Puzzle for Pilgrims (11 page)

“Hello, Marietta,” he said.

“Hello, Martin.”

And that was all. Martin turned back to Iris. Marietta lit a cigarette. Her hand wasn’t even trembling.

“I’d better have another tequila, Peter. I spilt mine.”

I called the waiter. He brought drinks for everyone. I said to Marietta, “You heard what I said about Sally?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t know?”

“No, I didn’t know.” She picked a blossom from the magenta stock and started gravely to dissect it. “How did she die?”

“She fell off the balcony.”

For a moment I thought she would be as fantastically stage-British as to say, “Oh.” But she didn’t say anything. Silence descended on the table, a silence charged by Iris’s fear, my anxiety—and nothing from the Havens.

Suddenly Marietta said, “You came up from Acapulco, Martin?”

“Yes, Marietta.”

She was peering at the stock blossom as if she wanted to examine the minutest detail of its botanical make-up. “To see Sally?”

The question hung in the air. Down in the Zocalo the pipe organ had stopped. We could hear the Paco orchestra now, the sob of the violins and the tinkle of the marimba.

I didn’t pay much attention to what they were playing until I noticed a change in Martin. He had dropped Iris’s arm. He was watching Marietta across the table. She wasn’t looking at him. Then suddenly she was. I shall never forget her face, radiant, tentative.

The preposterously important question was still left unanswered. But they both rose. Martin released the yellow balloon. It floated up to the unpainted rafter. Martin went around the table and caught Marietta’s waist. They drifted together, dancing, through the narrow, empty tables.

I listened to the music then, and I recognized the bittersweet, defeated melody.

Borrachitá, me voy par olvidarle.

Le quero muchoy el también me quere.

Borrachitá, me voy hasta la capital …

It was the song the
mariachi
had played for Marietta last night at the Delta, the song that had brought the slow, quiet tears to her eyes. I remembered a snatch of the dialogue.

“Someone was all for me once.”

“Who?”

“Martin.”

They swayed, very close together, Marietta’s dark profile against Martin’s golden cheek. And for the first time I resented them both, resented a glamour that seemed fake, a beauty that seemed false. Real people don’t dance when they’ve just been told that a woman is dead. They seemed suddenly self-conscious to me, flotsam of charm, pallid ghosts unexorcized from an old novel by Michael Arlen.

Borrachitá, me voy hasta la capital

Par servirme al patron

Que me mandó llamar…

They weren’t dancing like brother and sister. They were dancing like lovers.

I looked at Iris. She was staring at them as if she had lost something secret and priceless.

While Martin and Marietta were dancing, I thought of Jake up at the Casa Haven, taking care of the body, taking care of the police, doing everything that Martin as Sally’s husband should have been doing. I was beginning to see that was typical of the Havens. Whatever happened to them, there would always be someone else to do the dirty work.

I watched them moving, rapt, through the empty tables. I said to Iris, “I thought they had quarreled.”

“They never really quarreled.” Her voice was small, without body. “It was just Sally. Sally put ideas in Martin’s head, kept them apart.”

“Now Sally’s dead and they’re celebrating. What could be more reasonable?”

My wife turned to me with her old ferocity. “You don’t understand Martin. No one understands him.”

“Except you?”

“He isn’t like other people. Martin’s half genius, half—”

“… louse?”

She said gratingly, “If you have to be that spiteful, it’s hopeless between us.”

I was watching Marietta. Compared with her, Iris seemed pale, almost insignificant to me. Already the rope that I had thought would keep me forever hog-tied to Iris was fraying. Another strand had snapped. I could even visualize a time in the future when she would mean no more to me than “the wind goin’ over my hand”. It hurt losing something, even though it was a thing I was better off without.

I knew someone had to come out into the open sometime. I said, “Did you kill Sally? Or are you scared that Martin did?”

She sat very still, not saying anything.

“You knew Martin had been there,” I said. “The whole thing with the ring was pitiful. Was it something you arranged together, you and Martin? Iris, what happened!”

She seemed to have grown smaller, but she still did not speak. The silver tinkle of the marimba rattled from the inside bar. Marietta and Martin were still dancing.

