Puzzle for Pilgrims (21 page)

I thought suddenly,
Marietta was in here with him.
I tried to force the thought back.

Jake peeled off his jacket and tossed it onto a chair. He splashed rye from a half-empty bottle into a dirty glass and handed it to me. He didn’t mix himself a drink. He sat down on the bed, his hips bulging it down, and started to take off his shoes.

“That Martin,” he said. “Thinking he can get fresh with me.”

“Silly,” I said, swirling the drink in the glass.

“And Marietta.” He looked up, kicking his second shoe off, and pulled clumsily at his socks. “Thought she was smart too, didn’t she?”

Looking down into the raised face with its cropped red hair, its blunt, male features, its eyes smug with the assurance of virility, I realized I hated it more than any face I had ever known. He was grinning now, his sly, men-together grin.

He said, “Don’t worry, though, Peter, my pal. She got hers. She paid for every emerald of that bracelet. She won’t forget Jake in a while.”

I knew then what it felt like to want to kill someone. There was only one thing that kept me in control. The rooster strut was just false, the swagger overdone. I’d seen that swagger so often before in the war, boys coming back to the ship, bragging of a hot night which had, in fact, been spent alone at a movie. With a terrific sense of relief I knew that I didn’t believe him.

I said, “Maybe she’ll forget you sooner than you think, Jake.”

“Yeah?” The socks were off now. He was unbuttoning the shirt from his broad, sun-brown torso. It seemed to me that I had always known him like this, in an enforced physical intimacy, always on a bed, kicking off socks, stripping off shirts.

“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s just possible she may have forgotten you. By tomorrow, for example.”

He threw the shirt back over his shoulders, tugged at it, and found he hadn’t unbuttoned the sleeves. He worked on the sleeves.

“Tomorrow, Peter? You dreamin’ or something?”

“I’m not dreaming,” I said. “You see, you’re leaving tomorrow.”

He wriggled out of the shirt. He looked up. His blue eyes watched me, unblinking. Then he grinned.

“You think I’m leaving you tomorrow, Pete? When you and me’s just starting to be pals? Sure I get the fifty thousand tomorrow. But that’s just the start. What’s the matter with you? What you think I am?”

I said, “You’re leaving tomorrow, Jake. And you’re leaving without the fifty thousand dollars. You’re leaving with nothing.”

He just stared.

“Know why?” I said.

His eyes were glazed with liquor. There was something else too. A sort of overlay of stupidity. I supposed it was the sleeping pill beginning to work.

“No,” he muttered vaguely, as if he was losing the track of the conversation. “No, Pete, old horse. Why?”

“Because the hoax is over,” I said. “You can’t nurse it along any more. You see, we know you murdered Sally.”

“Me?” he said very slowly. “Me—murdered—Sally?”

He stared down at the buckle of his belt. His fingers began to fumble with it as if he thought the belt buckle and not I was the problem. I was worried. I hadn’t realized he was this stupefied. Maybe I was hopelessly ill-timed. Maybe I’d have shot my bolt and, by tomorrow, he would have forgotten the whole thing.

I said, “You killed Sally. You saw what an ideal setup for blackmail it would give you. You slipped up to the Casa Haven after Martin had left, before Iris came—and threw her off the balcony.”

“Balcony,” said Jake. Unsteadily, he got to his feet. He had undone the belt buckle. His pants dropped in a sagging heap to the floor. He stood in front of me, naked except for the white athletic shorts, weaving slightly, like a punch-drunk boxer a couple of minutes before the knockout. “Balcony,” he said.

I was really anxious now. I said, “Jake! what’s the matter?”

“Balcony,” he said.

He was only a foot away from me. Suddenly he lurched forward. His heavy arms flopped around my neck. His cheek jarred against mine. The whole weight of his torso fell on me. The bare skin of his body was cold, clammy. The complete unexpectedness of it caught me off balance. We swayed together. Then I fell backward.

He fell full on top of me. His arms were underneath me. Suddenly they clutched into my back. Breath hissed from between his clenched teeth close to my neck. His whole body arched like a spring and then shut down on me in a convulsive spasm.

For one moment I was smothered under the vast, stiff weight of him. Slowly the extreme pressure relaxed. His body started to roll crazily to and fro over me, his big legs flailing back and forth. Then he was suddenly still, inert, clammy, stretched spread-eagle on top of me.

