In the days of caravels bearing the proud standard of Spain, Puerto de las Damas had brimmed with life and commerce, but three centuries of English rule had moved Cariba’s center of gravity to the other side of the island within easier hail of Trinidad, and then Puerto had been abandoned to sun and history.
Its ancient houses with courtyards and doors barred with iron gratings were today inhabited by a fierce and savage mixture of Lascars, Chinese and tall, proud blacks, who paid no rent and answered to no authority except that enforced by their own keen knives. This rule existed despite regular, scheduled raids and arrests by Cariba’s efficient police force, carried out mostly for effect, not results. For the most part, the dreary, vice-ridden Puerto was permitted to go its own way so long as its activities did not extend beyond its ancient walled confines.
Hands planted deep in his pockets, the Parson stood in the lee of an ancient rusty cannon, jutting out of the pockmarked face of an old stone ruin in the very heart of Puerto de las Damas. Around the base of the cannon, grass sprouted. This ruin of three-foot thick masonry had been a dungeon and fortress in the days of Spanish rule of the West Indies. Now only scorpions and bats lived within its damp, musty interior.
The Parson kept his eyes fixed on a rambling house of rubble and crumbling stucco, flat-roofed and squat, some two hundred yards away on the other side of the road. Tex Kent had stopped his car in front of that house fifteen minutes before. Because of the angle from which he kept vigil, the Parson could not be sure that Kent had climbed out of the car. He could not even see the car from where he stood. He decided he had waited long enough.
He moved lightly down the street, blending with shadows. He was nearly opposite the car when he heard the soft-toned whimpering of a little child.
The sound lingered in his ears for just an instant and was gone. The surprise of its coming from the house, the impossibility of its belonging there, shocked him to an immobility as controlled and rigid as a pointer’s.
On the street nothing moved. Threads of light stole secretively from lower-story windows in the house before which the car was standing. There was no other sign of life save that elusive wail of a child, either hurt, lost or frightened, that was instantly swallowed up and absorbed in the dead silence of the night.
His eyes were boring into the blackness that enveloped the car before him; his ears were alert to the slightest sound. But the child’s whimpering cry was not repeated. For a long moment the Parson stood there, wondering if he could have mistaken the plaintive call of some night bird for the voice of a child. He moved silently across the cobblestones to the car, and as he moved, his hand reached into his coat pocket and brought out his flat, hefty Luger.
He could see a figure now, seated in the driver’s seat of the car. The figure was utterly silent, watching him without movement. The Parson did not stop short nor did he call out. He kept on coming toward the grim, waiting figure as if he were being drawn to it by a magnetic force outside himself, stronger than his own will. The figure did not move. The Parson reached the car, touched its sides until he moved around to the steering wheel.
Seated before it was Tex Kent. A knife had been plunged into his heart. The haft still protruded. A lot of blood had dripped down, and instead of being absorbed by his shirt front, had formed a little pool on the leather of the seat in the V of his thighs. His head was slightly bowed toward his chest so that he appeared to be gazing into the pool.
For a silent minute the Parson stared at the inert figure of Kent. His own lips were twisted, bitter; his face sallow. He could not explain to himself why the death of Kent should touch his sympathies, but he felt strangely moved. Kent had been struck down suddenly without a chance to defend himself.
The Parson peered into the interior of the car. The suitcase was gone.
A shot crashed inside the house, echoed like distant thunder, and before its flat echoes had died, it was followed by another.
The Parson blinked. His Luger jerked up in his hand. He started toward the house, moving past trailing hibiscus ghostly and redolent in the moonlight, past sail-like banana leaves that grew in the courtyard. Before he reached the house a woman’s angry scream, not terror-stricken but angry, sliced the deafening silence.
The Parson ran swiftly toward the front door of the house, which stood slightly ajar. He pushed it wider and slid in. It was a sort of hall. A staircase angled upward at the further side and doors from it led into other rooms. From up above he heard gasping sobs. The Parson waited, he had heard footsteps coming down the stairs.
In the dim light a woman appeared, carrying a child of four or five in her arms. A little girl. It was she who was sobbing. The woman held a big automatic pistol in her right hand.
When she saw Parson, she stopped her descent and pointed the pistol at him. He said disgustedly, “Ah, I wouldn’t shoot when you got a kid in your arms.”
“That’s manners anyway,” the woman said. She came the rest of the way down the stairs, put the child down. Enormous solemn eyes with grave childlike dignity peeped at the Parson: then the child clung to the woman’s skirts, hiding her head from the Parson, but still sobbing softly.
The Parson looked at the woman, shook his head with a faint smile. A point by point description of her would leave out everything essential. It was the intangibles about her that counted. The lift of the brow; the intelligent, expressive light in her eyes. The Parson could catalog to himself a strikingly tragic, beautiful face, triangular in shape, of an unusual creamy pallor. But that would leave out too much. The fierce glint in the hazel, swimming depths of her eyes, for example; the auburn-haired head, bravely, proudly carried; the tip-tilted nose; the wide, almost barbaric flare of her nostrils.
But even these details were not really significant. What was significant and definite was her personality, her passionate awareness. A vivid, daring quality; an aliveness, a keen zest. A woman not afraid of chances, who would stake everything on the turn of a wheel.
“The Dutchess!” the Parson said softly.
She had been appraising him from head to foot. She said matter-of-factly: “I know you, too. You’re the man they call the Parson. You were a gambler in New York.”
“Cig Wolfe’s widow. Here! That’s a laugh!” said the Parson. “Who’s the little girl?”
The woman did not answer. The Parson saw that her eyes went beyond him. He turned and saw a man in an open door, holding a gun.
The Parson had never seen him before. He had brown, wavy hair, brown eyes that were steady and deadly serious. His chin was neatly cleft and his nose was perfectly modeled. Altogether a handsome face but surprisingly cold, somehow devoid of emotion and human feeling. Only the eyes seemed alive in that face.
“Who’s the boy friend?” the Parson asked.
The woman said, “My husband. Carl Blue.”
“Oh.”
Blue wagged his gun impatiently. “Hey, you! Drop your gat!” he said.
The Parson did not move. Blue crossed the hall to the little girl, who was still crying. He dropped on one knee and began to pat her hair and talk soothingly to her. The Parson blinked, then got the idea. There was to be no shooting in front of the little girl. Carl Blue had not been afraid for himself. It was strange to see Carl Blue comforting her, without showing a trace of expression or emotion on his own face. It was eery, too.
There were still tears in the child’s eyes. But almost the instant Carl Blue bent down to her, she was stretching out her little arms and laughing with a sob as little children do.