Message From Malaga (50 page)

He didn’t like it. He transferred his anger to the man who waited at the door. “What the devil’s holding them up?” he called out harshly. “Wait, wait, wait. Is that all we have to do?”

“They left the cars on the road. They are walking down the driveway. The old bitch is dragging her feet.” It was quite a speech for the silent one. The other added to it considerably. He cursed and complained about foolish delays, dangerous wastes of time, stupid women, complications, unnecessary risks. Tavita stood quite still, her eyes never leaving the man’s face. And Ferrier could only hope she’d make no unexpected move. The man was too compulsive a talker to be trusted with a gun in his hand.

Suddenly, there was a crash of metal from somewhere distant,
a clatter and rattle that ended as abruptly as it had begun. In the room and hall there was complete silence, a turning of heads. The man at the door drew his revolver, and now two pistols were aimed straight at Ferrier.

“Don’t blame me,” he said. “Someone must have stumbled on the garage steps. Friends of yours?”

Tavita was beginning to understand. She translated quickly into Spanish, just to keep everything quite clear, and there was a brightness in her eyes as she glanced at Ferrier, sharing Sam’s joke with him. We’re friends again, he thought, and that’s important if we are going to get through the next half hour.

“Hear that, Zacarías?” the talkative one had to call out. “The Americans fell over their own big feet.” The idea appealed to him; he went into a fit of silent laughter.

Zacarías only nodded as he pocketed his revolver. He concentrated now on the door, listening carefully as he opened it a couple of inches. Then he swung it wide enough to let three people enter. First, a man, small and dark and sombre-faced, who pulled a woman across the threshold. She was old, heavy-set, her head bowed, her feet dragging painfully. Behind her, pushing her forward, was another man, small and dark, round-faced and fat. They dropped her in the middle of the hall. Her legs buckled under her, and she fell on her knees, her bloody hands clenched tightly, arms folded across her breast as if she were holding in her pain. She sank to the floor, a crumpled heap of black clothes.

“Magdalena!” Tavita’s voice rose as she called the old woman’s name. She ran toward her.

The grim-faced man caught Tavita’s arm, swung her round, pointed her back to the room. “In there, señorita. You take a
chair, sit down, and answer a few questions. That is all you have to do. Move!” But she tried to pull herself free.

So he’s still giving orders, Ferrier thought savagely as he recognised the man and his fat friend, two of the trio who had ransacked Jeff Reid’s place last night, roughly handled Concepción, left him with a painful reminder on the back of his head. He paid no attention to them, now, passing them swiftly but keeping out of their reach, and bent over old Magdalena. She was conscious. He tried to raise her. She could give him no help, a dead weight.

“Leave her alone!” the little thin man called out. He was holding Tavita’s arm, bending it backward to stop her struggle.

“Lend me a hand,” Ferrier said to Zacarías, who had remained by the door. Zacarías only looked away. “That’s what I like about you fellows. Your noble ideals.” He glanced up at the fat man, who was staring at him in amazement.

“Just look who is here,” the fat man said slowly. He wasn’t smiling much today; his jaw was swollen, discoloured. But his button-round eyes were gleaming with some pleasing prospect that stretched in front of them. A knife slipped out of his cuff.

“Later, later!” his friend warned him. “Start searching!”

Zacarías left the door, went toward the staircase to the lower floors. He kept his eyes averted from the woman on the floor. The fat man replaced his knife, trotted with his short quick steps into the living-room, looked around, whistled his approval.

Tavita wrenched her arm free. “If you want any information from me, you will start behaving like real men. What are you? Barbary apes?” She ran over to Magdalena, knelt beside her.

The word “information” had some effect. The thin man watched in silence as Ferrier got a grip on Magdalena’s broad
waist and managed to raise her to her feet. Magdalena was making an effort now. With Tavita supporting her on one side, Ferrier on the other, she stumbled slowly into the room.

Ferrier said warningly, “Look out for her hands, Tavita.” The blood was dried; the fingernails must have been torn off hours ago. But the slightest touch on them, even the drift of Magdalena’s long black lace scarf against the raw flesh, made her wince with a deep shudder. No cry, no sob, no moan. He brought her over to the couch.

“Not my room?” Tavita asked quickly.

