Blow-Down, page 7
“Yes, but—Good lord, who’s dead?”
“Stilton.”
Bill Roland jumped up, startled, then sat down again, smiling faintly. “You’re joking,” he said. “I dined with Stilton tonight.”
“Stilton’s dead, or I don’t know a dead man when I see one. He was stabbed with what looks like a screwdriver, over in Perry’s office, sometime within the last hour.”
“Ghastly! Who—?”
“You listen, Roland. I’ll talk. This is pretty tough on Stilton, but it looks like a break for me. I’m not a homicide dick, exactly, but I’m no dumber than most of the big clue-chasers I know. And I think if I can put my hands on the man who killed Stilton, I’ll have my real job pretty well licked. It’ll give me a handle on the case that I can turn over to the local authorities. We can’t force the Comandante to chase around the jungle looking for high-frequency transformers, but he can’t very well ignore a case of cold-blooded murder. The only trouble is, Roland, I may be in jail before I get my teeth into this thing. There’s circumstantial evidence against me—whether framed or by accident, I don’t know yet. If they do jug me tonight, I don’t want you to do anything about it—officially, I mean. I want to keep my incognito as long as I can. But I do want you to keep in touch with me, just as a consular gesture toward an unfortunate American.”
“I’ll bring you cigarettes in jail,” Roland said. “And insecticide.”
“And information,” Lane amended. “I want you to dig up for me, as significant background, the facts surrounding Bill Bossert’s poisoning.”
“Poisoning? I thought it was fever. Good lord, the Department never tells me anything.”
“I want you to get me the names of everybody Bossert ate or drank with after he left Pinky Hind’s farmhouse on the day he got sick. I want the names of the attending doctor, and the nurses who fed him and gave him his quinine. If necessary, you might send Washington a radiogram in code, and find out what they know.”
“I won’t have to. I’ll get it all right here.”
“Unobtrusively, of course.”
“Of course. By the way, what’s all this about you and Bossert being tattooed with swastikas? Is that part of your disguise, or is it some new Department regulation I don’t know about?”
Lane laughed. “That’s simple,” he said. “And rather funny. I’ll tell you about it.”
“Please do.”
“Well, Bill Bossert and I used to go to school together up in Connecticut. We belonged to one of these kid fraternities—very mysterious and secretive, and full of Far Eastern symbolism, including the Tibetan. The Tibetans use the swastika, only they call it tung-you, so we used the swastika too. One week-end Bill Bossert and I were in New York, being very smart and manly and crashing speak-easies. When we got tight, we also got sentimental, and decided to hunt up some tattooing joint and have tung-yous tattooed on our chests, together with our class—’28. Of course in those days the swastika hadn’t been appropriated by Herr Hitler, and—”
He stopped. At that instant there was a loud, determined knocking at the front door of the Vice Consulate.
Lane was on his feet at once. “See you in jail,” he murmured.
He made his way to the rear of the house, stood in the darkness listening to the Vice Consul walk to the door. He did not recognize the voice of the man who had knocked, but he heard Roland say, “Why certainly, Coronel Blanco. Just as soon as I can get some clothes on.”
Lane groped his way through the kitchen, feeling carefully along the wall until he came to the back door. He opened it softly, went out.
He had taken only half a dozen paces when a man stepped out of the shadows and jammed a revolver into his ribs.
Chapter Eight
Bach on Payday
It was raining again, roaring down on the tin roof of the Cantina de Mi Sueño, running off in a great sheet over the open front of the saloon. Muriel ducked through the deluge, shouldered her way through the knot of soldiers and peons who stood under the streaming eaves. A gust of mist blew into the cantina through the open front, swaying the colored paper festoons against the ceiling. The downpour was making such a din that she could scarcely hear the music of the marimba in the back room. The music stopped suddenly when Cecil Holliday saw her.
Holliday was standing with the three Indian musicians inside the semicircle of the marimba. The two padded hammers were poised motionless above the instrument as he stared at Muriel. He was very pale and dignified; he was always pale and dignified when he was drunk; and he was erudite and loquacious and delightfully polite. Muriel hurried toward him, oblivious of the stares of the brown dancing-girls and their tipsy partners as she crossed the room.
