Across the Spectrum (42 page)

“Never before, probably never after.” The man beside
Concepçion laughed. “Though they say its top note outdoes La Melba’s best—”

“No, no, La Melba is a lyric soprano, amazing high range,
but this whistle can span
six octaves—
!”

But the first speaker had risen at the official table, and
Concepçion braced herself.

When she felt it acceptable to slip away, the third speaker
had concluded, and the dining car was a glittering bubble afloat on the
Altiplano’s dark. Easing into the dimmed connection-tube, she chided herself:
you are the widow of a line foreman, gone these twenty years. Why should these
manos
blancos
recall a forty-year-old relict like you?

So how, she wondered suddenly, did the Indian know?

She released the Patent Steam-Pressure Door Seal Don Enrique
had required for all his trains.
Powered by steam, yes,
Edward
fulminated in her ear
, but what when the steam stops
? Then she stepped
into the first-class car and voices hissed, “Señora, por favor!”—“Señora
Gonzaga, venga por aqui!”

Only the shadowy blue of Southern Peru Rail uniforms
persuaded her to comply. They were huddled at the further car end, and the
closer she came, the more their postures, their anxious dancing motions,
alarmed her in turn. Halting short of the last stateroom, she said, “Señores?”

Their stances relaxed. They came to her with careful
celerity. “Señora,” the taller one bowed hurriedly, “as a favor, we ask, we beg
for your advice.”

“There is a—a situation.” The shorter man gestured back up
the train. “All the Ferrocarril officers are at dinner, the guard, the major
domo, are inside or beyond the dining car—but something must be done!”

“Why,” Concepçion asked blankly, “come to me?”

“But señora!!” Hands flew up. “You are of the
Ferrocarril—Señor Gonzaga’s wife! And he said, he always said, his wife was
very—very wise.”

In the half-light Concepçion could barely catch the liquid
glint of eyes, but something about their manner, the entire situation, prickled
her spine. Why should she be counted wise?

Did they believe she was like her grandmother?

“Señores,” she said abruptly, “do you think me a bruja?”

“No, no, señora, never, never, we crave your pardon, no one
thought of such a thing. But Edouard—Señor Gonzaga always said—you were very
wise.”

They stared then in a silence that drove her brain into its
highest gear. A situation, what situation would leave seasoned rail-crew paralyzed?
What situation could demand a higher ranking decision, from anyone who would
serve to make it—even a dead foreman’s wife they half-feared was a witch?

The train blew for a crossing and the rumble of tracks
jerked her back to life. They were approaching Guaqui. The rising panic in the
men’s movements insisted on action, now, but it need only be a stop-gap, until
the station, until someone else could take command.

“Show me,” she said.

∞

The body lay on its back in the second-class galley
entrance, sprawled like a broken sack of potatoes. Loose trousers, fawn
workman’s shirt, a disordered serape. Second- or third-class passenger,
Concepçion guessed; young, by the shape. The arms had fallen wide, one leg was
drawn up. She had time to see the black substance pooling widely round the left
shoulder before the stench struck.

“Phew!”

Concepçion had been at deathbeds, had coped with the details
dramatic novels carefully left out. But no deathbed had brought a stench like
this.

Then she identified its source.

“What is that round him? That black stuff?”

“We do not know, señora!” Both men had recoiled with her.
“We have never seen such, such . . . But señora.” The taller man
produced a cumbrous electric torch, almost as long as his arm. “That is
not—all.”

The light flowed up over the body. Boots, legs, torso,
chest, the serape dragged aside, the shirt torn or opened loose, the throat.

“Madre de Dios.” Concepçion had crossed herself before she
thought.

The wounds were shadowed deep as bullet-holes in the slanted
glare. Two of them: perhaps the size of a peso, her appalled mind assessed,
ragged-edged and sunken each side the jugular vein, as if some giant beast had
bitten and sucked—

A giant version, some tiny crazy voice commented, of the
bites left on a cow’s skin by a vampire bat.

How does he think to
feed it, on such a train as this?

Concepçion shook herself all over and administered the
mental equivalent of a ringing slap.

“Get a blanket. A tablecloth. Something. Cover him up.”
First makeshift measures, to keep unexpected witnesses under control. “At
Guaqui, someone must—see to this.”

