The Box (6 page)

Then Whitfield appeared, stepping through the doorway like a crane toe-testing the water. Quinn suddenly thought, What’s keeping me from asking what in hell Turk is talking about?

Whitfield waved at Quinn to come along, and when he saw Turk he nodded at him and Turk smiled back.

“What’s this about Remal?” said Quinn. “What’s he got here that he’s worried I might upset it?”

“What’s he got here? Almost everything.”

“Quee-hinn!” called Whitfield.

“Like everything what?” Quinn asked again, feeling rushed.

“He’s coming back,” said Turk and nodded towards Whitfield. “See you again, eh, Quinn?” And Turk moved away, smiling with his young face and the old gums where the teeth were missing. “You’ll be here a while, anyway.” Then Turk left.

Whitfield held a moist jug of wine by the neck, and when Quinn reached him he turned and walked back to the car.

“Fine friends you have,” he said to Quinn. “Did he ask you for a cigarette?”

“Yes. Who is he?”

“Did you give him one?”

“No.”

“Ah, saved,” Whitfield said. “Will you drive, please?” And he stopped at the car.

“You don’t think I followed any of this, do you?” said Quinn.

“You didn’t? That’s only because you don’t know Turk.” Whitfield opened the car door. “
If
you had given him the cigarette,” and Whitfield interrupted himself to sniff at his jug, “then I would now ask you to look up your empty sleeve to determine if something at least were left in it. In short, he is not trustworthy.” And Whitfield got into the back of the car.

Quinn got behind the wheel, slammed the door, and when he had the motor going he let it idle for a minute.

“How come he doesn’t like Remal, that Turk?”

“What gave you that idea, Quinn? He loves Remal.”

“Look, Whitfield, I just talked…”

“We all love Remal, dear Quinn, but some of us more, some less. But Turk loves him most of all, would love to be Remal altogether. He would steal Remal’s teeth out of his head to have a smile like the mayor’s; he would cut his heart out, I mean Remal’s, to have a big heart like that.
But
—Swig of wine, Quinn?”

“No, thank you.”

“But Remal does not like him. And I’m sure that’s what Turk told you and no more. Drive, Quinn. We U-turn and go straight out of town.”

Quinn shifted and drove back down the main street.

“Do we pass the place where you keep my cans?”

There was no answer from the back—just the hissing and gurgling which came from the jug.

“Did you hear me, Whitfield?”

A deep breath sounded from the back, as if Whitfield were surfacing, and when he talked he sounded exhausted.

“Quinn, baby, I realize you don’t have any money, and if I can be of any assistance while you…”

“Are you stalling me for any reason?”

“Turn right, the next street,” said Whitfield. “This wine gives me a headache. While you look at your bleeding cans I’ll just dash into my office for a headache potion I keep there.”

The side street ended on a cobblestone square of which one side was open to the long quay. There was just one warehouse and Quinn pulled up next to it. The two men got out, and on the water side of the building they walked along the white pier.

Quinn saw the place for the first time but it did not interest him. The cement threw the heat back as if the sun was below them. There was a small tramper tied up where the warehouse doors stood open, and a barge lay at anchor a little way out. It had a single lanteen sail furled in some messy fashion which made the yardarm look like a badly bandaged finger.

The box had been moved. It lay on its side at the far end of the pier and the splintered edge of the top gave a ruined impression. A mouth with no teeth, thought Whitfield. It gapes, after spitting out.

And somebody had cleaned the inside. There was not much smell, which was also because of the sun. And all the cans were gone.

“Where are they?” said Quinn.

“Ah yes,” said Whitfield. “Obviously gone. Quinn, look here. My company and I will reimburse you, all right? Theft is common around here, you know, but in view of, ah, yes.” He petered out that way and squinted with the sun in his face. This is new, thought Whitfield. That look on his face is no longer simple. Maybe this is how he used to be.

“All right, just a minute,” said Whitfield, and then he turned around and yelled something in Arabic.

