Murder Is My Dish (13 page)

We were a few hundred yards out of Puerto Casado and heading northeast. It had rained all day. The air was hot and sticky and swamp-smelling. The mosquitoes whined and feasted. It was Thursday, the twenty-third of December. Pan American and Panagra had flown me to Asunción via Lima, Peru. A river side-wheeler had taken me up the Paraguay through the swamps to Puerto Casado. In a riverfront café I had found Ansensio Martinez, a fat little Indian who was convinced I wanted to cross the border to smuggle out the yellow diamonds found in the Parana Republic. Ansensio Martinez charged me fifty dollars, gringo money, to take me across. It was not raining now. The swamps steamed. You could hardly breathe the moisture-saturated air.

I followed Ansensio Martinez's dim shape through the swamp. His boots made plopping sounds, as mine did. He wore a poncho and carried an ancient rifle slung across his shoulder. The man whose face I hadn't seen followed behind me. We would walk all night through the swamps, Ansensio Martinez had said. He did not believe in going on the river, although you could do so. On the river even at night there were patrol boats. Just before dawn we would reach the Parana Republic border. It was only five miles from the river port, but through the swamps it would take all night.

I wore a poncho like Ansensio Martinez's. When I crossed over, I would be strictly on my own, although for an additional fifty dollars, gringo money … But he hadn't finished the thought. The other man, impatiently,—had urged that we get started.

The caymans bawled. I wondered if they liked gringo meat. I walked, pulling my legs out of the muck with every step. This was the home of the anaconda, the boa constrictor's twenty-five-foot aquatic cousin, Ansensio Martinez had said proudly, as if he had sired the snakes. This was also the country of the bushmaster and the fer-de-lance, whose bite meant death.

I plodded on. Ansensio Martinez seemed tireless. His stumpy little legs pumped up and down like pistons. The man behind me grunted and did not ask to rest.

I walked. After the first couple of hours I stopped thinking about anacondas and bushmasters and the fer-de-lance. We were never very far from the river, but I no longer heard the bawling caymans. It was hard to tell where the swamps ended and the river began.

I walked. Walking, I dreamed I was Legs Drum, king of the marathon heel-and-toe men, in my hip boots and poncho. Ansensio Martinez had thrown the hip boots in for free, but I had paid for the poncho.

Ansensio Martinez passed out chocolate bars. We munched, walking. Some time after midnight it began to rain, not the way it rains in the North Temperate Zone but the way it rains only in the tropics after the sun has passed overhead on its yearly swing to Capricorn, leaving superheated air in its wake. The rain smashed in sheets against the surface of the swamp, hissing and crashing. It beat us; it clobbered us. Visibility had been poor to begin with and was nonexistent now. Ansensio Martinez roped us together. We staggered on through the rain. I fell down. They waited. Then Ansensio Martinez fell down. Then there was a frantic tug at the rope behind me and I helped the man whose face I hadn't seen to his feet. We walked.

The rain furrowed the swamp with swift freshets. We floundered through them, sometimes waist-deep. I played a game, and it helped. I wasn't pushing ahead through swamps. I was climbing a rope. I went hand-over-hand along the rope and dragged my feet after me. They came with reluctance. The rain boomed and exploded. At least it had driven the mosquitoes away.

Dawn seeped like a wet silver mantle over the swamp. The rain tumbled like molten silver out of a black sky. It made a silver-splashing silhouette of Ansensio Martinez's back. Then suddenly it stopped, as if someone had shut a faucet.

Here tall marsh grass grew as high as a man in the swamp. Ansensio Martinez used his rifle to beat a path through the wet grass. Water rushed through the swamp toward the river. The tall grass was too sodden to rustle. After a while Ansensio Martinez held up his hand and we stopped. He undid the ropes fastening us together. In Spanish he said, “The border.”

I didn't see anything different. I saw nothing but the swamp grass, green and lush with the rain. Then Ansensio Martinez parted the grass with his arms and I saw three strands of barbed wire, rusty and slimed over with swamp mold.

“The river lies half a kilometer to your right,” Ansensio Martinez told us. “Three kilometers to your left is a watchtower.
Bueno suerte
. Good luck.”

“You're not going back right now?” I asked.