The train called another crossing, wailing like a sundered
spirit, crossing with a jolt and shudder over points. At her side the two men
wavered but did not move. When Concepçion turned in surprise one jerked into
speech.

“Señora, he is only a, a peon, a third-class passenger, we
thought—perhaps—for the honor of the Ferrocarril . . .” The
torch wobbled. “We are not yet in the town. If he were lost. If he fell from
the door. From a window.”

“No one may know him,” the other chimed in. “No one would
think: the train. Nothing would involve the
Internationale—
”

Something fiery rose behind Concepçion’s eyes. The words
were in her mouth before she thought. “
This
you call the honor of the
Ferrocarril?”

Both of them flinched.

“Put that away.” The torch went hastily off. “Get a blanket.
One of you stay here to keep—others out. If they leave the dining car before
Guaqui, advise the major domo. The guard. Otherwise, at the station. The
honor
of the Ferrocarril demands that this be explained.”

∞

Eduoard would never have permitted it, Concepçion fumed,
bundling her belongings for transfer to the Titicaca ferry. Not the merest peon
would he see shuffled off like rubbish, with such a calamity unexamined, such a
threat to others left untouched. Honor of the Ferrocarril, hah!

And why do we not disembark?

The Guaqui platform stretched left and right, stark in
electric glare, desolate. New passengers boarded at the ferry-wharf, but
station and engine crew should have been swarming to collect luggage, tend the
locomotive, meet passengers pouring bee-like from the train itself.

You have done what you could, Concepçion argued, perching at
the stateroom window with a book. Doubtless they signaled ahead, once senior
officials heard. The porters will have been kept back, the train attendants
stopping passengers on board. They will be waiting for the Guardia Civiles, a
doctor, to examine the dead. Edouard had been a rapacious reader on his rare
leaves, delighting in the exploits of the English detective, Sherlock Holmes.
She knew all about murder procedures, in theory at least.

Two minutes later she put the book down. It can do no harm,
she told herself, to look.

The first-class exit was indeed guarded, but Concepçion was
going past. Lights glared from the second-class galley-car, daubing the
platform beyond the open exit door. She heard the clash of voices from the
connection-tube, even before she emerged upon a wall of backs.

“. . . should have been put overboard at the
first!”

“And I tell you again, it is too late!”

“Imbeciles! Idiots! Had you acted with initiative—”

“Forget
then
—we must do something now!”

“Then do it! Get the thing away—a laundry basket, a
wine-carrier—Get it off the train! Get the passengers out of here before worse
comes—”

“Nom’ de Dios, what is going on?”

The new voice bellowed at Concepçion’s own back. A blast of
Havana cigar smoke wreathed her ears, a bulky body shouldered past and clove
like a bull into the press. By sheer instinct she pushed in its wake.

“Señor!” Consternation rang in the shout. “Señor el Jefe!”

“Señor el Jefe, it is nothing, a small problem, we will have
it settled immediately—”

“Is that a body?”

The cigar shot out like a gun. From his other elbow-point,
Concepçion recognised the luxuriant goatee, the broad face and even broader
neck. Don Jose Menendez, the Ferrocarril President himself.

The man confronting him stammered, “A third-class passenger,
a—”

“Get the blanket off.”

The rustle of wool was louder than wind in the hush.

Possibly to his credit, Don Jose did not flinch. He did draw
hard on the cigar and expel a blast of smoke that almost worsted the stench.

“Cordon off the car. Start disembarkation elsewhere. You,
you, you—where are the first-class stewards? Move those passengers now. The
rest of you arrange the others. We have had a delay. You do not know what. You,
you, get rid of this.”

He made to step back. Concepçion sidled past. Beyond the
corpse the two men she had first met stood open-mouthed with fear and absolute
bewilderment.

“But, but, Señor el Jefe—how?”

The cigar flapped. “Nom’ de Dios, use your wits!”

Concepçion’s voice came out louder than an alarm bell and
entirely without her choice.

“Should the body not be left where it is—to show the Guardia
Civiles?”

Every face in the crowd turned. Don Jose was so close she
almost recoiled at his stare’s impact. She could see the bloodshot whites of
his eyes, taste the smoke and cognac on his breath.

