Puzzle for Pilgrims (20 page)

Her hand reached through the darkness and took mine. It seemed fragile as a bird. I didn’t say anything. It was better to let her go on.

“I remembered him. That night was never out of my mind. But I remembered half fascinated, half terrified, the way you remember ether after an operation. There’d be other men I’d see, dock hands down on the docks, laborers out in Hertfordshire, stripped to the waist, bringing in the harvest. But after that time I didn’t try any more, try to break away. Things were going bad for Martin anyway. And when things were going bad he always needed me. He’d even be nice, going away with me alone for the weekends. Letting the telephone ring. It was nineteen thirty-nine. Everyone knew the war was coming. Dread of it hung over everything. And Martin had spent all his allowance and mine. I never knew how he spent it. Money always went, and there seemed nothing to show for it. That’s when the trouble was bad. Martin did something, tampered with a birthday check from an uncle, tried to make it larger. It was stupid. Everyone saw through it at once. They hushed it up, of course, but the family was through with him then. Father’s awfully rigorous, mustaches, honesty, Charterhouse. They disinherited him. They said they would pay his debts and give him passage money if he’d leave the country. Of course, that was my chance. I could have let Martin go, sided with the family. But I didn’t. When I told father I was going with Martin, he had no use for me, either. So we came to Mexico, Martin and I. Martin was frightened. Life had caught up with him for the first time. And, because he was frightened, he clung to me. The first years here, before Sally, there wasn’t anyone else. Just Martin and me. He started the book. We’d never dreamed, either of us, that he could write. But he started it, and with the book it was almost the way between us that it had been when we were children. Almost.”

My heart was bleeding for her. I understood so much now, the lost green eyes, the radiance when Martin was nice to her, the terrific wound of his contempt, her pitiful searchings through me, Jake, to find some way out of the trap.

I said, “And then Sally came.”

“Sally knew. She always knew things like that. She wanted Martin all for herself, and she knew I was the only danger. Martin wanted me to live with them after the marriage. Sally wouldn’t let me. There were terrible scenes. I went off to Mexico City. Once I’d left Martin, father started sending me money, through the Embassy. Not much. Enough to live on. It was terrible, after Taxco, to be without Martin again. You see, in Taxco I’d let myself slide, pretended it was beautiful between Martin and me. But when I was alone again, I knew it wasn’t and I tried to break it. I lived in bars. Every night there was someone, Mexicans, tourists, anyone, but it never changed. Then, that night at the Cucaracha, I met you. I… oh, what’s the use?”

I moved nearer. I put my arm around her. Her elusive perfume drifted to me through the darkness. Her body was quiet and heavy with weariness.

“Tell me, Marietta.”

“I met you,” she whispered,” and you weren’t Martin. I talked to you and I wasn’t talking to Martin. I looked at you and I wasn’t looking at Martin. When you touched me, there wasn’t the recoil or the other thing—the lorry-driver thing. It was right. I thought it had happened at last. But it hadn’t.”

“It hadn’t?”

“You were in love with Iris. Iris of all people.” She laughed. “Martin had double-crossed me again.”

She lay quiet in my arms. Those few minutes of self-revelation had brought her as near as if I had known her all my life. The barrier she had put up wasn’t there any more. I could feel her despair almost like my own.

She said in a chilled voice, “Then Jake.”

“The lorry-driver,” I said.

“The worse he was, the stronger it came. Seeing him get Martin into his grip, seeing him bully Martin, having him bully me, treat me like dirt, outwit us all. I hate him and yet I want to feel the beastliness of his hands on me.” She shivered. “There’s two horrors now. The horror of Martin. The horror of this other thing. Scylla. Charybdis. They’ll always be there. I’ll always be between them, drifting to this one, drifting to that one.” Her voice choked into a sob. She twisted around burying her face against my shoulder. “If you only loved me. If only you could put up with me. But who could? Who could?”

She was crying, not hysterically now, but with the hopeless steadiness of exhaustion. It was strange how vividly, in spite of the darkness, I was conscious of her beauty. I held her closer. Her soft hair brushed my forehead. Her lips, wet with tears, found my cheek. I felt oddly triumphant, as if this moment had been inevitable. The end of Marietta’s dark, dreadful pilgrimage?

I said, “But I do love you, Marietta.”

“Peter.”

“I love you.”

“Then marry me. When this is all over, marry me. I’ll be all right. With you I swear I’ll be all right. Marry me.”

