“The old man is supposed to have had his father shot during the last revolution.”
I didn’t have to wonder any more, after hearing that. “Just forget about it,” I told him. It was a job up my own private alley, I could see that now — one of the very kind I’d been hired for and brought down here from three thousand miles away to handle — and I wasn’t splitting it with anyone. The poor “old man” couldn’t trust anyone in his own country I had a belly-laugh over it without letting it show on my face. They pick his own bodyguard to be their trigger man! Was that punch-drunk or was it punch-drunk? In one way, of course, they had the right angle: a foreigner was their best means of getting at him for the simple reason that he didn’t trust his own countrymen, and they knew it.
The Costamalan dick mooched off one way, looking furtively all around him — he might as well have had a sandwich-board on his shoulders labeled “I am Operative Number 5” — and I ambled off in the other. I thought it over this way: since Torres wasn’t alone in this, and I had no proof so far whom he was out to get, the only thing for me to do was pull my punches until after tonight when I’d made sure. If it was somebody else he was putting the finger on, it was none of my business, I wasn’t a commissioned member of the secret police force; if it was my employer, that was different. I had to be sure, because their idea of a trial down there is to stand the guy up against a wall and bang, bang, bang! — a mouthpiece was never heard of in that country. A spring just meant a season of the year.
I was probably being watched right now, but the thing was — by who? The plaza was dead, too hot for any of the regular bench-lizards to be out yet. There was, however, a guy standing on the opposite corner running through the winning lottery-numbers pasted up on the wall to see if he’d clicked. He’d been there a little too long, though, he should have found out by now. “So it’s you, is it?” I said to myself, “Well, watch me give you a run for your money!”
I took the Reforma, the main lane, nice and slow, and he stayed about a block and a half behind me. Which is too much leeway, anyway you look at it. So I just turned a corner all of a sudden, popped into a prewar cab ricketing my way, and got down flat on the floor. “Keep going aimless like you were, and leave your pennant up,” I told the driver, “only don’t take on anybody else.” So a minute later an empty hack passed my tail, going in the opposite direction, and he never even gave it a second look.
Still, a guy with white skin was bound to stick out like a sore thumb in that town, so I knew I’d be picked up again in no time, maybe by someone else, and this was only a breathing spell. The place was stool-riddled. They wanted to check on me, and the idea was not to make it tough for them, but easy. So I used the breathing-spell to give up my own half-way decent quarters, which a beachcomber wouldn’t rate, brought away my razor in my pocket and my differential in a leg holster, like a garter around the calf of my leg. Then I found a mangy, run-down rat-hole in an alley called “La Libertad”; it smelled of stale chili and mouldy plaster, but it was just what I was looking for.
I bought a fifty-centavo room for five pesos. “I’ve been here five days,” I told the guy that ran it.
He didn’t think I had. “This four-fifty extra says I have,” I snapped, so then he agreed I had and probably blamed it on marihuana. “Somebody’s going to stop in between now and evening and ask you,” I told him. “What’s more, I haven’t paid a cent; you don’t know whether to kick me out or turn me over to the police. Comprende?” After I’d repeated it five times it finally sank in, but if he’d had scissors and a paper-pattern he’d have handed them to me. I went up and took a look. The mattress had a lot of black specks and they didn’t stay still.
They traced me in less than an hour. I could hear the voices down in the flea-bitten patio, and tuned in through the crack of the door. “Si, a gringo,” the owner was saying, “we have one here. For five days now, and he hasn’t paid a cent! Mother of the angels, am I running a charity ward?”
“Not bad, greaseball,” I grinned. I got a look at them over the railing. One was the same guy I’d ditched in the cab, the other one was new to me. Well, I had three of them rogues-galleried now — and Torres’ driver made a possible fourth — but I knew there must be more of them than that in the daisy-chain.
I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning my little buddy from Chicago with the tail of my shirt, and then I went back to Filthy’s in time for what they called the “refresco-hour,” which was when everyone in town showed up there to get tanked. The place was blazing with lights and they were packing them in, but I got my same table back and bought a coffee. They bring it in a glass down there and you could spot what it was all the way across the room. I laid the straw flat across the top of the glass, and then I sat back and waited for the pay-off.
You saw everything there but ladies and gentlemen, the place is known from Nome to Cape Horn and back again; half-breed generals with swords and cocked hats, little man-eaters with tall combs in their hair, Chinese cocottes drinking absinthe, Indian girls with bleached blond hair, the dregs of the earth. Then into this mess, like an angel from another world, stepped a white woman, a lady, and they all soft-pedaled their noise for a minute. She was more than that, she had on the flowing black garb of a religious order, a nursing sister of charity, and a market-basket hung on one arm. In the other hand she held a small receptacle, and went around from table to table asking for contributions for some hospital or something, like the Salvation Army used to do in our saloons in the old days.
They all loosened up, their kind always do, and she got around to where I was sitting last of all. It was a beautifully-timed performance but I didn’t tumble for a minute. I’m no piker, but I was supposed to be a derelict and I wasn’t shelling out and giving myself away that easy. I shook my head uncomfortably while she stood there whining something about the House of the Good Shepherd, with her eyes on my coffee-glass and the transverse straw. Then suddenly at the tag end of her spiel, in the same sing-song voice, she murmured under her breath: “Go to 14 Reforma, they are waiting for you there.” It was fitted in so slickly with the rest of it that it took a minute to register on me, and by that time she’d slipped silently out again and was gone. Not even a mind-reader could have suspected that a signal had been exchanged between us.
I waited long enough to make it look right, then I blew. Outside, just beyond the radius of the bright lights at Filthy’s, the same Bugatti as earlier in the day was standing. The driver furtively unlatched the rear door, backhand, and jerked his head at it. I got in and we slipped away smooth as oil and headed up the Reforma.
Chapter II
Rendezvous with Rebellion
The house was on the outskirts of the town, set far back from the street and screened from view by leafy banana trees and other foliage. You wouldn’t have known it was there at all except for the wall that enclosed the grounds; not a light showed. The driver pulled a bell-rope for me and a peon in pajamas came shuffling out and undid the chain that braceleted the outer gate. I followed him up a tiled walk and into the place.
Torres was standing waiting for me on the other side of the door; I noticed he had his differential ready in his hand, a snub-nosed Belgian peacherino, the kind you load at the butt. “So you ordered coffee,” he said, putting it back under his wing.
“I ordered coffee,” I agreed.