Murder Is My Dish (21 page)

Figures detached themselves from the trucks, running and disappearing in darkness. Eulalia fell down. Someone shouted. Abruptly the Beechcraft's engine was silent. It had stalled, or maybe O'Tool had shut it because he knew we weren't going anyplace, at least not with him, tonight.

Eulalia got up and eluded Emilio. They ran silhouetted in front of the trucks' headlights. Eulalia ran toward them like a moth toward flame. A voice shouted in Spanish: “Stop, or we'll fire!”

Then just as Eulalia stumbled and fell again the voice shouted: “Fire!”

A volley of rifle fire punctured the night.

Emilio jumped, one arm outstretched, one leg stiff and one bent, an impossibly high jump, like Nijinsky. He went up gracefully taut like that and came down like a rag, limbs loose and floppy.

Feet pounded across the tarmac. I put up my hands and stood in my tracks. Someone came over and grabbed the .38/44 from my belt and poked me in the small of the back. I went forward with him. Another one of them helped Eulalia to her feet. She walked with him docilely. More of them trotted toward the plane.

“
Por favor
,” I said, and crouched over Emilio when we reached him. I felt for his wrist. There was no pulse. The man with me wore a uniform and had a Tommy gun pressed tight against his side, held there by his elbow.

“
Venga
,” he said.

They were not security police. They were soldiers in the Parana army. Their commanding officer was a young major in a hard helmet with a harder face and bright, dark eyes. He questioned us. When we gave our names he seemed very pleased. In a little while two of the soldiers brought Emilio's body over to the major's trauk. One of them found a wallet in the dead man's pocket and took something from it. He showed it to the major, who appeared to be pleased again. This was some night for the major.

Then Pedro and O'Tool came over. They were very tough with Pedro but not so tough with O'Tool. They asked O'Tool something I didn't hear and without looking at us he said, “I don't know nothing, Major. I'm a pilot. You pay me, I fly. They were going to pay me. That's all.”

I couldn't blame him. I hoped he would get away with it. For all I knew it was the truth anyway, but the major said, “They come too.”

“My mother,” Eulalia said, “is over there.”

“Where?”

“The shack.”

I touched the major's arm. “She's dead.”

“Get the body,” the major told one of his men. The major was very thorough. Two of the soldiers went to the shack and brought the old lady's body back with them. We were all loaded in the trucks, Emilio and señora Mistral in one, the rest of us with three armed guards in another. Eulalia asked to ride with her mother, but they wouldn't let her. Then the convoy of four trucks swung around on the tarmac and started up from the plateau into the hills.

Chapter Eighteen

T
HE CONVOY
rolled through the gates of an army post in the hills above Ciudad Grande before dawn. By the time they unloaded us, the sun had exploded over the horizon the way it does in the tropics. The sky was pale blue overhead but bronze where the sun came up. The air felt clear and washed and you knew that for now at least the rains were over.

They did not keep us together. A pair of guards marched me off across a compound walled in by low adobe buildings. Another guard took Eulalia away. O'Tool and Pedro went, under guard, with the major.

I was given a small, tidy room in one of the adobe buildings. It lacked bars on the window, but I could hear soldiers moving about, their boots creaking, in the compound outside. Since I could do nothing else, I stretched out on the bed and fell asleep.…

I awoke with the feel and taste of an old army blanket in my mouth and glue on my eyelids. I did not think I had slept very long. I was stiff and hungry, and could have drunk a quart of anything cold. The major stood alongside the bed looking down at me. He hadn't removed the hard helmet. Maybe it went with his face, at that.

“Which one is it,” I asked, “Lequerica or Duarte?”

“We're driving into the city,” he said.

I went outside with him. A staff car was waiting. The driver saluted as we got in back. The sun was dazzling but still cast long shadows. We drove down a hill and there was Ciudad Grande below us as I had first seen it, bleached bone-white by the sun and tilted on both sides of the river. We drove into the city and through it to the palace of the Benefactor and President of the Parana Republic. The major knew his way around the palace. It took him only twenty minutes to deliver me to Primo Blas Lequerica's apartment. He waited outside.

