Murder Is My Dish (16 page)

“Always listen to your heart,” I said, repeating the gist of it.

“Then you believe that too? Oh, I knew you would. I just knew it. On Monday, as a birthday present, Father has promised to take me on a jaguar hunt. I have always thought that hunting jaguars was the ultimate in excitement, except for the act of love.” She giggled and added, “At the convent they would punish me for such words. But they're true, aren't they? Aren't they?”

I kept my face straight. It would be nice to have a friend in El Grande's camp. “True, and spoken with wisdom,” I said.

The friend in El Grande's camp flung her arms about my neck. The orchid-fleshy and hibiscus-red lips kissed me. The friend in El Grande's camp sighed as I tried to disengage her arms. She said, “Sister Maria would like such an impulse. I am going to tell Father to take you along on our jaguar hunt. Kiss me again.”

I tugged at her arms. Any minute Lequerica would come into the room. I felt like a fly feels in a Venus-fly trap. She shut her eyes and waited to be kissed.

Just then the door opened and a large, stout woman in a black mantilla came into the room with a black scowl on her face.

“Encarnacion,” she said.

Encarnacion opened her eyes and then winked at me. “My
dueña
,” she said. Then, to the
dueña
: “Chestair will accompany us on the jaguar hunt. Oh, forgive me. Señora Rivera, Señor Chestair.”

Señora Rivera did not curtsy. I did not bow. The
dueña
clapped her hands and three flunkies sprang into the room to handle the half-dozen white alligator suitcases.

“You may wait in our rooms,” Encarnacion told her
dueña
. “Father wishes to see me.”

“I will wait right here. And I am going on no jaguar hunt.”

Encarnacion laughed. “She thinks hunting
el tigre is
undignified.”

“Undignified and uncouth,” the lady said promptly.

“We shall see,” Encarnacion said, still laughing.

Then Lequerica entered the room. He made the suggestion of a bow. The
dueña
made the suggestion of a curtsy.
“Vamos,”
he told me.

“Hasta luego,”
Encarnacion called after us. “I'll see you Monday, Chestair.”

“So she'll see you Monday, will she?” Lequerica asked without smiling as we went down the hall.

“So she says.”

“What do you think of her?” he asked in English.

“I think she's the wrong girl to have spent her formative years in a convent.”

“But she had to. I shouldn't be telling you this, but I'm telling you so you'll keep your distance from Encarnacion if you can. I'm afraid I have a considerable investment in you now. Encarnacion Grande is a sick girl. She had to spend that time in a convent.”

“What's the matter with her?”

“She is what the psychologists call an incipient hebephrenic schizophrenic.”

I said that was quite a mouthful.

“She can be violently enthusiastic about important things or violently enthusiastic about nothing at all. If the illness, now incipient, takes hold, she'd lose all contact with reality. Even now when she really gets started they have to hold her down. So keep your distance if you know what's good for you.”

We reached the gun room. I gave the man there my stub and he gave me the Magnum and shoulder holster. I unbuttoned my shirt and put the rig where it belonged, leaving the top two buttons unbuttoned so the gun wouldn't bulge too much. Then as we went down the escalator I asked:

“You have what kind of investment in me?”

“El Grande wasn't sure about you. He phoned our security chief, Pablo Duarte, to tell him your story and ask his opinion.”

I didn't like that, but all I said was, “I thought Duarte was showing your wife around the town.”

A muscle twitched on Lequerica's jaw. He did not look at me. He said, “The phone call found Duarte at home.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn't like it. He didn't want to go through with it on your terms. He had other ideas.”

“What'd you say?”

“That Duarte was wrong. That we had to do it your way or not at all. That's my investment in you, Drum. El Grande will go along with us, but I'm personally responsible.”

He reached into a pocket of his immaculate white linen jacket and withdrew an envelope. He gave it to me and said, “A kilometer beyond the new hospital on Avenida de los Santos is the old hospital. They use it for violent mental patients now. Deliver this note there.”

“What for?”

“It's a release order for Eulalia Mistral.”

“Why don't they deliver her here?”