Two Arabs were carting boxes from the tramper into the warehouse and one of them put down his load and looked over at Whitfield. They yelled at each other across the distance, Whitfield and the Arab, and since the language was meaningless to Quinn, and since they had to yell at each other because of the length of the pier, Quinn could not tell if there was anger in all this, or even excitement. They stopped yelling and Whitfield turned to Quinn.

“I have good news for you,” Whitfield said, looking as if good news were no news at all. “Your bleeding cans have not been stolen, he knows where they are…”

“What’s that?”

“Quinn, there’s a storage hut which we own on the trackless wastes of the North African coast. We can’t drive there in this car, I won’t buy the cans from you till evening when we get back, and in the meantime they will bring your cans to the warehouse, so you can count them, so we can bicker about them, and so you can make your profit.
Please
, Quinn, doesn’t that sound nice?”

“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” said Quinn and put his hands into his pockets.

But for the first time Whitfield thought that perhaps Quinn was an idiot, in some ways.

Chapter 7

The bottle which Whitfield got from his office turned out to be gin. He sat in the back of the car while Quinn drove, holding the jug on one knee and the bottle on the other. Now and then Whitfield sighed, which was always at the end of having held his breath while drinking from one or the other of his two bottles. A practiced drinker, he was proud and content with his skill in handling the situation, and he neither sank into drunken befuddlement nor rose into painful clarity. I am a man of proportion. And highly adaptable. I don’t even miss my bathtub.

“How long will all this take?” Quinn asked.

Whitfield, having been elsewhere, gave a small start. He didn’t mind conversation, but he was in no mood for questions.

“What, for heaven’s sake?”

“Till I can get out of here, with papers and all.”

“I don’t know, Quinn. Your State Department does move in mysterious ways, you know. Want a drink?”

“No. I’m driving.”

“Your answer shows you don’t know how to drink, Quinn. Done well, drinking can open your eyes or, if need be, close them. An advantage only available to the fearless, or the tippler.”

Quinn hardly listened. Every so often he could see the Mediterranean when the gray rocks or the gray humps of dry ground fell away, and there would be the water with a sharp blaze like glass. But most of the time the road was a band of dust with no view.

“Take the goat, for example,” Whitfield was saying. “Strange eyes, you know? I know their eyes by heart. Some wine?”

“No.”

“Remember the goat sitting in front of the butcher shop? Watching his nanny’s meat turn blue in the dry air. That would make anybody’s eyes strange, wouldn’t you say so?”

“You’re drunk, Whitfield.”

“I am not!” There was silence, then the sigh after the bottle was down. “Quinn,” said Whitfield. “You have eyes like a goat, somewhat.”

Quinn felt himself become tense, not liking the remark Whitfield had made. Nor did he like the image of the goat. Being all new, he thought, is not easy. It must have been easier, before. The thought was vague and the memory was without interest. He thought of the Arab called Turk, and of Remal.

“Whitfield.”

“Yes?”

“The creep who talked to me by the quarter, he made some remark or other about Remal. That he wouldn’t allow me to walk around or something like that.”

“Sounds very vague to me.”

“That’s why I’m asking you about it, goddamn it.”

“
Please
, Quinn. Don’t jab the accelerator like that. You made me spill and I shall now smell of gin.”

“God forbid,” said Quinn. “And you haven’t answered.”

“But I told you, dear Quinn. Turk loves Remal and Remal does not love him back. This causes tension, don’t you see, this causes pauses—oh, for heaven’s sake—”

At this point, Whitfield realized that he had misjudged his siesta capacity with the two bottles, which, as a matter of pride, distressed him a great deal. Stands to reason, however, he thought to himself. Bathtub alters temperature exchange, rate of metabolism and so forth, and me here with all the experimental controls shot to hell in the back of the car, so naturally. He felt better but wished he were asleep.

Quinn asked nothing else. He drove and slowly became aware of the muscles in his back. It was not a pleasant awareness and he had to think of the shell of a turtle. Going nutty, like that Whitfield back there. And without benefit of drink. He felt cramped and withdrawn.

This got worse during the hour or two he had to spend with the consul. He withheld information, faked dates and invented places, which, all in all, came surprisingly easy to him. But when he left and went out to the car where Whitfield was waiting, he felt sullen and stiff.

