Murder Is My Dish (15 page)

I went inside past the guards and asked at a reception desk in a dark air-conditioned hall for Primo Blas Lequerica. I was sent up an escalator to the second floor. It was the first palace I had ever heard of with an escalator. A young fellow at the top gave us all the once-over as we floated up single file. “
Un momento, señor
,” he told me.

He waved his hand and a second young fellow trotted up and led me along a corridor to what could have been a cloak room. There were hooks that coats might have hung on; holster straps hung on them instead. There were shelves for hats—with revolvers and automatics, all neatly tagged.

“
Por favor
,” the second young fellow said, holding out his hand. I undid the white shirt and removed my shoulder holster. He took it away from me, smiling, and wrote out a ticket, tearing off the bottom half and giving it to me. He hung the holster up and I went down the hall to where I'd been told I could find Lequerica.

I went through a door and got the usual receptionist treatment. No, I had no appointment. No, I was not expected at all today. Yes, I realized Primo Blas Lequerica was a very busy man. Yes, we have no bananas. Yes, thank you. It would be a very nice gesture if you rang him for me anyway. The name is Drum.
Gracias. De nada. Gracias. Gracias
.

For half an hour I cooled my heels. A couple of fellows who didn't look anything like gringos went in through the steel door behind the receptionist's four-by-four world. A buzzer buzzed and the receptionist said something softly into a squawk box. Then out loud she said: “Señor Drum?”

I went through the door expecting to find Lequerica. I found a small, metal-walled compartment. This being where it was and I being there illegally, it scared the hell out of me. But it turned out to be an elevator. When I got in, it went up. When the door opened and I stepped out a guard frisked me. I went down a hall past a row of doors with a guard in front of each of them. They must have had some palace payroll. When I reached Lequerica's door the guard there frisked me. I asked him if he'd had any business lately, and he smirked. The door closed behind me.

It was an apartment which made Lequerica's Fifth Avenue penthouse look like a place you might rent for two bucks, no questions asked, for a roll in the hay. It had a living room forty-eight or fifty feet long, with no windows at eye level. The windows were high up. It was not a room with a view because the view was inside the room. It was decorated and furnished like a nonobjective painting come to life, with a mobile hanging from the ceiling showing more sides and angles than a tesserat, a huge coffee table in ice-blue marble like the Rhone Glacier, almost enough functional chairs to seat the entire Social Register of New York, and Primo Blas Lequerica in a white linen suit which probably cost as much as the Matisse, no doubt an original, hanging on one wall.

“I know,” he said, waving me to a chair which looked like a coolie hat and was as comfortable as a feather bed. “When you couldn't beg or buy your way aboard that ship in New York without a note from me, you decided to fly down here and try again when it arrived up the river in Ciudad Grande.”

“Wrong,” I said. “I got aboard all right.”

He didn't stumble over that one. Instead he took his graceful, poised, high-class gigolo body over to a built-in bar and mixed us some drinks. He said in his excellent English, “Forgive the sarcasm. You like them dry?” He was mixing Martinis.

I said I liked them any way at all. He gave me a very dry Martini and began to sip one himself. “It's a secret formula passed down from generation to generation in my family,” he said. “You rinse the glass with vermouth and then pour it out and add all the gin you want.”

“Delicious,” I told him, wondering why he was trying to put on the charm.

“So you went aboard the ship after all,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And now you're here without a visa.”

I didn't say anything.

“It's obvious, isn't it? You couldn't get a visa to my country inside of two weeks unless you were a direct descendant of Simon Bolivar. There aren't any.”

“Any what?”

“Direct descendants of Simon Bolivar. Another Martini?”

“No thanks. How's the missus?”

Something ugly passed over his face unexpectedly, furrowing his smooth-shaven cheeks and drawing the corners of his lips down. It was gone before you could grab hold and take a good look. “Taking the grand tour of the city with a friend we met on the flight down.”

“Duarte?”

“What do you want, Mr. Drum? Why did you come here?”

“Well,” I said, trying to get the light touch back, “I don't want your friend Duarte. I can do without him.”