Lequerica shrugged. “Ask El Grande,” he said.

“But I'd better not?”

“But you'd better not.”

We went outside. The sun was low in the west now, but still hot. It had been some day. Lequerica shook my hand and without offering me a lift moved off toward a parked line of official cars. A chauffeur jumped out of one and almost scraped his chin on the ground bowing.

I walked down the street and found a small restaurant with outside tables. It was only a block and a half from the palace, but it was a greasy spoon. I bolted down some cassava cakes and beans and soddered them in place with a glass of tepid beer. Lequerica, I thought; Lequerica and Pablo Duarte. El Grande's outside hatchetman and El Grande's inside hatchetman. The dictator played them as you play a musical composition. I wondered if having Duarte show Kiki Magyar around town was El Grande's idea. Lequerica and Duarte. If they hated each other enough it would serve to cement their loyalty to El Grande. Duarte and Kiki Magyar. Hell, yeah. She'd go for the big guy. Given half a chance she'd probably go for anything in pants—provided he had about a million bucks and good connections.

I got up from the table five minutes after the cassava cakes had been set down. Then I got a cab and told him where to go. It was the same driver who had taken me out there earlier.

“Otra vez?”
he said.

“Yeah, again.”

My eyelids felt like lead. My eyes burned. I was out on my feet and still hungry. Every time I swallowed, it felt as if a stone had lodged where Ansensio Martinez had stuck his two stiff fingers. I could use about a night and a day in bed with nothing for company but pleasant dreams. Then I could use a hot shower and a rubdown and a cold shower and a tall cool drink. It didn't look as if I would get any of that for longer than I cared to think.

The taxi climbed the hill past the gleaming new hospital. The road curved left and lost a lane. It was barely wide enough for two cars to pass. The taxi stopped before a low rambling adobe building which looked almost the color of blood in the last light of the setting sun.

“Wait here,” I told the driver. Then I told myself, Use your head, Drum. Pretend you're wide awake. I took out Lequerica's letter and read it. There was no trick I could see. It was on palace stationery and signed by Lequerica. It told them to deliver the patient Eulalia Mistral to me.

I went up to the hospital. It stood on a slight rise of ground and had seen its best days before I was born. From the rear of the place a man cried out in pain or torment, or both. I went inside.

It was gloomy and oppressively warm. It smelled of sickness and not enough disenfectant and it smelled of death and putrefaction. The ceiling was low and cracked. A fellow in a gray-stained smock came over to me and I gave him my note. He had bad teeth and b.o. With dignified reluctance he pulled a light-cord. A bare bulb blazed above our heads. He squinted at the note and gave it back to me and shuffled across the dirty concrete floor. I followed him.

Maybe he didn't have b.o. Maybe he only had the smell of the place in his clothing and on his skin, the putrescent odor of mercaptans and damp rot. I followed the smell and the shuffling figure down a dark corridor past closed doors with heavy bolts. Behind one of them someone laughed. The laughter broke off in a terrible fit of coughing, but by then we had gone further down the corridor and there were other sounds, sobs and scratchings, frightened voices and the creaking weight of bodies on bedsprings.

We stopped in front of the last door. The man in the dirty smock drew the bolt back. “Señorita,” he called softly.

No answer.

“Ella duerme,”
he said. “She's sleeping. You may go in.”

He opened the door and stood back. There was a small window with a heavy shade drawn over it at the other end of the room. It was very dark in there.

“Eulalia?” I said.

No answer.

“Go on,” my guide urged.
“Ella duerme.”

“You first,” I said.

He shrugged and shuffled into the dark room.

I followed him. I made out the dim outline of a bed near the window. I drew my gun and entered the room.

“Señorita Mistral,” he said softly, cheerfully.

There was the faintest of scraping sounds.

In the darkness the bed looked empty.

Something bright and as searingly painful as a tongue of flame burst in the back of my head. Then the darkness which entered through my eyes put it out.

Chapter Fourteen

A
LITTLE BLOB
of flesh-colored paint kept slipping off the canvas. The canvas was a surrealistic nightmare in dripping reds and screaming yellows, depicting dismembered limbs and disembodied cries.