Using all my strength, I pushed and twisted and managed to release myself. I got up. I was shivering. I looked down at him. He lay quite still, on his stomach, in front of me—perfectly still, a great hunk of motionless male flesh.

I dropped to my knees. I took his shoulders. I yanked him over onto his back. His mouth hung open. The lower lip was bleeding where his teeth had cut through it. His eyes were filmed like dirty windowpanes.

I took his wrist. My fingers were shaking. There was no pulse.

Music drifted faintly up from the Zocalo.

I knelt there, staring. I thought, It’s “Yo no soy mariner”. That’s the name of the tune they’re playing.

I thought that because I couldn’t bring myself to think the other thing I had to think:
Jake is dead.

I got up. I was quite calm now. It is easy enough to be calm once you’ve realized that a situation is beyond remedy. What had happened seemed as obvious as the body sprawled at my feet. Jake had been drunk but perfectly normal. Martin had given him a sleeping capsule. A few minutes later, Jake had died in a convulsion.

The pattern was ironically the same as the pattern surrounding Sally’s death. Sally had had a change of heart. She had summoned Iris and me to let us know definitely that she was going to give the divorce and bring no police charges. Just when the situation was on the verge of straightening itself out, she had been killed.

And now, Marietta had retrieved the bracelet from Jake. That episode had been closed. The money was to have come tomorrow. Even if I hadn’t been able to scare Jake away without the money, I could almost certainly have persuaded him that the position was sufficiently precarious for him to take the fifty thousand and run. Tomorrow might have been the end.

Now Jake was dead. The police would come. They would find one murder. Word of Jake’s death would reach Taxco. His Mexican lawyer would hand over the damning report to the police there. Sally’s death would be reopened.

After all the heartache and struggle, we would be plunged into a double murder charge.

I still felt sure that Jake had killed Sally. That was what made the situation so bitter. Martin had killed Jake, of course. I had seen him do it. And the futility of the act was so typical of him. Martin, who didn’t think, who only felt, had endured his hatred for Jake until the disease of it had festered through to the bone. Then, blindly, mindlessly, he had turned on the Enemy. He had killed Jake with no thought of profit, of solving anything. He had killed him because he could no longer breathe, exist, write, while Jake was still alive. He hadn’t stopped to consider the havoc he would cause for the rest of us. Martin, with the hawthorn staff, the nightgown, and the cheeks puffed with exertion, had never thought of anything except the end of his own ruthless pilgrimage. In the past there had always been for Martin someone else to take the responsibility. Probably, at the moment, he was blandly assured that I, Marietta, Iris, one of his bewitched worshipers, would step in and make everything all right for him.

A fleeting memory came of Marietta in my arms, pouring out for the first time the sterile horror of her life, clinging to me as her one chance of redemption. The beauty, the promise of those moments, which had been less than half an hour ago, seemed infinitely remote now.

I saw then that Martin was more destructive a force than Sally or even Jake had been. It was Martin who had finally defeated us, Martin with his golden smile and his retinue of lost ladies, Martin who brooked “no discouragement”.

And Martin, at this moment, was more dangerous than the body stretched across the drab hotel carpet. Our chances for coming through this new ordeal were minuscule, but they would be nonexistent so long as Martin was left to face the world unprimed.

I glanced down at Jake. I felt no more for him than I would have felt for a beef carcass in a butcher’s shop. I thought of Sally’s little broken body flung down in the stream bed.

Somehow, big people look much deader than small people, when they’re dead.

The room key was lying on a table by the bed. I took it. I skirted Jake’s body and left the room, locking the door behind me. Martin’s room was two doors down the empty corridor, past Iris’s room. I went to it. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked again. Martin gave me a muffled grunt of satisfaction.

I said, “Let me in, Martin. Peter.”

Soon the door opened. The room was in darkness except for the faint street light seeping in through the window. Martin stood on the threshold, rubbing his eyes and yawning like a little boy unseasonably awakened to amuse his mother’s party guests.

“Hello, Peter.”

I pushed past him. I turned on a light. The bottle of sleeping capsules still stood on the table by the bed. I went to the table and put the bottle in my pocket. Martin moved after me. He dropped down on the bed, yawning again, cupping his hands behind his head and smiling up at me his quick, blue smile.

