Murder Is My Dish (19 page)

A small lamp in the shape of a fat nude Indian woman, primitively carved from mahogany and probably a Guarani Indian fertility symbol, was lit on the night table. It was a large room with heavy, gleaming mahogany furniture, a big fourposter dominating it.

A small lamp in the shape of a fat nude Indian woman, primitively carved from mahogany and probably a Guarani Indian fertility symbol, was lit on the night table. It was a large room with heavy, gleaming mahogany furniture, a big fourposter dominating it.

Eulalia sat down on the bed and looked up at me. I said, “How do you feel?”

“That's the amazing part of it. I actually feel splendid, Chet.” She smiled. “Maybe a little tired, that's all.”

“You had a rough time of it.”

“My father had rougher.”

“Remember much of what happened up there?”

“No. It's like a dream.”

“I saw your mother.”

Eulalia looked surprised. “The night after I got here they came for me. They said they were from the state hospital. They were security police. I didn't want to go. Then they took me. They did things to me. They wanted me to tell them about the book.”

“But you didn't?”

“I didn't know where the book was! I hate to think what would have happened if I did.”

“No, I mean the contents of the book.”

Eulalia patted the bed next to her and I said down. Then she said, “It meant so much to Rafael. He died for it. It would have meant so much to my father. I don't know if I talked or not. I don't know.”

“Stop trying to convince yourself you're a coward. Caballero would have been proud of you up there. They drugged you blind. They threw everything they had at you. Anyway, it wouldn't help them.”

“What wouldn't?”

“About the book. There's a plane Robles wants me to be on tomorrow. I'm going to deliver the book to its publisher. You're coming with me, Eulalia.”

She looked at the Guarani Indian woman, smiling at us from the lamp. Her eyes were wide. She put her hand on my knee. Her fingers were trembling. “You knew me only one day,” she said. “You hardly knew me at all, but you came four thousand miles after me.”

“Forget it, huh? I didn't know you were in a jam. I flew down here to get Pablo Duarte.”

“To get him?”

“To kill him.”

Then her eyes really opened wide. “Chet, they'd kill you before you ever—”

“Forget that too. I'm going home. You're coming along with your mother. All right? It wouldn't be safe for you here, not after what happened.”

“Now who's trying to deprecate himself? You're leaving because Robles is afraid of what will happen if you stay. Aren't you?”

I didn't answer her. I didn't want to talk about it.

“Please kiss me the way you did before,” she said.

I turned my body toward her, and she came sideways into my arms. Her eyes were closed. She had very long lashes. I kissed her, but it wasn't like that other kiss in the rain. I didn't want it to be. The rain fell softly outside. A breeze stirred. She was all mixed up. She couldn't stop thinking of herself as a coward, but she wasn't a coward. She wasn't going to drink herself into a stupor, though. At least that was something. She had me. I got up and stood looking down at her.

“I can't go with you tomorrow,” she said.

“You've got to, after what they did. What makes you think they won't try it again?”

“That's just it. My mother wouldn't leave the Parana Republic. If I'm in danger, then she's in danger because of me. I've got to stay.”

“She'll come with us,” I said. “We'll make her come.”

“She has a bad heart. It would kill her.”

“She'll come.”

“I'm sorry. No.”

“Use your head, for crying out loud.”

“I'm sorry. I have to stay with her.”

“I saw your mother. You want to know what I thought?”

“No.”

“She was like something out of a surrealistic painting. No background. Just bare walls and a sick old woman in a ray of sunshine on a camp chair in an empty room. She wants to die, Eulalia. It's the only way she can escape from the present and get back to the past.”

“Shut up. Please shut up.”

“I'm asking you to get her out of it.”

“She'd die.”

“That's not the way I see it. What the hell good is she doing herself or anybody now?”

“Get out of here.”

She turned over face down on the bed and lay there barely moving. I touched her hand but she drew it away. She seemed to be hardly breathing. She wasn't crying that I could see.

I left her there and went looking for Hipolito Robles. I found him just leaving the dining room.

“Well?” he said.