The blob of flesh-colored paint had a long way to fall. It elongated and differentiated into a tiny man-figure with flailing arms and legs by the time it hit the floor. It struck hard, head first, and splattered and was scraped up with a palette knife and flattened against the dripping, screaming canvas.

Then it slipped off the canvas again.

“… the book,” one of the disembodied cries said.

Unprintable.

“… have the book?”

Unprintable.

“Do you truly have the book?”

Established, in pain and torment.

“… it.”

“… for it.”

“…. send …”

“Send for it.”

Or sometimes they left me alone. Then I would drift through the ebbing pain toward the welcome relief of sleep, but someone prodded me with a stick. I did not sleep.

A face to remember.

Beetle-browed and lantern-jawed. Superimposed over questions and pain like a double exposure.

Duarte.

Across a table. Wood planks. Light in my eyes.

A needle. They doped me.

Extend the threshold of pain.

I went back in darkness. Way back. Dark small cavern where only I could fit. Furry things crawling. The world way out there and me way in here. Sheltered. Insane smile. Giggle maybe.

Then beetle-brow and lantern-jaw superimposed over the surrealistic nightmare.

Or sometimes the madness went away.

A small damp room. Timbers supporting the roof. Duarte and the man who smelled, in the gray smock. With sweat streaming from his face in the hot close room as he used a rubber truncheon on me. Without leaving a mark.

“Get up, Drum.”

Knees like rubber.

“Pick him up.”

Tuesday, I had said. There were better ways, subtler ways. The box where you couldn't quite stand, couldn't quite sit, couldn't quite stretch out. Drugs which took your mind away. The dry-out. But I had said Tuesday. They didn't have the time to be elaborate.

I got to my feet, with help. The rubber truncheon slammed against my kidneys. Then my cheek was against the damp stone floor. Water trickled somewhere.

They told me about ruptured kidneys. You couldn't walk upright. Bent little man who screamed every time he passed water.

“All you have to do is send for the book.”

I told him all he had to do.

He said, “All right, let him sleep.”

That was part of it. A little sleep. Maybe an hour. Just so you remembered what it was like to sleep. Then they woke you.

When I opened my eyes I saw Eulalia Mistral.

They had had more time with her. She moved slowly, in a dream. You could barely see the pupils of her eyes, although the light was dim in there. They hadn't been able to get anything out of her, though. She knew nothing which could lead them to the book.

Duarte sat on a bench against the wall, his big arms dangling, his big legs stretched out. I sat slumping in a wood chair. When the fellow in the gray smock brought Eulalia into the room, I started to get up.

“Sit down,” Duarte said. I sat.

Eulalia stared at me without recognition. She wore a simple, two-piece black dress with two buttons at the throat and a zipper down the left side of the skirt to mid-thigh. The fellow in the gray smock couldn't get his eyes off her.

“Send for the book,” Duarte told me.

I shook my head.

Duarte looked at the fellow in the gray smock. He had a gaunt, puckered face like a white raisin. His eyes were holes poked in it. But in their depths they gleamed, staring at Eulalia. His teeth were bad.

Duarte smiled a little and said, “Rape her.”

The fellow in the gray smock didn't get it at first. His head jerked and he looked at Duarte. “Rape her,” Duarte said again. The fellow's tight mouth did a slow thaw. He grinned, showing us his bad teeth. He made a noise in his throat. Spittle flecked his lips.

He undid the two buttons at Eulalia's throat. She stood acquiescent, arms at her sides, in a world of drugs and dreams. His thick blunt fingers trembled. With his fingertips he touched the bare skin of her throat. She took an uncertain step away from him. He placed his left hand heavily on her right hip and used his right hand, the fingers shaking, to pull down the zipper on the left side of her skirt. I didn't move until she roused herself enough to slap his face. He laughed. Spittle gleamed on his chin. He started to pull her skirt down over her hips.

I got up faster than I thought I could and staggered toward them. I picked the rubber truncheon off the table and swung it against the side of his face. He squawked like an angry bird. I hit him a second time with the stone floor.