. What a fool he had been, when he had seen that the bell-boy was a friend of Salvador Bejar's! He took the key out of his pocket and opened the door.

At first glance, he noticed nothing unusual. Then he saw a little trail of blood drops, wavering, but leading across the carpet to the door.