Then he swung his head and rapped at the men opposite him,
“Take it away!”

Rage overran Concepçion so fast her voice bounced off the
roof. “This man died by violence, by some unknown means! Investigations must be
made!”

Don Jose turned his shoulder, all of a piece like a wagon
swinging, and took a step away.

Concepçion lowered her voice. It hissed like a drawn dagger
and she meant it as a blow. “Would Don
Enrique
have let this pass? On
his
Ferrocarril?”

Don Jose stopped. The silence shuddered with the stink of
sweat and human panic, cigar smoke and the stench of untoward death.

Then Don Jose half-turned about. She saw the livid color in
his face as he ground out, “Fetch the Guardia Civiles.”

∞

“Señora Gonzaga, you have hindered me.”

Concepçion shot upright in her bunk. Through the bulkhead
beside her the steamer engines throbbed. The
Internationale
had reached
Guaqui at eight, the
Inca
should have sailed by nine. Argument, waiting
for the Guardia Civiles, had taken till eleven. Disbelief at their perfunctory
examination, the spluttering and muttering and breast-crossing, then the hasty
verdict that “the man died by misadventure. Remove the body. Do not hinder the
Ferrocarril!” and the certainty of pesos sliding from Don Jose to ready Guardia
palms had gagged Concepçion until the
Inca
finally sailed, around half
past two.

Her porthole was closed. Though she did not think she had
slept, the icy beginnings of dawn over miles of open water glimmered through
the glass, silver-bleak. It could not wholly clear the cabin’s Stygian black.

But for first-class passengers the
Inca
sported a
light-switch by the bunk.

The cabin burst into light. Something gave a furious hiss.
Black flashed through Concepçion’s clearing vision, black velvet in an
old-fashioned cutaway coat beneath a thin but pristine white stock. A small
shape, but upright and elegant as a rapier. Tiny black goatee and moustache,
back-slicked black hair, black brows high and crooked as a devil’s knife over
deep-hooded black eyes.

Concepçion wrenched her gaze down. Never look at a brujo,
her grandmother had said most often of all, eye to eye.

“Who are you?” She managed not to gasp. “What are you doing
in here?”

“Put out the light.” Like the “z” in “Gonzaga,” the one in
“luz” had the pure Castilian lisp.

“No! How did you get in here?”

Blackness advanced a soundless step. The fastidiously thin
lips parted. Teeth shone in the gap, white, glistening. Two overlarge front
teeth.

“You,” the drawling hiss repeated, “have hindered me.” A
long-drawn, almost snoring breath. “You have exposed an—accident. Raised a
commotion. Disturbed the Guard. This will cease.”

“Commotion?
Accident?
” Outrage fired Concepçion’s
wits. “What do you mean, hinder you?”

The upper lip rose. Concepçion’s back hair rose too and her
hand flew to the other first-class passenger’s recourse.

“One more step and I pull the alarm!”

Blackness froze. Another vicious hiss.

Concepçion clutched the bell-pull for dear life. The
arrogance of the intruder’s bearing outdid Criollo bluster; every movement
spoke birth, rank, privilege. Yet the skin was just too dark, the nose just too
heavily arched, for a true Peninsular.

“Who are you?
What
are you—” She amended the
question. “What were you doing on the train?”

The lips curled in a sneer. Concepçion tweaked the
bell-pull. There was another furious hiss.

“Baseborn putana. I travel to Arequipa.”

I must carry him safe
to Arequipa.

Concepçion’s heart jumped in her chest. She blurted, “Why?”

The slender body seemed to coil. She could feel the glare.
She fixed her own gaze grimly on the mouth, the two anomalously protuberant
teeth.

“That is no concern of
thine
.” The “tua” dripped
contempt. Then the stiffness became a sudden, lethal fluidity. “I came to warn
thee.” Now it was a purr. “Not to cross my path again. That no longer matters.
So now I tell thee: I go to Arequipa to feed.”

“To—what?”

“There is little choice on the Altiplano. Shepherds,
herders, railway gangs. But Arequipa is a city. A choice of plenitude. Now
thy—ferrocarril—has taught my—food—to travel, I shall travel too.”