Someone knocked on the door. Marietta stirred in my arms. I called,” Who is it?”

“Iris.”

“Okay. Just a minute.”

I whispered. “Stay here, Marietta.” I slid off the bed. I grabbed a robe and found my slippers. I went out into the corridor, closing the door behind me.

Iris was in a white wrap with her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked at me anxiously.

“You didn’t talk to him yet, did you?”

I couldn’t switch that quickly from Marietta. “Talk to whom?”

“Jake.”

“No, not yet.”

“He’s in Martin’s room. Their voices through the wall woke me. Jake’s mad about something. Martin’s mad too. I’m afraid of them together. Martin hates him so much. He might—”

“I’ll break it up.”

She smiled her relief. “Don’t let Martin—”

“Don’t worry.”

I left her and went down the dim hotel corridor toward Martin’s room. I felt a reckless excitement. Marietta had asked me to marry her. I was the one she had sought out in the extremity of her unhappiness. If only Jake had killed Sally and I could scare him out of our lives, there might still be some sort of storybook happy ending for all of us. Marietta had retrieved the bracelet too, thrown it in the harbor. The little Taxco episode was over, dead. Even Jake couldn’t resurrect it any more. There was the truth about Sally’s murder. Nothing else.

Light fanned down from Martin’s transom. I could hear voices indistinctly from inside the room. I tried the door. It was open. I walked in without knocking.

Martin, in white cotton pajamas, was sitting on the edge of the bed. Jake stood over him, his arms crossed, his big back to me. He was still fully dressed, but his gabardine suit was mussed. There was something ominous about his stance, and, when he glanced over his shoulder at me, I saw that he was drunk. Not just full of liquor, but drunk. In spite of his steady intake of rye, I had never seen him drunk before. It coarsened his face, made his eyelids droop heavily over the blue eyes. He was furiously angry too.

Martin was just as angry. But anger was different in him, cold, restrained behind a grave surface composure, but equally dangerous. He had hated Jake before this evening’s street clash with Marietta. Now I knew his hatred must be lethal.

As I entered, he was saying, “I’ve told you once. The money comes tomorrow. You can have it tomorrow. There isn’t anything else to discuss.”

“There isn’t, eh?” Jake laughed. “When I’m out, you sneak into my room and snitch that bracelet, and you say there’s nothing else to discuss.” He swung to me. “Know what this bastard did? Stole something out of my room!”

“What do I do?” I said. “Cry?”

Martin’s blue boy’s eyes, so accustomed to find allies everywhere, met mine. “The thing I’m supposed to have stolen is the evidence Sally had about the stupid thing Marietta and I did in the past. I’m delighted it’s disappeared, of course, and I’d have taken it gladly if I’d had half a chance. But, as it happens, I don’t know anything about it.”

Jake leaned clumsily over him. The red tie was askew. There was a sordid, end-of-a-debauch look to him, the brutality of a drunk coming home to beat his wife. His words spilled clumsily too. “That bracelet’s going to cost you good money. You stole it from the dame it belonged to, and you’re paying me for it—cold cash. Don’t think you can act smart with Jake, baby. Get that into your pretty little head. I’m going to search this room and I’m going to find that bracelet if I have to strip those pajamas off of your hide and—”

I said, “I wouldn’t bother about Martin’s pajamas. He didn’t take the bracelet. Marietta did.”

Jake lumbered around to stare at me. Martin’s body tensed with interest.

“Marietta?”

“Yes, Marietta.” I enjoyed being able to put it that way in front of both of them. They both thought Marietta belonged to them. I was her spokesman now. “You overestimated your sex appeal, Jake. She was just stringing you along for a chance to get at that bracelet. She’s got it and there’s no use wasting time searching for it. She threw it in the harbor.”

Jake’s jaw sagged. The information had really hit him, not just because the bracelet was irretrievably gone but because he had been so sure of Marietta. The man in me enjoyed seeing his sexual vanity crumble, even though what I had told him was only part of the truth.

“In the harbor?”

“In the harbor,” I said.

“The bitch. The little conniving bitch.”

Martin laughed suddenly. It was a deep laugh full of private amusement. He tossed back the wheat-yellow hair and sat there on the edge of the bed laughing.

“Marietta. Wonderful, wonderful Marietta.” The laughter was still in his eyes but it was mingled more with extreme contempt. “How much did you hope to squeeze out of me for that bracelet, Jake? Another ten thousand dollars, wasn’t it?”