Lequerica came across the room with the inside view, poised, handsome, well groomed—and under it all, I thought, ready to bust out crying.

“So it was you who gave Martinez his blood money,” I said.

Lequerica licked his lips. “El Grande has authorized me to pay you twenty thousand American dollars and to offer freedom for yourself and the Mistral girl in return for Rafael Caballero's manuscript.”

“Like the release form you gave me, the one I took to de los Santos, you son of a bitch?”

“You're angry. Well, I can't blame you.”

“Remind me to put your apology in my diary.”

“It was Duarte. Duarte. El Grande gives us both all the rope we need. He always has. Duarte gets results his way, and I get them mine. El Grande doesn't have a son. One day he's going to proclaim one of us his heir. El Grande knows that, the palace knows it, and we know it.”

“El Grande,” I said, “is all washed up.”

“Twenty thousand dollars, Drum. And your freedom.”

“Tuesday, remember? That was yesterday.”

“Then call up. You can still stop the book, can't you?”

“Maybe I can. Maybe I can't. Maybe I was bluffing you all along. Maybe I never had the book. Maybe I never even saw it.”

“No, you knew all about the book. El Grande told me.”

“What I told him.”

For the first time Lequerica let his alarm show. It was in his eyes, and his eyes were naked. “You've got to stop the book. I can get a phone call through for you to anywhere in the United States in ten minutes. Just say the word.”

“Or else you'll let Duarte's men shoot Eulalia Mistral full of morphine?”

“That was Duarte. I am not Duarte.”

I said, “Tell that to your wife.”

His back stiffened, and I thought he was going to hit me. Instead he smiled a wolf's smile, with his lips only. His eyes were burning with hatred. “That's it,” he said softly. “That's it exactly. Twenty thousand dollars of Indalecio Grande's money, Drum. And I'll chip in ten thousand of my own, to prove that Duarte was wrong. To prove his methods outmoded. I want to beat him, Drum. I want to knock him down and step on his face. I never wanted anything so much in my life.”

“He's really got you where it hurts most, doesn't he?”

“Kiki's living with him. Openly. It's no secret.”

“I told you El Grande was all washed up. I meant that. It's only a question of time. You'd see it too if. you used your head to think with instead of your goddam
cojones
.”

He slapped my face hard enough to split my lip, but not hard enough to jar me. I leered at him and said, “Even if I got you the book, how would you know I haven't had it copied? How would you know I haven't been suckering you all along?”

“What are you trying to say, Mr. Drum?”

“That sooner or later the book's going to get itself printed. You're not big enough to stop it and neither is Duarte and neither is Indalecio Grande. But go ahead, play it your way. I'll make that call if you want me to. I'll have the book delivered. With no guarantees, Lequerica. No guarantees at all. So where's the telephone?”

I watched his face, or rather his eyes. His face was a handsome mask as well cared for as his gigolo body and as expressive as the white line of scalp that showed through the part in his hair. But as I looked at him and as he looked at me his eyes clouded. They said I had him, at least for now.

“I'll call if you want,” I said. “You'll get to deliver the manuscript to El Grande your way. You'll make Duarte look like a clumsy fool out of the pages of a two-bit horror story. Then what? El Grande's regime is big down here, but elsewhere it isn't big, it's only loud. Forget about stopping the book. It's too late now. Maybe it was too late to stop it before I came down here.”

“Be careful, Drum. You'll make it impossible for me to believe anything you say. You're playing with thirty thousand dollars. Your thirty thousand dollars. That's more money than a private dick—that
is
the expression, isn't it?—that's more money than you ever get to see at one time, in one place. Don't talk yourself out of it.”

“All right. I deliver the book. You give Duarte a red face and a ruined reputation and maybe Kiki comes crawling out of his bed back to yours and El Grande puffs out his chest and struts around on his bandy legs and proclaims you the heir apparent. Then what? Then if El Grande lives and stays in power you suck around him a few more years, or maybe more than a few more because El Grande's a guy who watches his health, hoping Duarte won't find a way to knock you down and step on your face and hoping some other bright young man with a good smile and white teeth doesn't move up out of the ranks to take your place.”