“Ah!” called Whitfield. “How was it to be back at the bosom of mother country?”

Quinn did not answer and walked around to the driver’s side.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you with the question,” said Whitfield. “All I meant…”

“Stop talking a minute, will you?”

Whitfield had a headache. When it came to drinking, he felt a great deal like an athlete in training, and a headache to him was tantamount to a disqualification. And now Quinn, on top of all this, acting churlish and sullen. He watched Quinn start the car and felt ignored.

“You’re unhappy, I’m unhappy, and perhaps your friend the consul wasn’t happy either. That’s all I meant to say.”

“One month,” said Quinn. “He says it’ll take one month for investigation and papers.”

“I’d like to have a month of absolutely nothing,” said Whitfield. He had an impulse to reach back for one of his bottles, but turning his head he felt a sickening sting go through his brain. He felt out of training.

“You’ve got a month of nothing every siesta time,” said Quinn, but the joke did not interest him. The month ahead seemed like a vacuum to him, or like a view without focus.

Goat-eyes looking, thought Whitfield, and he turned his head straight, to look out through the windshield.

And all Quinn could think of, at first, was what he had been told, that he must get his papers and must get back to the States immediately.

The consul had said nothing about leaving. He had only said to comply with the local rules while awaiting his papers.

And why go back? Because the police had said so while he, Quinn, sat half dumb in the hospital bed?

There was a bend in the bare road and behind that bend came a small village. Quinn knew this but did not slow down. He leaned the car through the bend and pushed through the short village, leaving a big ball of yellow dust in the air.

Go back there for Ryder? The question seemed almost meaningless. As if long ago he had screamed all the rancor out of himself, struggled it out of himself, and had been left blank.

But what to do, what to do, staying a month in a truly foreign place, where no one meant anything to him, or everyone was somehow beyond him? How did I do it before, what did I do, filling the time and finding some tickle in it? A month of nothing—Quinn wiped his face.

“Listen, Whitfield, the boat that brought me, where is it now?”

“Oho!” and Whitfield folded his arms, closed his eyes. “That does worry you, then.”

“How come you never answer the first time you’re asked a question?”

“Because I’m a conversationalist, Quinn. Are you concerned, then, that whoever shipped you will want to finish the job once they find out where you are?”

It was put so crudely that it hardly fit, though Quinn himself could not have been more specific. But he knew he was sweating for more than the remote possibility that Ryder would send down a goon to pack him in a box again. He felt a bigger anxiety, which waved and wove about, obscuring the feeling of his helplessness, his worry that he had somewhere been wrong but did not know why. At the bottom, from somewhere, came the notion that he must always defend himself or he would sink away, and that would be fine with everybody.

He felt his back again, as once before, and how stiff his wrists were now.

“Quinn, you have a positively boxed-in look. Stop thinking. You don’t seem to be used to it. Weren’t you going to ask me something else?”

“You still haven’t answered the first thing I asked.”

“Yes. Where’s the boat? I don’t know. Ask someone else.”

“Is it back in New York?”

“Out of the question. With the run she had, I’d say she’ll be two months out yet.”

“Two months,” said Quinn.

“I follow you,” said Whitfield, and then he felt he might say something witty to make this more like conversation, but Quinn didn’t let him.

“Maybe you know about procedure in a case like this. What happens when a captain finds something irregular with his, let’s say, with his cargo, and he’s away from home port when he discovers the irregularity?”

“He dumps the mess as best he can, as he did you.”

“I don’t mean that. Does he report it to somebody?”

“Yes,” said Whitfield, “he reports it.”

Quinn said something which Whitfield did not catch, but it sounded vulgar.

“I want to know what he reports,” said Quinn.

“In this case that’s up to the captain. He’s an independent. Otherwise there’d be a company policy, such as ours, where a stowaway matter, for instance, goes out by short wave to the closest office, and the office handles the red tape from there.”

“You mean this captain who brought me has nobody to report to on this?”

“Yes, he does. Immigration, customs, that sort of thing.”

“He didn’t, by any chance, ask you to send out a report for him back to New York?”