Puzzle for Pilgrims (12 page)

“Sure, sure.”

He poured a stiff shot for me and patted the bed next to him. I took the drink and sat down. He kicked off his shoes and started pulling off his socks. He wasn’t helping me.

I said, “What did you take out of Sally’s typewriter? A letter?”

“Sally’s typewriter?” He twisted around, giving me the naive blue stare. “Oh that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That.”

He shrugged and the muscles rippled under the white skin. “That wasn’t anything, Peter.”

“Then why did you take it?”

He grinned. “Sloppy, leaving things in typewriters. I hate sloppiness.”

I said, “For the second time, why are you doing all this?”

He twisted around on the bed. He put his heavy bare arm on my shoulder. I smelled sweat, not subway sweat, gymnasium sweat. I wished he wouldn’t be so affectionate, or, if he had to be affectionate, that the obscure, sinister undertone wasn’t there.

“Listen, you want that accident to stay nice and tidy, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You want that inquest to pan out all right tomorrow?”

I nodded.

“Okay, I’m fixing it, aren’t I?”

“It seems so.”

“Then take a load off your mind. Quit worrying. Relax.”

I said, “I’m not likely to relax until I know who you are and what you’re doing this for.”

He got up and stripped off his pants. He glanced at me over his shoulder, making a mock clucking sound.

“There you go again. There isn’t no satisfying some guys.”

He shook the pants, folded them neatly, and put them on a chair. He came back to the bed and nudged me with his elbow.

“Hey, get off of there. Jake’s going to bye-bye.”

I got up. He pulled back the sheets and flopped into the bed with a grunt of satisfaction.

“Light me a cigarette, Peter. Lazy. That’s me.”

I lit a cigarette and stuck it between his lips. A big arm came up from under the sheets and took it. He was watching me.

“We’ll get along, Peter, if you play it my way.”

I didn’t know what he meant, of course.

“And one thing you’d better learn is to stop asking questions when Uncle Jake isn’t giving the answers.”

He pushed himself up. The bedclothes dropped away from him.

“There’s one thing we’d better get straight, though—plenty quick.”

“What?”

“Which of those dames are you after—Iris or Marietta?”

The question caught me off balance. Which was I after, anyway? Under the cropped red hair, his blue eyes were blatantly intimate, as if we were two men trading hot telephone numbers.

I said, “Maybe that’s a question Uncle Peter isn’t answering.”

“Okay. If that’s your attitude. Okay.” He puffed cigarette smoke, curling his lips so that they looked almost negroid. “But get one thing straight, baby. I’m making a play for Marietta. That kid does things to me. I want her.”

A fleeting image came of Marietta last night, Marietta with her hands cold as ice, Marietta shivering.

“Yeah.” His stare was still on me like a challenge. “I want her. And when Jake wants something, he gets it. See what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said. “I see what you mean.”

“Then there’s not going to be any sloppiness about that.” He twisted around in bed, crushed the cigarette into a tray, and turned out the bedside lamp.

“Now, scram, Peter. If there’s one thing I don’t like in a bedroom with the lights out, it’s a man.”

I went out of the room. Marietta’s room was next door. I tapped lightly. I tried the handle. The room wasn’t locked. I pushed open the door.

She was standing fully dressed with her back to me, combing her dark hair and looking out into the moonlight. She hadn’t heard my knock. Then, suddenly conscious of a presence, she turned.

It was the same each time I saw her. Her beauty caught my breath as if I was seeing her for the first time. She was straight and slim as a sapling. Her eyes were green like leaves.

I said, “I just came with a little practical advice. Keep your door locked.”

“Wasn’t it locked?”

“It wasn’t. And it better be.”

“Why?”

“Unless you want Jake to get chummy with you.”

“Jake!”

“Marietta, you weren’t born yesterday.” I went to her and put my hands on her arms. “Or were you?”

Her face was very close to mine. I saw her eyes change as if a sprinkle of frost had come. She was stiff, unyielding.

“Now, baby,” I said, “no shivering.”

Suddenly she melted in my arms. “Stay with me,” she said. “Stay with me, Peter. Just for tonight.”

I ran my hand down her dark, soft hair.

“Please, Peter…”

She was shivering now, and she was gripping me to her as if I was the only thing that could warm her.

I said, “Marietta, tell me something. It’s time now. What do you want? Who do you want?”