“I'll remember that.”

“This is kind of out of my line, Mr. Lequerica. Unless you happen to know another traveling salesman with a private dick's license.”

“What are you selling?”

I looked at the cocktail glass in my hand. It was Steubenware and probably cost more than Esteban's clothing, which I was wearing. I said, “The down payment is Eulalia Mistral, safely out of the country. With her mother, if that's the way she wants it.”

“If you mean the dead revolutionist Arturo Mistral's daughter, I didn't know she was down here. Naturally she may leave any time she wishes.”

He smiled at me. I didn't smile at him. The smile dropped off his face. He didn't throw it on the floor and step on it, but he was going to. “You didn't know your goddam foot,” I said. “She came down on the plane with you. I saw her off.”

“Exactly what are you selling? It must be something immensely valuable, like a half interest in your detective agency, if you think you can talk to me like that.”

“Go ahead and make with the cracks, chum. While you can. I'm down here to make a buck, but I happen to think Miss Mistral deserves a break. That's why you people are ahead of Hipolito Robles on my list of customers. You have Eulalia Mistral. It's the only reason. The rest of what I want is money. A hundred thousand gringo dollars.”

“Robles never saw that much money.”

“There's that too,” I admitted.

“Well, Drum, I admire the way you built up to it. It was admirable. Now, what is it you have to sell?”

“Rafael Caballero's book.”

He bent down and picked up his smile and somehow got it back in its place, all without moving a muscle. He made another pair of Martinis. His hands were not shaking, I'll say that for him. I waved my Martini away. It would like sharing the inside of Chester Drum with a bar of chocolate and a little charqui and nothing else, but I wouldn't.

He gulped his drink and said, “Can you prove you have it?”

I smiled. “Can you prove I haven't?”

“Down here?”

“I look like I'm tired of living? A friend has it.” Some friend, I thought. General Delivery, Alexandria, Virginia, U.S.A. “Who'll know what to do with it if anything happens to me,” I added. Such as, truck it on over to the dead letter office in Richmond.

“But how can you prove—”

“Simple. First you hand over the down payment—in this case, Miss Mistral. Then I contact my friend and he flies down to Paraguay or some mutually agreed-on place outside the country, with the manuscript. You send somebody to take a look. If he likes what he sees, my friend gets the money, I get an exit visa, you get the book.”

He said, “Still talking theoretically—and we are talking theoretically—you might have had it copied.”

I said, “I might have.”

“Then only a fool would do business with you.”

“If I don't contact my friend, he has word to deliver the manuscript to the university press where Caballero taught.”

“When?” Lequerica demanded very quickly.

I said the first thing which came to mind. I said, “On Tuesday,” and knew it was a mistake. Tuesday was too far in the future, still four days off. A lot could happen between now and Tuesday. Four days. Your team could win a World Series in four days. You could crown a king in four days or abolish a monarchy or get married or sue for divorce, or carefully plan and execute mayhem and murder.

Lequerica hiked across the big room, past the Matisse and under the tessera. He turned at the door and flashed me his gigolo-diplomat smile. “Help yourself to a cocktail,” he said. “Don't go away.”

I leaned back in the coolie hat and got comfortable. I had taken a nap on the paddle-wheeler up the river to Puerto Casado. It was the last time I had slept. I dozed off and dreamed I saw Pablo Duarte out in the jungle hunting a jaguar with, a rifle big enough to blow an elephant's head off. It turned out to be quite the most beautiful jaguar you ever saw. It roared. Then it began to cry. It wasn't a jaguar at all, suddenly. It was Eulalia Mistral. Duarte lifted his rifle.

A hand shook me. I blinked up at an Indian face, the black palace uniform, an officious smile.

I was told in Spanish, “You are commanded to appear before El Grande, the Benefactor and President of the Parana Republic.”

Chapter Thirteen

T
HE
Benefactor and President of the Parana Republic was a dark silhouette against a bank of fluorescent lights in a windowless room. The silhouette came toward me. It had the waddling walk of a big torsoed man with short bandy legs.