I was surprised that Jake could be thrown so easily. For the first time since he’d come into our life, he was rattled. Perhaps the liquor in him had something to do with it, but I think it was mostly the anger. He was one of those people who, when they lose their tempers, lose their heads. I decided to snatch the advantage and put him through his paces as soon as I could get him out of Martin’s room.

He leaned over Martin and gripped his shoulders with thick, blunt fingers. Martin’s face paled in disgust. With a violent jerk, he freed himself.

“Keep your filthy hands off me.”

Jake said, “Don’t worry, baby. You and your sister, all of you’s going to have my filthy hands around a long time yet. You’re going to pay for this.”

“Pay!” echoed Martin. He laughed. “The man doesn’t exist, Peter. I’m sure he doesn’t exist. He’s something metamorphosed out of a penny dreadful. What was your mother, Jake? A bottle of ink? And your father? A gray little hack scribbling in a garret at a penny a line? Don’t worry. You’re going to be paid. Tomorrow. Fifty thousand dollars. Remember?”

“More,” said Jake.

Martin stiffened. “More?”

“Fifty thousand for murdering Sally. Ten thousand for the bracelet. And another ten thousand for making me mad.” A travesty of the bland grin twisted Jake’s lips. He held up a hand and started counting off fingers with the other. “Get it? Fifty. Ten. Ten. Seventy thousand bucks, or I report into the Taxco police tomorrow.”

The change in Martin’s expression was poignant. I could see his mind working. His triumph had been so short-lived. Of course, from his point of view, this was the end. The original fifty thousand had been an arbitrary sum. Jake had him completely in his power. He could raise the ante indefinitely, and go on raising it. I knew we might be able to start a successful counterattack against Jake. But Martin didn’t, Martin, lying there on the bed, hating Jake physically, like a wife hating a monstrous husband, hating him the more because for a few moments he had felt free of him.

In a thin, colorless voice he said, “All right. Let’s forget it tonight. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

Jake loomed closer over him. “What’s wrong with now?”

Martin shrugged. “Everything. You woke me up. It’s late. We’re probably keeping half the hotel up, and I’ll probably never get to sleep again as it is.”

His bottle of sleeping capsules stood on the table beside him. He picked it up, spilled two capsules into his hand and swallowed them with water from a tumbler.

Jake’s hand shot out greedily. “Gimme one of them.”

Martin blinked. “You?”

“I ran out.” He laughed harshly. “What d’you think? Think only Havens take sleeping tablets, sensitive, thoroughbred Havens? Think you’re the only ones that sleep bad? Gimme one.”

Martin was watching him, a strange disturbance in his eyes. “All right.” He picked up the bottle, rolled a tablet into his bronzed palm and held it out. “Take it. It will cost you a peso. Exactly one peso.”

Jake grabbed the capsule, fumbled in his pocket, and tossed a peso bill down on the bed.

Martin turned to me then. His eyes were brimming with affectionate, almost cozening amusement, like an English schoolboy who’d got away with putting a thumbtack on his form-master’s chair.

“I made him pay, Peter. Let the news go ringing down the centuries. I made Jake pay.”

Jake swallowed the capsule with the rest of the water in the tumbler. Martin, still smiling, rolled back into bed. This was far better than I had ever dreamed it could be. Now that the time to match Jake’s bluff had come, Jake was not only drunk, he would be dopey from the sleeping pill.

I said, “Come on, Jake. Let’s get out of here.”

“Yeah.” Still flushed with anger, he was glaring down at Martin. “Don’t he look cute in bed, though. Think we should kiss him goodnight?”

Martin grinned. “Pleasant dreams, Jake. After all, you’ve deserved it. Something attempted, something done, you’ve earned a night’s repose.”

I took Jake’s arm. He moved willingly with me to the door. In the corridor, I said, “How about giving me a nightcap? I’m out of liquor.”

“Sure, sure, Peter.” He’d never classed me as an enemy along with the rest of them. Basically, he was pretty stupid. He had nothing against me. He didn’t wish me any ill will, therefore he blandly assumed that I wished him none.

We went to his room. The bed was rumpled, but the sheets hadn’t been turned back. There was the sort of squalor that comes with a sloppy man—a pair of socks on the floor, a necktie looped over the bedrail. A dirty ash tray, spilling its contents onto a chair bottom. Some of the cigarette butts had red lipstick stains.