“My dear, what on earth are you doing in this ungilded den of iniquity, this sink of depravity, this—”
“I had to see you, Cecil. I had to talk to you.” Muriel was standing on the other side of the marimba from Holliday. He was swaying slightly, almost imperceptibly. “Have you been here long, Cecil?”
“Ages,” said Holliday. “Eons. Ten thousand years at the very least. And it seems like yesterday.”
“You did come here right from the Hen House, didn’t you, Cecil?”
“The Hen House?” Holliday swayed again—very genteelly. He touched his temple with one of the marimba hammers and frowned with his whole face to indicate deep thought. “I have such a short memory—”
“You came directly here,” prompted Muriel. “After we left to go swimming, about an hour ago, you came right here, didn’t you?”
“No,” said Holliday. “I didn’t.”
“Where did you go?”
“I wandered. Mentally and physically. I strolled hither and yon. Listen, my dear—” He played a few notes on the marimba.
The next words stuck in Muriel’s throat. She was afraid that Holliday may have been the man Lane had seen climbing through the hedge outside the company offices. She was afraid to ask. And yet that was what she had come for.
“Cecil, you weren’t near the office building?”
“Wasn’t I? Possibly I was. I was in so many places. I visited the lost generation. I strolled through pre-war England, when the world was young and full of music—”
The girl appealed to the Indian musician who was standing next to Holliday, listening with bewildered amusement. “He has been here for an hour, hasn’t he?” she asked.
“No, Señorita. He came only ten minutes ago.”
“Cecil, try to understand me. You must remember where you’ve been for the past hour. You’ve been standing at the bar drinking, haven’t you?”
“Have I?”
“Someone must have seen you. Someone will swear that you’ve been here. Or—you didn’t do it, did you, Cecil?”
Holliday looked at the girl with a strange, faraway look in his gray eyes. He shrugged.
“Muriel, my dear,” he said. “I’m forgetting myself. I’ve let you stay here in this disreputable place without making the slightest effort to make it respectable. Perhaps old Bach could help me make it respectable. Good old Bach. Listen, my dear.”.
“Cecil—”
“Listen.” Holliday was moving the mallets over the marimba, scarcely touching the graduated wooden bars. The deep-toned gourds hanging beneath the chassis gave off a sweet, flowing, strangely resonant melody. Holliday seemed to be smiling absently to himself. He said, “It’s not quite Das Wohltemperirte Clavier but it’s rather nice. Perhaps Bach would want me to retitle it. We might call it ‘The Well-Tempered Marimba.’ ”
He continued to play as he spoke. In spite of herself, Muriel was compelled to listen. The three Indians on either side of him had picked up their hammers, were playing with him, softly, tentatively at first, feeling their way through unfamiliar chords, then more confidently. Tall, stalwart, copper-colored, these men had probably never heard of Bach, could certainly not read a note of music, yet they sensed the simple fundamental harmonies, followed instinctively the sure leadership of Holliday. The effect was lulling, fascinating—until Muriel saw the effort Holliday had to make to clutch the hammer in his maimed right hand. Quickly she came around to the back of the marimba, put her hand on Holliday’s shoulder.
“Stilton’s dead,” she said, watching his face.
His expression did not change. He went on playing. “Yes, of course,” he said.
“Cecil, you’re drunk! Are you so drunk that you can’t—?”
“I’m sorry, Muriel dear. I apologize for being a little bit bottled and more than a little bit maudlin. But it’s a luxury that I permit myself once a month—the luxury of pretending—of forgetting twenty years—the joy of creating—of making music instead of talking of bananas—The aviso just came in for the European ship, Holliday. We’ll want two thousand stems from you. No, fifteen hundred’s not enough. Well, why isn’t it shooting? You haven’t been blown down, have you? Two thousand stems tomorrow, then. English fruit. You can shade the grade a little; it’s for England.” He stopped playing, looked off into space. “Dear old England. They lost their most promising young pianist of the generation, but they’re getting bananas.” He laughed curtly, brutally. Then he started playing again.
