The Rodriguez Affair (1970) (10 page)

“What about the oil?”

“Smoke-screen,” Johnson said. “You have to be something. Still, it’s not been all wasted. I kick this geology stuff around for a hobby. Found some nice rocks up here. I was doing some chipping when you went past Heard you hoot; wondered why the heck you didn’t stop and decided to follow.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Well,” Johnson said, “I guess my job’s about finished
here now. All that remains is to tell the syndicate.”

“You know what they’ll do?”

“I’m not interested,” Johnson said, “Look, I’ve got a rope in the jeep. Let’s pull that jalopy away from the brink of disaster.”

“Are you going to do anything about José?”

“To hell with José,” Johnson said. “He never did anything for me except throw a knife at my guts. Let the bastard walk home.”

M
ARTIN
D
UERO
was still filing a piece of metal when Cade took the Citroen back. It could have been the same piece; it looked smaller. He seemed relieved to see the car. He waddled up to it, wiping his hands on an oily rag and sweating a little.

“No trouble, señor?”

“Not with the car,” Cade said.

Duero looked at Cade’s head. “Other trouble perhaps?”

“Something hit me when I wasn’t looking.”

Duero made sympathetic noises. “You have enemies, señor?”

“We all have enemies,” Cade said. “I may want the car again tomorrow.”

“It will be here,” Duero said.

Señora Torres was deeply concerned. “You have been injured, Señor Cade. How did it happen?”

“An accident. Just an accident”

She raised her hands in horror. “You have had an accident with Martin Duero’s car?”

“No, not with the car. I walked into something hard.”

It was a close enough description of what had happened; José was certainly hard. He wondered whether José had made his way back to the Gomara place yet. It would be a long hot walk, and he was probably not used to walking. Cade drew quite a lot of pleasure from the mental picture of José with blisters on his feet. He had taken a lot from José; he was still feeling a little sick and his head was still aching as a result.

“You do not look well,” Señora Torres said. “I will get you an ice-pack for your head and then you must go and lie down.”

“I think I will,” Cade said. “I’d like a long, cool drink too.”

He went to his room and washed, and a little later Señora Torres appeared with some ice in a polythene bag and the long, cool drink.

“You must put this pack on the swelling,” she said. “It will make it go down.”

“Suppose it freezes my brains?”

“No, no, it will not do that. But of course you are joking.” She gave him a playful slap which did things for his head that he would rather not have had done for it. “I will leave you now. You must be very quiet, señor, and later you will feel better.”

“I won’t make a sound,” Cade promised.

When she had gone he drank the long, cool drink and felt a lot better. He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the bed with the ice-pack pressed to the swelling on his head. The throbbing was muted. He closed his eyes.

The tap on the door was no more than a formality. The door opened immediately and Jorge Torres came in. Cade opened his eyes and groaned, Torres walked to the foot of the bed and looked at Cade, smiling in a gloating sort of way. It seemed to be giving him a great deal of pleasure to see Cade in his present state of health.

“My wife tells me that you have had a small accident, señor.”

Cade stared back at him bleakly. “So?”

“I have come to offer my sympathy,”

“I don’t need sympathy,”

“No? Perhaps you need someone to take care of you, A bodyguard perhaps.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I think so, señor, because I do not believe you have had an accident. I think you have been doing business with some person who does not like you; some person who might even wish to see you dead.”

“You’re crazy,” Cade said.

Torres shook his head slowly from side to side and showed his fine white teeth under the black moustache. “Oh, no, not crazy. It is perhaps you, Señor Cade, who are a little crazy. Crazy to go visiting Señor Gomara without your gun.”

“How do you know I have been visiting Señor Gomara?”

Torres lifted his plump shoulders the fraction of an inch. “One keeps one’s ears open; one makes certain deductions. Where else would you go in a hired car?”

“And what makes you think I went without my gun?”

Torres slipped his right hand inside his jacket and
when he pulled it out again it was holding the .38 Colt. “This makes me think so.”

“Damn you,” Cade said. “You’ve been at my luggage again.”

Torres admitted the fact without shame. “You are very careless leaving the bag unlocked. There is no telling who might walk in and steal things.”

“I can tell who would.”

An expression of shocked surprise came over Torres’s face. “Señor Cade, you cannot mean that you think I stole this gun.”

“How would you describe it?”

“I removed it for safety. As I said, anyone might have come in while you were away.”

