We ran to him. I had to work one-armed. Barbara Castillo was a marvel. She dug with both hands like a hasty dog, and together we pulled him out and dragged him past the creek and rolled him onto his back. The water had washed the blood off his face. It ran from a two inch groove over his right ear, persistently but not dangerously. He grunted and pushed us away and sat up. He stared at where Pittler had been. He did not try to talk. He merely pointed and raised his heavy eyebrows in question.
“Yep,” I said. “He’s under there.”
There was a confusion of expressions on Meyer’s face as he realized what he had done. There was awe, and concern, and a troubled wonderment. He is my friend. He is a man of peace and gentleness.
But he’d had a very bad year, and even though the end of the strange man called Pittler had been sudden and ghastly, in the doing of it, Meyer had restored his own pride and identity.
And finally the underlying emotion supplanted all the others, and his smile, a strangely sweet smile, won out, and spread slowly all over his face, proud and certain: the smile of a man who had suddenly been made whole again.
“When you felt it start to go, there was time to scramble back off it,” I said. “You could have killed yourself.”
“I had enough left to jump three times and that was it. Scramble back? Couldn’t. You know, you think of weird things when you don’t have anything left. I thought that if I was only wearing the right costume, you know, like a cape, I could spread my arms and fly out of here.”
Barbara got a knife and cut up her spare shirt and bound his head, tightly enough to stop the bleeding. She used the rest of it on my upper arm. On her way back with the cloth she had squatted by Jorge and learned he was just as dead as he looked. The wound was at the base of the skull.
Juan reappeared. He looked sallow. He sat by Jorge, his lips moving. Then Barbara and Juan carried Jorge into the shelter of the cave, out of the sunlight. She talked with Juan and then told us it had been decided that some of his people would come out and get the body, and that we were leaving the supplies and stores for Jorge’s family: There would be no fuss made about it, she said. Ramуn would learn that Senor Hoffmann was never coming back from this trip. He would tell the others. Little by little inconspicuously, they would strip the great house of everything they wanted. It might take months. And then they would disappear back into the jungle villages. Eventually the authorities would notice he was gone, the house empty and decaying. But nobody would really care very much.
Meyer said, “It offends my sense of neatness. Shouldn’t we go to the house? Look for… I don’t know. Proof? Money?”
“You couldn’t go there, either of you. The servants wouldn’t let you in. I could go there. Ramуn would let me in. I could look around, I suppose.”
“Maybe we should tell the authorities where he is,” Meyer said.
She stared at him. “Shot in the leg and buried alive? Both of you wounded? Do you want to spend two or three years here answering questions, living on tortillas and beans?”
“No,” I said. “No Way.”
“Nor I,” she said, with her habitual little air of formality.
Right at that moment I began to feel uncommonly hot and strangely remote. All colors were too bright. The sun hurt my eyes. I didn’t start having the chills until we were halfway out of the jungle. Meyer had to drive.
Meyer headed back three days later, very nervous over taking back into the States the items Barbara had collected in Pittler-Hoffmann’s house: a few thousand in U.S. currency, a stack of Mexican old fifty-peso pieces, several diamond rings, and two expensive wristwatches. We had agreed among ourselves they should be sent to Helen June in upstate New York. No need to include any kind of a note. We believed she would understand from the contents that there would probably never be any more packages from her brother.
I thought I was recovering and would soon be well enough to travel, but the day after Meyer left the illness came back. Barbara Castillo moved me to her place, the better to look after me.
She had found no proof in the Hoffmann house. She had found no clue to where the rest of the money might be.
We didn’t need the money, and we didn’t need any more proof than we had.
Twenty-six
ANNIE RENZETTI phoned me from Hawaii at two o’clock on Sunday, September nineteenth.
“Isn’t it pretty early there, kid?” I said.
“Sort of about eight. Morning on Sunday is my best office time. Catch up on stuff. Who was that who answered yesterday when I phoned?”
“Kind of a Maya princess type.”
“A what?”
“A nice person. Barbara is a nice person. She’s up here from Mexico on sort of a vacation. I keep talking her into making it a little bit longer.”
“I’m glad you have a nice new friend, Travis.”
“I’m glad you’re glad. Neat weekend we are having the great Meyer chili festival. On an empty sandspit way down Biscayne Bay.”
“Gee, I wish I could make it.”
“Wish you could too.”
“How is Meyer?”
“In the very best of form. He has enlisted the services of a troop of young handsome women. They follow him around, helping him carry the provisions back to his new boat. Which, by the way, is a dandy. The Veblen. Built-in bookshelves, and his colleagues are helping him replace the library he lost.”
“Did you really stop looking for Evan Lawrence?”
“Meyer and I had a moment of mature consideration when we wondered what we would do if we caught up with him. So we gave it up.”
“That doesn’t sound like either of you!”
“We’re learning discretion late in life.”
“Travis, there was a little paragraph in the Advertiser about the HooBoy sinking. Wasn’t that the name of Hack’s boat? What happened?”
“Dave Jenkins waited until one of the people who had contacted him finally showed up to claim the boat. They’d paid a lot of money to have it made much faster, and they’d had a verbal contract with Hack about what they would pay for it when it was done. Dave thought it might be something like that. He’d alerted the Coast Guard and their friends, and they came and put an automatic beacon in the hull that would broadcast for a long long time. So the men came and claimed it, paid off Dave, and arranged the title transfer, and three weeks later they caught it loaded with pot, hash, and coke. They had to make a hole in the hull before it stopped. And after they saw the load, they took the men off and let it go down.”
“And you had nothing to do with that?”
“Annie, I don’t want to have anything to do with anything like that. Boats sinking. People getting hurt. It’s all behind me. Meyer is delighted that now we’re both sedentary.”
“Sedentary? You?”
“We’re settling down a little, that’s all.”
“I don’t think I like it.”
“Well, Annie, you are out there in Hawaii earning your battle ribbons, and I am here admiring this year’s crop of beach bunnies and dipping into a little Boodles on the rocks from time to time. Everybody seems in good form. We have a few laughs.”
“You’re going to make me homesick.”
“How is it out there?”
“Same as last time. There’s an awful lot of work. It isn’t as much fun as it was in Naples. But… it’s a bigger challenge. There are some chauvinists in the company who are hoping I’ll fall on my face. I won’t give them that little satisfaction, dammit. I just wanted to hear your voice, dear.”
Barbara came in from the beach and came striding across the lounge to give me a quick kiss beside the eye before heading for her shower.
The conversation with Annie was soon over. It might be the last one, I thought as I hung up. There was a little edge of loss, but it had softened. It no longer bit.