“What’s the matter, Peter? Need something to help you sleep too?”

The smile was ingenuous and perfectly friendly. He wasn’t reproving me for having waked him up for the second time when he had notorious trouble in sleeping. There was no suggestion of resentment. I was his friend. I must have a good reason for waking him up. He was my friend. He’d do everything he could to help.

Under the circumstances, that sunlit charm was almost monstrous.

I said, “Why did you do it, Martin?”

He humped his knees up and pushed the yellow hair back from his forehead, still watching me trustingly. “Do what, Peter?”

“Jake killed Sally. I could have pinned it on him. I could have got rid of him. You wouldn’t have had to pay a cent. Why, in God’s name, did you kill him?”

Martin sat up. He was squatting on the bed. He nursed his knees with his hands. He watched me, his blue eyes flat, making a sudden curtain between me and what was in his mind.

“Kill him?”

“I saw you give him the capsule. I don’t know where you got the poison or what the poison was. The doctors will.”

He said, “You mean Jake’s dead?” He paused. “Dead?”

“Very dead.”

I could see the skin of his face whiten under the honey surface of sun tan. It seemed to dry and sag. His shoulders stooped. He dropped his head and stared down at the floor.

He said, “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

He had ignored my direct accusation, let it pass over him. Already it was what are
we
going to do? To have pressed him more would only have been to make myself sound hysterical. The potency of Martin’s personality was remarkable. Things always ended like this—being played his way.

I said, “Get your clothes on. Don’t let anyone in. Don’t talk to anyone. Wait till I come for you.”

“Where are you going, Peter?”

“To get the others.”

“Marietta?” The word came sharply.

“Marietta and Iris.”

He looked up. His face was gaunt, stripped to an elemental dread. “Peter…?”

“What?”

His shoulders crumbled again. “Nothing. I’ll get dressed.”

He moved off the bed. He wandered around it in a daze, picking up articles of clothing at random and dropping them. He was like a man with amnesia who remembers dimly that you have to dress yourself but has forgotten how.

I left him, closing the door. I had no ultimate plan, but I knew that I would have to break the news to Iris and Marietta before we did anything. In this extremity, we all had to know everything, to decide upon a united front.

Because I shied from it so much, I went to Marietta first.

She was still in my room, lying on the bed. She had turned on the small bedside lamp and was propped against the pillows, smoking. She seemed to me more beautiful than I had ever seen her. Her face was quiet and serene. It was not the old impervious tranquility that had made her masked as a Mexican idol. It was translucent, bright, as if she had been through the refiner’s fire. She smiled at me.

“You might at least have a drink in your room for a lady.”

I crossed to the bed and sat down next to her. She leaned toward me, putting her arms around my neck.

She said, “I’m happy, Peter.”

“No,” I said.

Her eyes, dark green as the ocean, deep below the sunlight, met mine baffled. It was senseless to ease the shock, just as senseless as to bowdlerize the brutality from a Scottish ballad.

I said, “Martin’s killed Jake.”

Her arms around my neck stiffened. Her lips half parted.

I said it again,” Martin’s killed Jake.”

“No,” she whispered. “No, Peter, no.”

She was there on the bed, but I could feel her gone from me as if the Atlantic separated us.

I didn’t say anything to try and bring her back. I knew it was useless.

She got up.

I said, “Don’t go to Martin. Not yet.”

“I must. I—”

I took her arms. “No, Marietta. Promise me. Go to Iris. Tell her what’s happened. Wait for me with Iris. I’m going to dress. Then we’ll all go to Martin.”

I made her look at me. Her eyes were impersonal, not seeing me.

“All right.”

She left the room. She hadn’t tried to deny Martin’s guilt. She hadn’t even questioned those few words which had shattered her future. She had accepted them like the inevitable fulfillment of a curse.

I dressed. I don’t know why I was so meticulous about it, choosing the right tie, selecting shined shoes. I suppose in extremity you need all your armor, and there is a certain security about being well dressed. I went to Iris’s room. Iris and Marietta were standing together by the bed. Marietta in her flamboyant Tehuantepec costume, Iris neat, almost severe, in a black suit. I knew at once that Iris had been told the news and it had almost crushed her. Danger to Martin had brought out a curious physical kinship between the two girls. Their dark eyes, the attitude of their bodies, stowed the same sort of suffering. They might have been sisters.