“Listen, my dear. I can play Haydn, too. Pity I can’t play Debussy on this. If only Debussy had written for the marimba. Or if. Ravel had composed his piano concerto for the left hand alone—if only he’d done it ten years earlier—”
“Cecil, listen. Stilton—”
“Yes, I know. Stilton’s dead. You just told me.”
“You must protect yourself. They’re bound to find out about you and Stilton. And when they know why you had so good a reason to hate Stilton—”
“But I don’t hate Stilton, my dear. After all, he was only a green reserve captain, and I was an experienced soldier. I was the instructor, and I knew what happens to hand-grenades when one doesn’t treat them with the utmost respect, not to say fastidious care and deference. I should have exercised infinitely more caution in a training-camp, my dear. Besides, Stilton has more than paid for his slight error.”
Holliday saw the girl staring at the crippled grip of his right hand on the marimba stick. He put his hand behind him.
“There are tears in your eyes, my dear,” he said. “Why?”
“Those are rain drops.” The girl tried to laugh.
“You needn’t be ashamed of them,” said Holliday, gently putting his arm around her. “You needn’t be ashamed of good, honest emotion, of natural excitement, of youth—”
“What are you talking about, Cecil?”
“You’ve just left that young chap Lane,” said Holliday. “I like him. He’s a good boy. If it can’t be poor old Holliday, I’m happy it’s Lane. I’m glad for you, Muriel dear.”
“Don’t be ridiculous—”
“I liked the way you stood up for him against Perry yesterday. It wasn’t so much what you said, but the way you said it. And I was watching the pair of you tonight.”
“Cecil, I came here to talk to you seriously.”
“Yes, of course. Stilton. You want me to invent an alibi. I—”
The brown bailerinas of Mi Sueño, impatient of the long, musicless pause, were crowding around the marimba, clamoring for music.
“Play Mi Viejo Amor, maestro.”
A big-bosomed mestiza girl in blue threw her arms around Holliday, kissed him squarely on one cheek. “Play Mi Viejo Amor,” she repeated.
Holliday seemed to emerge from a trance. He was suddenly very gay, much too gay, Muriel thought.
“By all means, Chiquita, music,” he said. “And Bach shouldn’t be intruding on payday night at Mi Sueño.” He poised the wooden hammers as though he were the conductor of a great symphony orchestra, waiting with upraised baton for his audience to stop rustling programs so that he might begin. “Let’s hear that bass clear down in our heels, Gaetano. And make the treble sing. Adelante, amigos.”
A sonorous burst of sweetness swelled from the queer instrument with all the vibrant nostalgia of distant jungle sounds at night. The music swung along for a few lilting bars, then broke off abruptly, as though by prearranged signal.
Dave Perry came striding purposefully into the back room of the cantina, the rain running in rivulets from his stiff-brimmed hat.
“I’ve been looking all over for you, Muriel,” he said. “This is the last place in the world I expected to find you.” He nodded peremptorily to Holliday. “You better come too, Holliday,” he said, “if you can still walk,”
Chapter Nine
The Wrong Man
Instinctively Lane backed away from the deadly finger of steel that probed his mid-section. He did not back far, because another figure arose behind him. The tail of his eye caught another gleam of gun metal, and he felt a spot of hard, round pressure boring in between his shoulder blades.
In spite of himself, his knees flexed. It was all very well, professionally, to thumb your nose at danger as a career, but there was something about the awful proximity of a revolver muzzle to the vital organs, with only a strange and hostile trigger finger between yourself and eternity, that produced a reaction as automatic as the patellar-tendon reflex. It was all very well to be rational—and Lane’s mind was working at a prodigious rate—but there was no stopping that constriction about the throat, the sudden dampness in the palms of his hands, the incredible fluidity of the joints.
“You will come with us, Señor,” said the first man.