“All right,” Cade said. “So you took it for safety in my absence. Now I’m not absent any more, so you can give it back.”

“Of course, señor, when the small formalities have been attended to.”

Cade sat up and took the ice-pack from his head. “What formalities?”

“For services rendered,” Torres said. “I am surely entitled to some reward.”

“So that’s it. Just another hold-up.”

“You may call it that if you wish.”

Cade was becoming angry, and anger was bad for his head. “Give me back my gun and then get to hell out of here.”

“No, señor.” Torres’s voice had hardened slightly; it was no longer quite so urbane; and the revolver was not being held so negligently; it was even being pointed at Cade, and Torres’s finger was resting on the trigger.
Perhaps Torres was remembering his humiliation of the previous evening and was taking some revenge. “No, I will not get to hell out of here. Not until you pay me one hundred bolivars.”

Cade stared down the muzzle of the revolver. It had a nasty look about it when viewed from that angle.

“You may need a gun,” Torres said softly, “Especially if you propose to visit Señor Gomara again. If you are wise you will pay me what I ask. It is a small sum to give in exchange for one’s personal safety.”

“Are you threatening me, Jorge?” Cade asked.

“Threatening you? What makes you think I would do a thing like that? You are a guest in my hotel.”

“Señora Torres’s hotel.”

Torres frowned slightly. Obviously he did not wish to be reminded of that unpalatable truth. “It is the same thing. We are man and wife.”

“I think you would find it difficult to convince the lady that it is the same thing.”

“Let us forget the hotel,” Torres said, and his face had darkened and there was an angry glint in his eye. “Are you going to pay me one hundred bolivars for this gun?”

“Yes,” Cade said. “I’ll pay you, Jorge.”

Torres looked surprised and gratified. Perhaps he had expected that it would have been necessary to exert rather more pressure. He also looked a good deal happier.

“I see that you are a prudent man, señor.”

Cade swung his legs over the side of the bed. He lowered his feet to the floor and stood up. The ice-pack
was in his right hand and with his left hand he felt in his trousers pocket. Torres lowered the gun and moved towards him ready to take the money. Cade was still fumbling in his pocket. Torres came closer. Cade swung his right hand in an arc and struck Torres on the point of the jaw with the ice-pack.

Torres staggered back. Cade followed up quickly and grabbed Torres’s right hand with both his own. He twisted the hand back until Torres, with a squeal of pain, dropped the revolver. Cade picked it up and dug the barrel into Torres’s paunchy stomach. It seemed to go in quite a long way.

“Do you want me to blast your guts out?” Cade said. The way his head was behaving made him feel savage. The way Torres had tried to shake him down for another hundred bolivars and had actually threatened him with his own gun made him feel even more savage.

Torres froze rigid. His frightened eyes stared back at Cade and his lips trembled. “It was a joke. I swear to you it was only a joke. I meant no harm.”

“That kind of joke doesn’t appeal to my sense of humour. Perhaps I’ve been threatened once too often.”

“I did not threaten.”

“I know. You would never threaten a guest in your own hotel—even if it does belong to your wife.”

But there was no satisfaction in taunting Jorge Torres, no satisfaction in pushing a revolver barrel into his fat belly. He was too flabby. Cade pulled the gun away and Torres breathed again.

“Get out,” Cade said.

Torres went out of the room faster than he had come in. He seemed afraid that Cade might change his mind.

He was almost asleep when another gentle tap came on the door. He ignored it To hell with it; to hell with the lot of them.

The door opened a little way; a head appeared in the opening. Silky black hair. Dark eyes. Rounded chin. A voice said very softly: “Roberto!”

Cade sat up so quickly that he thought for a moment he had left his head on the pillow.

“May I come in?” Juanita asked.

Cade ignored the protest in his head and swung his feet to the floor. “Yes, of course.”

Juanita came in and closed the door gently behind her. She was wearing a patterned silk dress, buttoned down the front and pulled in at the waist with a red belt. It did things for her figure—or her figure did things for the dress; Cade could not decide which. Either way, she looked like a dream.

“I have come to see how you are, Roberto. I hear that you have had an accident.”

“Only a very small accident. A bump on the head.”

He began to get up, but she said quickly: “No, do not move, not for me. You should rest.” She came to the bed and put a hand on his shoulder, exerting a gentle pressure.

Cade sat down again.