“She doesn't want to go. She knows she has to, but is afraid it would kill her mother. If she doesn't go, the deal's off.”

“I understand. She will accompany you. Emilio will bring her mother to the airport. Will that be satisfactory?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “You're a
buen hombre
, Señor Drum. A good man.”

“Ah, the hell with all of you,” I said, and left him standing there with his mouth open.

I went to my room and got undressed and lay there without sleeping.

Rosa had a big breakfast ready at sunrise. It was drizzling outside and the coldest it had been since I'd arrived. Don't let anyone kid you about those twenty-minute sun showers during the rainy season in the tropics and bright clear weather the rest of the time. The only place you find that is in the travel folders.

At breakfast Eulalia wouldn't talk to me. I didn't push it. Jesús went outside to see about the jeep he would drive us to the airport in. Rosa sat with Eulalia. Robles took me into the hall and gave me a roll of
dolares
big enough to choke a capybara.

“The pilot,” he said, “who is an American del Norte named O'Tool, will fly you to Asunción, Paraguay. There is enough money left for air fare from there to wherever you wish to go in the United States.” He also gave me an envelope. “Here are visas for Señorita Mistral and her mother, and a validated passport for the old woman.”

“You don't exactly sleep on an idea, do you?”

Hipolito Robles smiled. “We had the blanks. We merely had to fill them in.”

Just then the motor of Jesús's jeep coughed and caught outside, and began to purr smoothly. Rosa and Eulalia came out of the dining room and Eulalia said, “I don't want to go.”

“
Muchacha
,” Rosa said. “
Muchacha
.”

Her brother gave me a revolver. It was a Smith & Wesson .38/44 Special. “Just in case,” he said.

We shook hands. Rosa pecked a kiss at Eulalia's face, Robles said, “
Suerte
,” and I took Eulalia's elbow and led her outside.

“Take care of the girl,” Rosa called after me. “Take care of her, señor Drum, and go with God.”

Eulalia's arm was stiff under my fingers. We went over to the jeep, walking through the light rain. Jesús sat like a statue at the wheel.

All morning we drove up into the hills west of the ranch. The road was bad and we made very poor time. Jesús never said a word. He didn't even turn around to look at us. He drove in splendid, isolated communion with the jeep and the bad road.

Once Eulalia dozed off and her head slumped against my shoulder. She said something in her sleep, but I couldn't make it out. When she awoke she jerked away from me. We didn't talk at all. Pretty early in the morning we had passed the last of the higher, smaller ranches. The animals out grazing in the rain were small and bony. It was bad pasture land. Beyond it the hills rose steeply and Jesús took the jeep up and around one hairpin turn after another. From the look of the countryside it had been high jungle once, but had been cleared for ranching. The poor ranchers had long since given up their hopeless fight and a scrubby secondary growth of timber lay tangled and twisted over the hills, glistening and very green in the rain. Eulalia stared straight ahead, looking at nothing. She never saw any of it.

Around noon the highest hills were behind us and the road went gently down across a sloping plateau. We rounded a sharp curve and there was the airport below us. It wasn't much of an airport, just a couple of corrugated metal shacks and a lonely hangar with a wind-stiffened yellow windsock flying above it. There was a biplane out in the rain that Errol Flynn might have flown in
Dawn Patrol
. The hangar door was open and there was a high-winged monoplane in there, possibly a Beechcraft. Jesús drove up to the larger of the two corrugated shacks, crossing the concrete tarmac. The surface was pitted and cracked. Weeds grew out of it. The place looked like the last airport for the final flight of the last airplane in a dying world.

As we got out of the jeep a fellow in an unzippered leather jumper came out of the shack. He was short and stocky, with reddish-blond hair and faded blue eyes. “Come on in out of the rain and grab some coffee,” he said cheerfully. “Hell of an airport, ain't it?”

We all went inside the corrugated shack. The front room had a narrow zinc-topped counter and half a dozen chairs. An Indian lad behind the counter had a big pot of coffee perking and it smelled delicious. There was a platter of sandwiches on the counter.