I went on, “You’ve got to tell me. There’s only Jake between you—and God knows what. You can’t rely on Jake. You don’t even know what his game is. Don’t be like Martin, drifting along being a pilgrim, expecting everything to fix itself. Hate me if you like. God knows I’m getting used to it. But tell me the truth.”

She said icily, “Jake was there. He said it was an accident. The police say it was an accident.”

I saw it was useless. She thought of me too much as an enemy. I felt terribly sorry for her. I said, “The head’s pretty deep in the gas oven, isn’t it?”

She was suddenly pleading. “You don’t suppose I’m happy, do you?”

I didn’t rise to the plea. “I don’t know what you are any more. And I don’t know what you’ve done. But I do know we’ve got to get rooms for tonight. I’ll call the Borda. How about you and Martin? Separate rooms?”

She looked as if I’d slapped her. “Of course.”

“All this—and separate rooms. A fine romance.”

There was a rich, tourist luxury about the Hotel de la Borda. It was a relief to be in a normal atmosphere where people were doing normal things, sitting in deep chairs, reading the
Reader’s Digest,
and discussing tomorrow’s sight-seeing trip. The management was polite about our absence of luggage. We were taken up to beautiful, clean rooms with bright modern Mexican furniture and staggering views of the terraced town.

Jake, who appeared shortly after us with the news that everything was in control until the inquest tomorrow, vetoed any further discussion that night, although, heaven knows, the others showed no signs of wanting to discuss anything ever. We broke up and went to our separate rooms. I slumped into a yellow tape chair by the open window and lit a cigarette. Then I called downstairs for a drink. When it came, I stared out at the dying lights of the town, watching them vanish one after the other as fiesta-tired Mexicans dropped onto their rush sleeping mats.

I thought about Sally. A few hours ago she had been so powerful; she had had three lives to play with and she had been enjoying herself to the hilt. Now she was dead, brushed away like a dead fly by a cryptic Californian and a Mexican policeman whose uncle was a carpenter. Something had happened on that balcony. What? With whom? Marietta’s face, Martin’s face, Iris’s face rose in my mind. I started to worry; then I thought, “Why the hell should I worry? What’s it to me?”

I finished my drink.

There was a knock on the door. I said. “Come in.” It was Martin Haven.

He had taken off his jacket and tie. The sun-silvered blond hair was tousled. He was carrying a bottle of some kind of capsules.

He smiled his sudden, trusting smile that made you feel you’d be a heel if you didn’t love him more than anyone in the world.

“Hope I’m not bothering you, Peter.”

“Of course not.”

“There’s no drinking water in my room. You can’t drink water out of the taps in this country. I thought you had some perhaps.”

There were a pitcher and glasses on a side table. I nodded to them. He splashed some water in a glass, took two capsules out of the bottle, and swallowed them.

“Thank you.”

“What you taking?”

“Just sleeping tablets. I can’t sleep in Mexico.” He crossed to the bed and sat down on it, tucking his legs under him. He watched me. The blue eyes were utterly guileless.

He said, “Something I ought to tell you, Peter.”

“There is?”

“Yes.” He paused. “I was at Sally’s tonight.”

“I know you were.”

“I know you do.” The smile came unexpectedly. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

I waited.

“She called me yesterday in Acapulco, asked me to come, told me not to say anything about it to Iris.”

How many times had I heard a version of that story?

“And when you arrived, she was alive?”

“Naturally.”

“What happened?”

“She was quite decent, really. Said everything might be arranged.”

“No quarrel?”

“No, nothing of that sort.”

“And yet your ring was left behind. What happened? Just slip off?”

“Oh, no. She asked for it. She’d given it to me when we were married. She wanted it as a keepsake. He looked at me gravely. “She loved me, you know.”

“Seems it’s quite an epidemic.”

He didn’t rise to that. He slid a leg out from under him and gripped his sun-gold ankle. “Funny. Everything’s violently changed, isn’t it?”

“Violently.”

“That end of the balcony was always rotten. In the rainy season the rain washed down that way off the porch roof. There’s no gutter.”