The sound of his voice dispelled the queer sense of unreality that blurred Lane’s vision. He could see one of the gunmen, could detail the way his black hair grew low on his broad forehead, could see the cloud-dimmed moonlight making bronze highlights on his prominent cheekbones. The man wore a nondescript uniform of some kind, and probably had Maya blood in his veins. Lane wondered if the Comandante was still at the front door of the Vice Consulate, and what would happen if he suddenly yelled. Would the man run—or pull the trigger? If only he had ignored etiquette and worn his own gun to Muriel’s supper party—
“Anda!” said the man with the gun—and Lane’s decision was made. He would go along meekly, find out where the trail led, depend upon his wits and resourcefulness to get him out of whatever situation developed later.
“At your service, gentlemen,” Lane said as pleasantly as he could. “Váminos.”
The man behind gave Lane a push, starting him in the general direction of the sea. The other man fell in beside him, walking half a step in the rear, so that he could keep Lane constantly aware of the revolver barrel against his ribs.
They walked past the rear of the cantinas, past the barrack-like lines where the railway laborers lived, past the last straggling long-legged huts of fishermen, standing on the water’s edge like wading birds. A dark thicket of mangrove stretched away to the north, hiding the beach. When Lane hesitated at the first bushes, increased pressure against his ribs urged him on.
“Anda!” said his uninvited guide.
The waist-high tangle of branches tore at him as he strode through the mangroves. He felt mud and water ooze over the tops of his white shoes. He hadn’t gone far when he saw the glowing end of a cigarette winking through the thicket directly in front of him. The smoker was squatting in the stern of a large cayuca that had been dragged to hiding in the tidal growth.
“Get in!” came the command.
Lane obeyed. As he settled himself in the bow, he noted that there was an outboard motor attached to the stern of the native craft. One of his armed companions seated himself behind Lane. The other pushed the cayuca through the mangroves until it floated free of the bottom. A moment later Lane could hear the outboard motor cough and wheeze as the flywheel was being spun. Then the engine broke into an even chatter, the propeller churned the water, and the cayuca nosed out to sea, swung to the north.
As Lane watched the dock lights of Puerto Musa wheel slowly out of his line of vision, he toyed with the idea of upsetting the cayuca and swimming for his life. Clouds darkened the moon now, and he would probably have better than an even chance—yet he decided against it. After all, his job was to dig up information, and at this moment he was obviously headed for a large chunk of it. He tried questioning the three men in the boat. When his queries brought no reply, he sat back and relaxed.
The trade wind, whipping diagonally across the bow, was hot and sticky. His shirt clung to his back and moisture beaded his eyelashes. The dugout, nose high, splashed and bounced over the long cross seas, heading for the lights of Liberica, twinkling far ahead. Lane was watching the lights when they blurred before his eyes, then were blotted out. Instinctively he braced himself; he knew what was coming.
He could hear the rain squall for fully a minute before it struck. It came hissing over the sea, plunging him suddenly into rattling, splashing turmoil. The huge warm drops beat down upon his face, poured into the boat. He was breathing water. A flash of lightning split the darkness, revealed for an instant the rain-pitted sea heaving in sudden anger. A wave sloshed into the dugout, swirling about his ankles. Thunder exploded into a thousand echoes.
The man behind Lane handed him half of a coconut shell and shouted something that was lost in the tumult of the rain and sea. Lane looked back and saw a man bailing frantically with a tin dipper. He took the coconut shell and started bailing, too.
In ten minutes the rain squall ended as suddenly as it had begun. The chattering outboard motor was again driving the cayuca smoothly over the long swells—but not, Lane noticed with a start, toward the lights of Liberica. The little craft was now heading for the cays, the chain of palm-plumed islands that stood off shore for a hundred miles of coast. One island, in fact, loomed dead ahead, a black, feathery silhouette against a moon-tinted cloud.
When the bow of the cayuca scraped the beach, Lane saw a light gleam once, then go out. The gun was again prodded into his wet back. He stepped over the gunwales and waded ashore.
After more silent but persuasive urging from behind, he walked through the wet undergrowth toward the shadow of a manaca hut fifty yards ahead. The hut, smothered in palms and obscured by broad glistening blades of plantain leaves that slashed and parried in the wind, was dark, but Lane knew there was a light inside; he could smell hot kerosene.