“Rain don't get any worse,” the man in the jumper said, “we can take off this afternoon. All right with you?”

I said it was all right. Jesús finished his coffee in a hurry and wolfed down one of the sandwiches. He got up and smiled politely and shyly and said, “
Mucha suerte
.” Those were the only words I had ever heard him speak. Then he went outside and in a moment we heard his jeep driving away.

“I'm O'Tool,” the man in the jumper said. He grinned. “I own this place, lock stock and barrel. Took me twelve years to pay off the mortgage, but of course by then the high ranches had all folded up and the place ain't worth a bent slug now. I was going to fly supplies and grub in so they wouldn't have to cart it up the hill roads. Going to make a million bucks. All the ranchers fooled me. by going back down into the river valley. Ain't it a laugh?”

Eulalia smiled fleetingly. I introduced her and told O'Tool my name. The Indian poured a second cup of coffee for all of us. O'Tool took a bottle of Irish whisky out from behind the counter and spiked all our drinks.

“Cold up here. Elevation six thousand feet,” he said. “They radioed there'd be three of you.”

“We're waiting for Miss Mistral's mother,” I said.

We finished our coffee and O'Tool showed us around the little airport. There were five bunks in the back room of the larger shack, and an office took up the entire interior of the smaller one. The plane in the hangar was a big old six-seater Beechcraft. O'Tool seemed to take a kind of perverse satisfaction in showing us around his business enterprise. “O'Tool's Folly,” he said. “You could buy it now for enough bird turd to fertilize an acre, but you'd have to be out of your head.”

I never asked him what had brought him to the Parana Republic in the first place, or why he didn't pull out. He didn't ask me why we had chosen this way out of the country.

In the middle of the afternoon Eulalia went into the bunk room to take a nap. I didn't have to watch her because there was no place she could go. Besides, she had to wait for her mother now. O'Tool looked uneasy and I asked him what was the matter.

“The weather,” he said. “I could take her up now, Drum, but I can't swear for later. If that soup up there closes in, we're grounded. And I mean grounded, brother.”

At four o'clock it began to rain harder. Clouds rolled and billowed like smoke on the surrounding hills. “I dunno,” O'Tool said. “It don't look good.”

Twenty minutes later the rain slackened and he began to get cheerful. Then we heard the sound of a car coming down the hill toward the airport.

I went outside and waited for it. Eulalia came out too and stood next to me without talking.

“Sleep any?” I said.

She didn't answer me. The car was closer. Then it came around the shoulder of the closest hill. It was a jeep. I put my hand on the butt of the .38/44 in my belt and felt foolish doing it. Who the hell could it be but Emilio and Señora Mistral?

The jeep drove across the tarmac and came to a stop, its brake linings squeaking with wet and rust. Emilio opened the canvas door and climbed out. He saw me and beckoned with his hand. I trotted over there with Eulalia right behind me.

Señora Mistral was sitting in the back of the jeep. She wore a poncho. All you could see of her was a little wrinkled skin and her deep-set eyes. She looked two hundred years old. I leaned in and helped her to the jeep's door. She was a poncho and a husk and those deep-set eyes. She didn't weigh ninety pounds. She was not a young woman, but with the poncho covering her she looked old enough to be her own grandmother. She looked a little like an Indian, too.

“
Madrecito
,” Eulalia said. “Are you all right,
madrecito?”

The old woman mumbled something.

Emilio told me, “If we can make a saddle with our hands—”

“No. I can carry her.”

I lifted Señora Mistral out of the jeep. Emilio leaned in and shut the engine. I took a step away from the jeep with señora Mistral in my arms, waiting unconsciously for the complete silence of the high hill country. It didn't come.

There was the sound of another car, far away. It grew more distinct. “Quick,” I told Emilio. “Take her.”

He lifted the old woman from my arms. The other car was much closer now. I thought it would appear around the shoulder of the hill in another moment; but it didn't. Then the sound of its motor rose and fell, rose and fell—as if the car were being seesawed back and forth across the narrow road to make a U-turn.