Not your room, he was thinking. I don’t want Magdalena or you in there. What I want are two of these men, somehow, in some way, enticed into that room and its heavy door securely locked. That would lessen the odds. For a short time. But that is what we need: time. He shook his head. “This will do,” he said as he set Magdalena down on a white leather cushion. “Get her legs up on the couch, let her lie flat,” he told Tavita. He reached for the stole, held it casually in front of him, got a sure grip of the automatic. “We’ll cover her with this—she really needs a blanket—shock.” He slipped the automatic into his belt, buttoned his jacket, kept on talking in a rush of words. “Yes, that’s the way—straighten her legs—gently.” Magdalena went rigid with pain. He dropped the stole, looked down at her. The backs of her calves were red-scored, raw.

Ferrier grasped Tavita’s wrist, silenced her gasp, pulled her to face him as if to spare her seeing Magdalena’s wounds. Quickly, in a whisper, his lips unmoving, he said, “Get the key to your bedroom. Get it.” But his hand did not loosen from her wrist. She nodded, wondering, waiting, strangely obedient.

“Keep apart, you two!” came the sharp order from the
centre of the room, where the small thin man had established his command post. “And let her look at the old woman. An object lesson.”

“Why else,” put in the fat man, “did we haul the old bitch here?” He had been wandering around, roughly pulling out small drawers, rummaging wildly in large chests, creating the utmost chaos from the simplest actions. His search was more for effect than for any practical purpose: a threat of what he really could do if he set his mind on it. He was over near the studio, now. And the uniformed man, strangely untalkative for those last five minutes, was at the entrance to the hall, where he could keep an eye on the front door and listen for any call from his friend Zacarías downstairs.

Ferrier said to Tavita, his voice at a normal level, “We’d better find something to stop the pain. Where do you keep your medicines? In the bedroom?” He let go of her wrist.

She moved quickly, saying, “I’ll get something. Bandages, too.”

“You stay here!” The small man had his revolver out. “First, you answer my question. Only one. The old woman told us all the rest.”

That stopped Tavita. Her hand dropped away from the bedroom door. She turned slowly, looked at him. Then softly she said, “So it was you who did that to Magdalena.”

Ferrier said quickly, “If you know so much, why did you have to come here? There’s nothing—”

“Do you want me to close your mouth for you?” The man’s revolver pointed at Ferrier’s face, then swerved back to Tavita. “Yes, we know everything. Only one question left. Where is Tomás Fuentes now?”

“Six feet under. Where you should be. Monster!” Tavita was recovering.

“Where is he? He was here yesterday. The old woman—”

“Nonsense!”

“She saw him.”

“She saw a man. A stranger.”

“Tomás Fuentes.”

“You put a name into her mouth. She did not know any Tomás Fuentes.”

Ferrier was listening tensely. Tavita believed what she was saying, he was sure of that. Yet the man seemed so confident. Bluffing?

“She saw him,” the man said. “Here. Yesterday.”

“Not Fuentes,” Tavita insisted. “A stranger. I threatened to call the police. And he left. Magdalena neither heard nor saw any of this—she was downstairs.”

“We watched this house from the moment you arrived here yesterday afternoon. We were watching. No man left.”

Ferrier felt a surge of relief. A definite lie, he thought. They did not start watching this house until they became suspicious of it, and that was only after they had knocked me cold on Jeff Reid’s living-room floor and filched Tavita’s address out of my wallet. No one was watching this house yesterday afternoon—not until eight or nine o’clock in the evening, if that. He tried to signal Tavita with his eyes, but she kept looking at the man. She had known what Magdalena could actually tell these men. She had known they were lying when they talked about the naming of Tomás Fuentes. But now her confidence was gone. She was believing this new assertion. Had they seen Fuentes arriving? Her face was blank with worry. Ferrier said clearly, “I’ll get
the medicine.” He crossed rapidly to the bedroom door. “He’s bluffing,” he said quietly as he reached Tavita. “One big bluff.”

“You stay here!” the man was yelling at him. “Or I’ll put a bullet in your spine.”

Tavita’s eyes widened, narrowed. She pushed the bedroom door violently open, smashed it shut behind her.

The fat man dropped the large vase he had been examining, let it splinter around his feet as he ran towards the bedroom. “What has she got in there? Who?” He flung the door wide and entered.