“That's a chance you learn to take in our system of
caudillismo
.”

“Sure, but that's only half of it. Here's the other half: you get appointed heir apparent by a two-bit dictator who's all washed up as soon as Caballero's book gets printed. Because you don't think El Grande's regime could withstand the publication of the book, do you? I read it, Lequerica. I read the book. El Grande did a lot of things to get where he is, all of them dirty. They involve the army and they involve the church and they involve most of the big shots in El Grande's Democratic Liberal Republican party, and they're there in the book. The day that book comes out El Grande will have to sleep with a gun in his hand and a guard at his door and someone else to watch the guard. But go right ahead and dream. Get yourself appointed heir and spend the rest of your life cleaning up latrines in the army camp on the hill after the army takes over—if you're still alive.”

It was a long speech and I had nothing more to say unless Lequerica was buying. I wondered if Hipolito Robles would approve of what I was trying to do. It really didn't matter. I wasn't doing it for Hipolito Robles. I was doing it for Eulalia Mistral and for me because I couldn't deliver the book without leaving the country and Lequerica wouldn't let me leave the country without delivering the book. I wondered too what Hipolito Robles would do in the event of a palace revolution. Let them beat themselves over the head until he could step in and pick up the pieces? Let whoever won out run a caretaker government until the book did its work as planned? But of course everything still depended on Lequerica.

He went to a cabinet and poured himself a drink in a hunk of cut glassware only a little larger than the diamond his wife wore. The drink sloshed out on its way to his mouth and he gulped what was left of it down, then poured another and gulped that too. Then he poured me a drink and a third one for himself. His hands were trembling. He suddenly did not look like the same man, but when he drank his third drink his hands steadied and the curtain came down so fast that the other fellow, the nervous one with the shakes, might have been my imagination.

He said, “Go on with your interesting fantasy, Mr. Drum.”

I sipped my drink. It was straight hundred-proof rum.

“You have your name for it,” I said, “and I have mine. You're in the Caballero book too, Lequerica. I won't lie to you. But you're not on every page, the way El Grande is and the way Duarte is.”

“Duarte too? Duarte?”

“That's right. You could probably live down what the book says about you. They couldn't.”

“Why do you tell me all this, Mr. Drum? What do you want for yourself? If you can't deliver the book, the only copy of the book, I couldn't be expected to pay you.”

“I want out of here. I wouldn't take your money.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“It makes sense to me. I'm thinking of Rafael Caballero. I'm thinking if I take your money and deliver the book, but if the book gets printed anyway, I'll end up like Caballero.”

“Then yours is not the only copy of the manuscript?”

I didn't say anything.

“You've never been in a position to keep the book out of print?”

I smiled the smallest, thinnest ghost of a smile. It was painful.

“Well?” he said.

“Well what? I've given you information and advice. It's for free.”

I looked at him and thought I had won. It shows how wrong you can be. He was silent for a long time. Very faintly I heard the sounds of traffic in the street and the hoot of a boat horn on the river. Then he said, “Send for the book and we'll see. All right, Drum?”

“You're dealing.”

“Now,” he said, and led me across the room to a door at the far end. We went through there into an office done in modern metal furniture. It looked like something out of a spaceship.

“As you see,” he said, “two telephones. They're usually on different lines, but they don't have to be.” He pressed a button at the base of one of the phones. He picked up the receiver. “Where in the United States?” he asked.

My lips were dry. I had no one to call. The book was in the post office at Alexandria, General Delivery, addressed to me. But I needed time. I had set Lequerica thinking. Given enough time, anything could happen.

“Washington, D.C.,” I said.

“Give me the trunk line to Washington,” Lequerica told the operator in Spanish. He pointed to the other phone. I picked up the receiver and heard an operator talking in Spanish, then in a very short time another one, talking in English. Lequerica was watching me very closely.