“How did it happen? Señora Torres says you walked into something hard.”

“That’s what I told her.”

She gazed into his eyes. “That something hard would not perhaps have been a man?”

“Is that what you think, Juanita?”

“It is what I think, Roberto.”

“What gives you ideas like that?”

“I do not think you would be so foolish as not to look where you were going. Also you would have to be walking very fast to get a bump on the head like that.”

“Sometimes I do walk fast.”

She moved to the window, looked out on to the Plaza, turned, “Did you see Señor Gomara?”

“Yes,” Cade said, “I saw him.”

“You had trouble with him perhaps?”

“Why should I have trouble with Gomara?”

“Why did you want to see him?”

“I thought I told you. I’m a journalist. I wanted an interview.”

He wondered whether she had been talking to Johnson, whether Johnson had told her anything. It was unlikely. Private eyes kept information pretty much to themselves except when it was to their advantage to dish a little out.

“Is he so interesting?” Juanita said.

“He interests me.”

“What is he like, this Gomara?”

“You are interested in him too?”

“Just curious about a man who shuts himself away and keeps people out.”

Cade wondered whether to tell her who Gomara really was, but he decided not to. She had probably never heard of Rodriguez anyway.

He said: “Gomara is a sick man, white-haired; he goes about in an electric invalid chair.”

He thought she seemed a shade disappointed. Perhaps
she had expected something more startling. “So,” she said musingly. “So.”

“I interviewed him in a room with no furniture; just a snake pit.”

She looked surprised at that. “A snake pit?”

“A concrete pit in the floor, full of snakes. He said he liked them. Some people have strange tastes.”

“Poisonous snakes?”

“Oh, yes. Very lethal, I’d say. To tell the truth, I thought him a bit like a serpent himself.”

“Could it have been a serpent that struck at you, Roberto?”

She was being very shrewd in her guesses, Cade thought. He wondered again whether Johnson could have told her anything. How close was she to the American? Close enough to share secrets? Rather to his own surprise, he felt a stab of jealousy. He did not want them to be too close.

“Has Earl been talking to you?” he asked.

“About what?”

“About Gomara and me?”

She shook her head. “Does he know something?”

“Who knows what he knows?”

“You’re being very mysterious,” she said. “Are you going to see Gomara again?”

“I don’t know.”

He was not at all sure he wanted to visit the Gomara place again. The way he felt now, he would not be very sorry to forget the whole affair and leave San Borja at the first opportunity. After all, he had got what he had come for: he knew how Harry Banner had come by the diamonds and why he had been killed. He even
knew who had killed him. So what more was there to do in San Borja? No need for him to worry about Gomara; when Earl Johnson reported to the Argentine syndicate it was as certain as tomorrow’s sunrise that Gomara would be very thoroughly dealt with. True, there was the matter of José; he was still burned up by the treatment he had received from that thug. José had not only pricked him in the side a number of times— and the marks were still there as evidence; he had not only struck him on the head with a knife-handle; he had also pushed him to the brink of death. For those things he owed José something. But was it worth the trouble? Was it really worth the trouble?

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Juanita frowned slightly. “I was hoping that you would go and take me with you. I would like to see that snake pit. You have roused my curiosity.”

“Why not go by yourself?”

“would not be allowed in. I have tried.”

“You think they’d let you in if you went with me?”

“I think so. I think you have some influence there.”

“You could be over-rating that influence,” Cade said.

There was another problem too that was exercising his mind, the problem of what to do with the diamonds. He could think of several alternatives; perhaps there were always several possible courses of action where diamonds were concerned. Number one: he could send them back to Gomara, the rightful owner. No doubt Gomara would be duly grateful—if by that time he was still alive. But when it came to the pinch, was Gomara the rightful owner anyway? It was a thousand to one that he had come into possession of the gems by somewhat questionable
means to say the least; and all things considered, Cade felt that he hardly owed Gomara anything after what had happened at the derelict silver mine.

Cross off Gomara.

Give them to Della Lindsay as compensation for the loss of her lover? There was little doubt that Miss Lindsay would appreciate the gesture; little doubt too that she would draw ample consolation from possession of those glittering stones. She might even erect some kind of monument to the memory of Harry Banner—if she felt she could spare the money. But he did not think that was quite on either. He was not worried about Delia’s future; diamonds or no diamonds, she would fall on her feet; she was that type.