“How do I know? Does anyone know?”

“Martin knows what he wants,” I said.

She reacted to the name like a dog reacting to a whip. She clung to me. Her lips moved over my cheek, and she whispered with an abandon that was more like despair than passion, “Stay with me, Peter. Stay with me. Stay with me.”

The inquest was, to me, astonishingly uneventful. It was held next morning in Sally’s sun-splashed living room. Nothing had been changed. The tuberoses, yellowing slightly, still stood in their blue and white Oaxaca vase by the French windows. The furniture had not been altered to present a more official appearance. The man in charge, a heavy middle-aged man with black, alert eyes, sat on the couch with a coffee table in front of him as a desk. A group of nondescript people, jurors or hangers-on, I was never sure which, stood respectfully at one end of the room. The Captain of Police and his two honey-colored buddies sat squashed tightly and stiffly together on the long piano stool. Jake, Iris, Marietta, Martin, and I lounged in the gay Domus chairs.

Since no one else was sufficiently bilingual, Jake was chosen as interpreter. This to me seemed rash on the part of the law, but since they apparently had every confidence in him, and since there was absolutely no concrete evidence left to make the accident questionable, I suppose it was reasonable enough.

The Captain of Police and his two assistants testified first. Then Jake gave his own story in Spanish. Iris and I, through Jake, were called upon only to substantiate the “simplified” version of the discovery of the corpse. The three of us together, we said, had paid Sally a social visit and had found her dead. Martin and Marietta had been coached by Jake before breakfast. They gave evidence that they had visited Sally much earlier in the afternoon, had talked to her about unimportant family matters and had left her in good spirits. Owing to the fiesta, there was little risk that anyone had been observant enough to notice the time of their actual arrivals and departures from the Casa Haven. Martin was called again, and the carpenter uncle of the Captain of Police. They both supported each other as to the rottenness of the balcony. No mention was made of the repair visit which the uncle had failed to make. The absence of a gutter and the insidious effect of the rain were played up to the hilt.

After a lot of talking, some excited, some bored and plodding, the Coroner, or whatever he was, closed his notebook and stood up. The people in the corner had something to say about it all. Then we were dismissed.

Everyone in the room must have known about the situation between Martin, Sally, and Iris. But, so far as I could tell, it wasn’t broached. But then the Mexicans are a polite race and, from their experience of the United States citizens resident there, divorce and sex intrigue were as natural a part of American life as burros and tortillas were for the Mexican peasant.

In spite of my own personal misgivings, the inquest had been far from a mockery of justice. The house had been thoroughly searched. Obviously Sally’s claimed “proof” of a past misdeed committed by Martin and Marietta had not been found. Thanks to Jake, there was nothing else to find. Things might well have worked out the same way in Westchester County, unless some sensation-smelling journalist had pushed an investigation for its headline value.

After a great deal of handshaking and smiling with the Coroner, Jake expansively invited us all for a drink at Paco’s, which was very post-fiesta. A couple of dark, languid waiters coped with a group of bouncing American schoolteachers plastered with Taxco silver jewelry. Below the terrace in the Zocalo, pigs grunted their way through the tumbled confetti and streamers. The carrousel was dead. A small, solemn boy was swinging himself in the pink swing. Flies swarmed over the stalls of candied fruit. Up between the feathery twin steeples, the Star of Bethlehem had reverted to being a grimy cardboard cutout.

At the head of the table, Jake grinned and lifted his tequila collins.
“Salud,”
he said.

His bright eyes moved from one of us to the other. “Well, babies, there may be quite a cackle of gossip among the Americans, but gossip doesn’t signify. You’ll have to come down and weep at the funeral, I guess. But after that I figure you can consider that little episode closed.”

“Thanks to you,” I said.

“Yeah, buddy, you’ve said it.” He looked right at me without smiling. “Thanks to me.”

He turned to Martin. “You’d better go to Mexico City and start talking to Sally’s lawyer about the property. Know his address?”

Martin looked uncomfortable, as if he weren’t accustomed to people mentioning such worldly subjects. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

“You inherit everything, don’t you?”

“I believe I do,” said Martin.

“Okay. Start plaguing the lawyer. The sooner the better.” Jake took a gulp of his drink. “That’s what people are going to expect you to do. Better not disappoint them.”

I don’t think Martin got the crack.