“No one is there,” said the uniformed man, finding his tongue again. He had come out from the hall, but no more than a few feet. “Zacarías searched. We made sure.”

The thin man wasn’t impressed. “Stand aside!” he told Ferrier, who was partly blocking his view of the bedroom. He began fitting a silencer on to his revolver.

He won’t threaten any more, thought Ferrier. Now he will act. So Ferrier drew to one side of the door, stood there with a shoulder against the wall, his arms folded. He could feel his automatic hard, against his side, waiting for his hand to reach it. But the man was watching him. Ferrier kept absolutely still, while his mind raced: one in that room—one here—one hovering near the hall—one, Zacarías, somewhere on a lower floor—two Americans now being very quiet indeed after their stumble on the garage stairs, but where? Helping Zacarías search below? Or investigating the terraces? Well, that would be Sam’s problem. “Tavita?” Ferrier called, turning his head toward the bedroom, listening. He had hoped to divert the man’s attention from him, just for a split second. And there was plenty to hear: a short, sharp argument, voices distant,
as if they were coming from either the dressing-room or the bathroom.

But the man’s eyes never left Ferrier. He did take a step forward, almost reached the threshold of the bedroom. “What’s she doing?” he called out angrily. “Tell her to drop everything. Come back here.” He had a command for Ferrier, too. “And you get back over by the couch. Move!” To the uniformed man near the hall, he tossed another order: “Keep an eye on this one. Shoot him if he tries anything.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at Ferrier, who had taken only one step away, and that slowly. “I give you two seconds to—”

A high-pitched scream jerked their attention back to the bathroom. It ended in a strange cry, abrupt, cut short.

“Bernardo?” called the man near Ferrier. His pistol instinctively pointed at the bathroom door, his eyes questioning.

Ferrier shot him in the right shoulder. His second shot was for the uniformed man. It caught him in the chest, so that he fell backward even as he fired silently and his bullet ripped upward into the ceiling above Ferrier’s head. The revolver fell out of his hand, skidded over the tile floor. The man with the shoulder wound stood with his right arm sagging, his long-nosed revolver drooping helplessly by his side. There was a look of utter astonishment on his face, then pain, then rage. His other hand reached for the gun. Ferrier shot him in the left wrist.

Three seconds all told. Ferrier moved quickly. He pocketed his small .22 and picked up the powerful .38 complete with silencer. The other .38 had slid under the edge of the couch, and he left it there. Neither man was likely to use it, he thought grimly, as he ran lightly through the bedroom, skirting its walls, keeping out of direct range from the half-open bathroom door.
When he reached it, he paused, drew close to one side, looked cautiously. It was Bernardo who lay on the floor just beyond the door.

“Tavita?”

She stepped into view, a knife in her hand. There was blood on it. She let it drop beside the red gash in Bernardo’s chest. “His,” she said. She raised her other hand, holding an empty glass. “I threw this in his face. He dropped the knife. I picked it up.” She looked down at the dead man. His hands were up at his eyes, as if he were tearing out that searing pain.

Ferrier took the glass, smelled it. Disinfectant of some kind, strong. Tavita was already finding another glass, filling it with water, searching for a box of pills, some fresh linen towels, a tube of sulfa ointment. “There are others,” he warned her, and handed her his small automatic before he turned to go back to the living-room.

She didn’t take it. “Guns make me afraid,” she said. She reached into the low neck of her dress, produced a key. “You see, I did not forget,” she told him. She stepped carefully over the pool of blood, followed him quickly. He had halted at the doorway to the main room. He put up a warning hand for silence.

On the couch, old Magdalena had begun to cry softly. The man on the floor was stirring restlessly, groaning. But the thin one had gone. He might not have been able to hold a revolver or throw a knife or shout an order, but he had used his legs. They had taken him, in a weaving pattern of trailing bloodstains, toward the terrace. Perhaps he expected help there. But of Zacarías, who ought to have reached the head of the staircase by this time, there was no sign. No sign, either, of Gene Lucas. No sign of Reid’s killer. Perhaps they were all out on the terrace.

Ferrier looked at the stretch of windows, treacherous, dangerous, tried to calculate the remaining odds. Suddenly, he felt his exhaustion. He was unable to think, to guess ahead, to plan. He could only stare at that window wall.