“There isn’t?”

“Peter.” He hesitated. “The police—they won’t think anything odd, will they?”

“Depends on what you mean by odd.”

“I mean, Sally being dead with the situation…”

I said, “What did Sally have on you and Marietta?”

I could see the blood coursing up behind the smooth boy’s skin of his face. “How do you know about that?”

“Sally was at my place in Mexico last night. She said she had enough proof to throw you both in jail. What was it?”

He said stiffly, “I don’t see what that has to do with anything. It was just a—personal matter.”

“I’m not being vulgarly curious. You asked me if the police will think anything odd. If they find evidence that she could have had you and Marietta in jail, they’ll think things are plenty odd. Did she have proof? Sally?”

The flush was still there. “Yes. I believe she did.”

“Where’d she keep it?”

“I don’t know.”

Impulsively he got off the bed and dropped to the floor at my feet, squatting with his arms resting on his crossed legs. It seemed almost impossible that he was a grown man. He was like a little English boy trying to cozen a half crown out of Pater.

“You won’t say anything about this to the police, Peter?”

“I won’t say anything to anyone. I don’t speak Spanish. You’ll have to square Jake.”

“Jake? He doesn’t know, does he?”

“I don’t know what Jake knows and what he doesn’t.”

He said, “Who is he anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

He said with sudden, savage bitterness, “Marietta knows. Or perhaps she doesn’t. You don’t know much about people who pick you up in bars.”

“This isn’t the time to sit in moral judgment on Marietta.”

He seemed to forget Marietta. His face lightened.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. You’re not angry with me, are you?”

“About what?”

“About Iris?”

He was genuinely worried. I could tell that. Martin couldn’t bear to have anyone not liking him. He’d stolen my wife. But that wasn’t anything. I still had to be his friend, take him out to tea with plenty of crumpets and cucumber sandwiches. What could you do with your wife’s lover when he was this way? Pat him on the head and say, “Okay, Junior. Run along now. It’s way past your bedtime?”

He said gravely, “It couldn’t he helped, you know, Peter. Things like that can’t be helped.”

“You should put that in a book.”

He was so slight and yet so closely knit. He made me feel big and clumsy. “Most people don’t understand, Peter. Because I know what I want and get what I want, they think I’m heartless. I’m not. If you’ve got to live, you can only live the way you want with the things you want.”

“If you can get them.”

He looked faintly puzzled. Perhaps it had just crept into his consciousness that some people couldn’t always get what they wanted.

“Right now I need Iris,” he said.

He needed Iris right now. We were all supposed to cluster around and clap our hands.

He got up and picked the bottle of sleeping capsules off the green and white bedspread. He yawned and then grinned.

“The pills are beginning to work. Better get to bed.”

“Do you carry that stuff around with you all the time? Even when you expect to be home before nightfall?”

“Oh, no. Sally gave me these. I’d left them at the house. She knows I need them horribly.”

Nothing had been resolved, but he seemed to think it had. He held out his hand. There was nothing to do but play it his way. I took the hand. It was warm and dry and the nails were almost silver against the suntanned skin.

“You’re being an awful sport, Peter.”

“Think nothing of it,” I said. “It isn’t cricket not helping a pilgrim.”

“Pilgrim? What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Skip it.”

He left. I wondered if a husband-lover relationship had ever developed this way before. It probably had. Everything had happened before. I wished I had another drink, but I couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone and order one. I thought of Sally’s evidence against Martin and Marietta lying, heaven knew where, for the police to find. Then I thought of another thing. I thought of the sheet of paper which Jake had pulled out of Sally’s typewriter. I knew then that I wouldn’t sleep unless I found out what it was. I left my room and went down the corridor to Jake’s. I knocked.

He called, “Who is it?”

“Peter.”

“Come in, Peter.”

He was sitting on the bed, stripped to the waist, taking off his shoes. He had the torso of a champion boxer. In perfect trim too. No thickening around the hips. He grinned at me over his shoulder. There was a pint of whisky on the table beside him.

“Well, well,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“You can give me a drink for one thing.”