“Of course,” Jake went on, “it’ll take a little time to get things smoothed out, but I can’t see as there’ll be any trouble.”

He swallowed his drink abruptly and summoned the waiter to pay the check. When it was paid, he got up. The morning sunlight played on the red, cropped hair. He looked like a good-natured, rather dumb wrestler, the clean kid from the Y.M.C.A. who had the crowd rooting for him.

“Well, it’s been swell knowing you folks,” he said. “Guess there’s nothing more I can do for you right now, so I’ll be on my way.”

Marietta, sitting next to me, stiffened. I felt pretty surprised myself.

“You’re going?” said Iris.

“Sure.” The white teeth flashed. “I’ve always wanted to make Acapulco. The playground of the world. Guess I could do with a little sun-baking for a while. Sun fiend, that’s Jake.”

He moved to the terrace and gazed down at the suspended gaiety of the Zocalo.

“Not as big a drop as the drop from Sally’s balcony,” he murmured thoughtfully.

Iris slipped her hand into Martin’s. There was an uncomfortable silence.

Jake turned again, grinning. “Maybe I’ll give you a buzz when I get back to Mexico, just in case any other of your pals falls off of anything. How’s about an address?”

Iris looked at Martin. “We don’t know where we’ll be yet. But you can always get us all through Peter.”

I scribbled my telephone number on a card and handed it to him. He pushed it into his pants pocket without reading it.

“Okay, kids. This is it.”

Iris suddenly said, “Thanks so much, Jake. You’ve been wonderful.”

He grinned. “Think nothing of it. Got to help your pals, haven’t you? Nothing to it anyway. Just a spot of simplification.”

He moved to Marietta and watched her with flagrantly masculine interest. A faint smile played around his lips. He put his big hands on her shoulders and kissed her full on the mouth.

“Sorry about this, baby. You don’t mind having me walk out on you? Peter can drive you home, can’t he?”

Marietta’s green eyes watched him. “Yes, Jake, Peter can drive me home.”

That had me staggered. I had been certain this was the moment he had chosen to drop his role of disinterested pal and come out in his true colors, whatever they were. But here he was walking out of our lives. And even bequeathing me Marietta too.

He shook my hand. He shook Iris’s hand. He slapped Martin on the back.

“Well, kids, take care of yourselves.”

He waved and strolled away towards the inner bar. As he disappeared, he started to whistle softly under his breath.

The tune he was whistling was “I’ll Be Seeing You”.

I was sure then that we would be seeing him—soon.

That was when the trouble would begin.

I drove Marietta home. She was abstracted, almost unfriendly. As soon as we reached Mexico City, she left me. She got out of the car by the Caballito and walked away, slim and straight, through the clear sunlight toward the Arch of the Revolution. That night Iris telephoned and told me that Martin had moved into the apartment of a friend who was out of town. She had taken a room at the Guardiola. At least they had enough sense for that.

After the phone call, all three of them slipped out of my life as suddenly and completely as Jake and Sally Haven.

I read in the paper that Martin and Marietta had attended Sally’s funeral in Taxco. It was a small, uninterested paragraph. That was all. If my memory of Jake had not been so vivid, I could have pretended that the whole Sally episode was over.

I expected Marietta to call, but she didn’t. Something, pride maybe, kept me from calling her. Then after a couple of days of loneliness I telephoned her number to be told that she didn’t live there any more. They didn’t know where she was.

I picked up Martin’s novel in a little bookstore on Hildago. Apart from Iris’s unqualified superlatives, I had been told nothing about it. I started to read it skeptically, but after the first few pages I was absorbed. Martin’s talent was authentic.

The story was simple. It was about a brother and sister growing up in an English country house. They lived in a world of their own, bound together by a love that was inarticulate but poignantly constant. They thought life would go on forever the same, with the wonder of catching black and yellow newts in the cress-filled ponds, the perilous climbing of elm trees after rooks’ eggs, the greedy scramble for blackberries on the dusty August lanes. Then, gradually, they began to find out that nothing lasts. They grew a little older and became adolescently awkward with each other. They tried to make things stay the way that they had been. But they were inevitably defeated. The boy was finally sent off to public school, and the book ended heartbreakingly with his return for the summer holidays. He brought with him a new school friend whom he worshiped. They shared the same bedroom. They were inseparable. He was lost in a new love and the girl was forgotten.