Ansensio Martinez grinned. The skin of his face was cross-hatched with wrinkles like Scotch grain, but he wasn't an old man. Life in the swamps did that to you. He was probably about twenty-five or thirty. He looked fifty, but he would probably die before fifty of old age.

“I too have business in the Parana Republic,” he said.

“I'm going to Ciudad Grande,” I said. “There's another fifty dollars in it for you if you take me.”

“Gringo, gringo,” Ansensio Martinez said, and laughed.

“What's so funny?”

Martinez wouldn't stop laughing, but the other man told me, “When you enter the Parana Republic without a visa, on whatever business you have, it is best to disappear in the swamps or north in the bush country or the forest or the mountains. You do not announce where you are going. Especially not to an Ansensio Martinez.”

The guide stopped laughing. “So?” he said. “So?”

“Well, that is my advice,” the other man told me with dignity. He was a tall and very handsome man, or would have been if mud had not besplattered him completely. He had the darkest eyes I had ever seen and a bold, high-bridged nose which had been bequeathed to his ancestors by the Arabs in Spain, and skin of that olive color common among Spaniards and a voice as deep as Ansensio Martinez's was high and reedy. He was my height, six-one, and about forty-five years old. He did not look as if he had spent much time in the swamps. For a Spaniard he was a very big man.

Ansensio Martinez parted the upper two strands of barbed wire. “
Aqui,
” he said. “
Vamos.
”

I stepped over the lower strand and stood up in the Parana Republic.

The tall fellow came through head first, stooping as I had done. He got his left foot over the lower strand. Then his right boot snagged on the barbs and he fell forward heavily with an oath, his right leg still dangling from the wire. I bent down and tugged at his boot, but he yelled for me to stop. Ansensio Martinez came through nimbly between the strands of wire.

“I think it's broken, or badly sprained,” the tall man said, his face all at once haggard with pain and fatigue.

I disengaged the barbs as gently as I could. He winced once but did not cry out. When I got his foot loose he rolled over and tried to stand up, but collapsed with a groan when his right foot touched the ground.

“I'll be all right,” he said. “Go ahead. Go on, both of you. No, wait. You've been paid, Martinez. I want to talk to the American.”

Ansensio Martinez laughed. It was a bubbly sound and ended in throat-clearing and a cough.

“Get out of here, Martinez,” the injured man said. “You've been paid. Go now.”

Martinez smiled. He was missing three teeth in the front of his mouth. He shook his head. “No, I don't think so.” He turned slowly and faced us with the rifle. He had carried it all night weather-slung, the barrel canvas-covered. He asked, “How much?”

The injured man didn't say anything.

Martinez laughed the bubbly, throat-clearing, cough-ending laugh again. “How much do you think the police will pay for the delivery, alive, of Hipolito Robles?”

Hipolito Robles. The name hit me so hard I just stood there watching them. The injured man reached clumsily inside his poncho. Martinez stepped forward quickly, crouching, grasping the rifle by stock and barrel and swinging the butt in a down-blurring arc. It struck the injured man's hand just as he draw a small automatic from his poncho. The automatic flew from his fingers and disappeared in the swamp grass. He clutched at the rifle stock, but Ansensio Martinez pulled it out of reach and then drove the butt down against his chest with a thud. The injured man groaned, his hands falling slack at his sides, his eyes glazing over, his lips forming a rictus of pain. Martinez jerked around and faced me with the rifle.

“You. Help him to his feet, gringo.”

Hipolito Robles. The white hope of the Parana Republic, Caballero had called him in his book. The one underground leader of any real importance who hadn't fled the country permanently or been hunted down, and captured, and killed. Until now.

“Gringo!” Martinez said.

I stooped. The grass had been beaten down all around us. Martinez was close. Very close. Beyond him the swamp grass stood like a wall in the wet windless air. Taller than the grass was a gnarled tree with purple flowers the size of platters. An enormous blue-winged butterfly fluttered uncertainly toward it. Ansensio Martinez's gaze flickered for a split second, caught by the iridescent blue. I came up with a handful of mud and hurled it. The rifle roared, its canvas cover smouldering. I hit Martinez hard in the middle with my shoulder and he jackknifed over it. The rifle beat at the small of my back. I fell on top of Martinez in the high grass.