Perhaps Indalecio Grande thought he could tell if I told the truth some special way of his own, like coming up close in the strangely lighted room, all the light behind him and none of it behind me, and counting the pores per square inch in the skin of my face. Anyway, he seemed to examine me for many minutes. I didn't speak. I wasn't asked to. I was delivered to the room and deposited there and after a while he had entered in darkness. Then the lights had flickered on behind him. It was a good trick if you wanted to impress your visitor with the fact that he'd come to play marbles in your back yard with your rules. I never even saw his face.

Then he surprised me by talking. He had a good deep voice and he knew how to project it, but all he said was: “Now tell me of the book.”

I told him all I remembered about it. I didn't hold anything back. He sucked in his breath a couple of times. He grunted. I think he held his breath when I got to the Arturo Mistral story. Mistral had led the underground opposition, and it was gaining strength. A meeting had been arranged. The underground would be heard. Safe conduct would be guaranteed for Arturo Mistral. The government-owned press announced this, and Arturo Mistral came to the meeting at the palace of the Benefactor and President of the Parana Republic. The Benefactor and President arrested him, imprisoned him, let it be known that the wild dog Mistral had made an attempt on the life of El Grande, and had him executed before the eyes of his wife and child. It was the blackest day in a black regime, and when I finished telling about it Indalecio Grande said:

“
Basta! Ahora vaya
. Enough. Now go.”

Whatever else he might be, Indalecio Grande wasn't a man who wasted words.

I opened a door and closed it and went down a hallway to a waiting room done in black alligator and blonde wood. I expected to find Lequerica there, but apparently he'd gone in some other way to confer with El Grande. At the other end of the room half a dozen suitcases of bleached white alligator hide were stacked like blocks of ice on the black carpet. Standing near them and looking out the window was a girl.

She turned around when I came in.
“Padrecito?”
she said, and blushed when she saw I was not, as she put it, her little father. She was a plump, dark-haired and dark-skinned girl in the best-loved Latin tradition, which meant she had eyes like sloe plums, lips as fleshy as an orchid and as red as hibiscus, breasts like small round ripe melons under a tight white dress, and hips and thews as sturdy as young trees. She wore a white mantilla on her hair.

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” she said. “I thought my father—”

“That's all right.”

“I am Encarnacion.”

“Chester,” I said.

She made a little curtsy. I did not bow. She said, “Encarnacion,
hija del
Grande.”

I said I was very pleased.

She rearranged the mantilla over her head. It covered one of her eyes as she smiled. I wondered if that was meant to be seductive. She said, “You're not awed.”

“Should I be?”

“I hope not. Oh, I hope not. When I used to come home from the convent on visits all the young men were so awed of me they wouldn't even talk. They wouldn't even dance with me. I like to dance with men. Don't you?”

“Not with men,” I said.

“I mean dance. You're funny. I'm going to like you.” She said that as if she had decided to buy me. “Are you an Englishman?”

“No.”

“Father said he would bring a real Englishman to teach me English. In the convent they did not teach English. They taught us Latin and Castillian. I hated the convent; it's no secret. But Father wished me to stay until my eighteenth birthday.” She came closer. She was a short girl, shorter than I had thought. She looked up at me with her sloe eyes. “I'm eighteen tomorrow,” she said.

“Well, congratulations.”

“I was born Christmas day, you see. I'm so excited. You're the first man I've spoken to since leaving the convent. I'm glad it was you. Have you ever been in a convent?”

“No. It was always my dream, but they wouldn't let me in.”

That wasn't much, but it really got her. She laughed so hard tears sprang to her eyes. But she did it without a sound, as if that kind of laughter or maybe any kind of laughter had been discouraged at the convent. Her reaction to such restraint was more than the reaction of a normal, red-blooded girl. The way she was looking at me I thought they would need a leash.

“Silly, I meant did you ever visit one?”

I smiled at her. She showed me beautiful white teeth. She said, “Sister Maria at the convent always used to say—I liked Sister Maria, she was the only one I liked—she always used to say,
‘Ayudastu a lo que el corazon dice.'”