He writhed and let go of the rifle and tore at my face with fingers and nails. I covered his face with the flat of my hand and pushed. Slowly his head sank into the mud. His arms flailed, splattering muddy water at me. He cursed. He snarled and bit my hand. I pulled it away. He sat up, jabbing two stiff fingers at my Adam's apple. I gagged. Tears sprang to my eyes. I couldn't breathe. He tried the trick with his fingers again, but I brought my chin down and he stubbed them against it.

We both scrambled to our feet, glaring at each other. He threw a left, but I blocked it and hooked my own left at the side of his jaw. His head jerked back and I used the edge of my palms against his stretched neck. You can kill a man that way, by breaking his trachea, but I eased up on it. It was a mistake which I would regret later. Martinez went down heavily on his back, gagging and wheezing before he lapsed slowly and reluctantly into unconsciousness.

The man with the injured leg was crawling toward us with a dead branch in his hand. He smiled at me and dropped the branch. It was sodden and wouldn't have helped much.

“A car,” he said. “Waiting for me on the road between here and the river. That shot might have carried to the watchtower. You want a ride?”

“Brother, do I!”

I helped him to his feet and draped his arm across my shoulder. We hobbled along that way until a man with a big .45 automatic in his hand appeared out of the swamp grass and stopped us.

He was wearing khaki and did not look as if he had walked all night through the mud. He was a young
mestizo
with skin the color of mahogany. Facing us with the automatic, he was as emotional as a mahogany log.

“Emilio,” Hipolito Robles said.

The young
mestizo
flashed large white teeth at us and said in Spanish, “I didn't recognize you, señor Robles. I heard a shot and came running.” Then, as he saw that I supported Robles's weight on my shoulder, he exclaimed, “You're hurt, señor!”

“I was clumsy. It is nothing.”

Together Emilio and I helped Hipolito Robles through the high grass. After a while we came to a road of beaten earth. It was hardly more than a track through the swamp grass, with two muddy tire ruts and a ridge between them. Up the road a little way was a jeep. It took up almost the entire road. The canvas top was up. The plastic side windows were scratched so you couldn't see through them. Emilio opened the flimsy door and I got into the back with Hipolito Robles. Emilio sat in front. The driver, a little old Indian with a shock of white hair and Scotch-grained skin like Ansensio Martinez's on the back of his neck, started the jeep. We went bouncing along the track through the swamp.

“How is your leg?” Emilio asked.

“Of no importance.”

“And Esteban?”

“Your brother came down with fever in Puerto Casado. He is well cared for. The guide Ansensio Martinez took us through the swamp.”

“Martinez!”

“
Sí
.”

“That dropping of a wild sow. The underground means nothing to him. Nothing. That fornicator of
capybaras
. That
cabrón.”

“It was Martinez or nobody,” Robles said, and told them all that had happened in the swamp.

The old man driving said nothing. Emilio said, “Then when Martinez regains consciousness he will go to the watchtower and—”

“No,” Robles told him. “I think not. If he could deliver me to them of a certainty; otherwise, he gains nothing. American?”

“Yes, Señor Robles?”

“What do you want in our country that you can't get by coming in the usual way, with a visa?”

I told them my story. While I spoke and we sped bouncing along the rutted, muddy, incredibly bad road which only a four-wheel-drive jeep could negotiate, Emilio passed clothing back to us. I helped Hipolito Robles off with his hip boot. I had to cut it away with a knife Emilio passed back to me. The ankle was swollen and blue. We had hardly space to change clothing. We bounced and jostled against each other as the jeep sped along, but by the time I finished telling my story I was wearing white ducks and a white shirt and a soft white wide-brimmed hat, clothing meant for Esteban and a pretty good fit.

Emilio gave us strips of charqui. We chewed on the dried, jerked beef. It was as tough as leather.

Robles said, “I cannot believe that Rafael Caballero is dead. We were like brothers.”

“It looks as if he's dead. We can't be sure.”

“His book?”

“I have the book.”

“Here, with you?”

“No.” Robles looked at me. “In the States,” I said. I didn't say anything else.

Emilio gave us cigarettes and squirmed around to light them. “Your mission, señor?”