She shook her head quickly, as if trying to escape her thoughts. “Forgive me, Mike, please. I shouldn’t say such things.” She turned away from him, a soft cry of pain sounding in her throat. “I was hurt. I was shamed. She made me feel like something evil and filthy. I wanted to hurt you for that. I don’t even remember going to Don Julio. It was like a nightmare. Can’t you understand?”
“You’ve got to phone him now,” Beecher said. “And tell him you were lying.”
“Yes, yes, I will do anything. But why are you so kind? Why don’t you shout at me? Tell me how stupid and wicked I’ve been.”
“Because I don’t feel that way,” Beecher said. “Make that call now. Then we’ll forget this business.”
“All right, Mike.”
Beecher stood beside her while she spoke to Don Julio. It wasn’t an easy matter, he could see; her words came slowly, halting with embarrassment and shame, and her free hand fluttered nervously at her throat. When she finished and Don Julio began to speak, she closed her eyes and squared her shoulders, as if she were expecting a blow. Don Julio was brief, but his words must have stung; Ilse’s cheeks became flushed and red, and her lips began to tremble. “Yes, yes, I know,” she said miserably. “I had no right — yes, yes!” The tone of her voice begged him to stop.
Finally she put the phone down and leaned against the back of a chair. Her eyes were still closed. “He despises me, I know,” she said.
“It’s over now,” Beecher said. He walked to the door, but hesitated with his hand on the knob. She hadn’t looked at him, and she still leaned wearily against the back of the chair.
“Ilse,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Well, look at me. I won’t bite.”
She turned to him and opened her eyes. “Yes?”
“I understand how you must have felt. And why you did what you did. Most of us don’t have our emotions completely under wraps.” He shrugged. “We get mad, do things we regret. It’s part of being human. Okay?”
She smiled wearily. “You’re very kind, Mike. I don’t know why.”
The police dogs were raising a clamor again, and the atmosphere of the shaded, cluttered room seemed grim and oppressive to Beecher.
“How about having a glass of wine with me in the village?” he asked her.
“I’m too ashamed to go out.”
“You did something foolish, but you admitted it and straightened it out. Now how about a glass of wine?”
She smiled at him, but it was still an empty and weary effort. “All right, Mike. Thank you.”
They drove up Calle San Miguel to the central plaza, moving slowly behind a donkey-drawn cart of olive logs. The shops on either side of them were crowded; this was the second shopping hour of the day, the late afternoon when the morning’s meats and vegetables might be had for a bargain. The noise was shrill and incessant, with lottery vendors screaming out their numbers, and the crunch of the iron-wheeled cart just ahead of them, and the swell of haggling voices from the shops.
“I am going away from Mirimar,” Ilse said.
“Tired of it?”
She sighed. “I’m tired of everything. I’m going back to Austria for a while.”
“To your home?”
“It is not really a home. My parents are dead. I stay with my sister, who is married to a doctor. They live in a village near the one I was raised up in, but village life is the same everywhere.” She was looking down at her hands. “We have our supper, and sit before the fire until it is dark. My sister’s husband goes to bed early, because he never knows when he will be needed, and he must have his rest. On Sunday we go to Mass, and after dinner my sister and her husband take the children to the cinema, or to visit friends. They have two boys and two girls now.”
“It sounds peaceful enough,” Beecher said.
“Yes, it is very peaceful.”
Beecher glanced at her and noticed the hollows under her eyes, soft and dark against her white skin. “And will you come back here?”
“Oh, yes.” She sighed faintly. “I will always come back here.”
The terrace of the Bar Central was crowded, and Beecher took her inside. They found an empty table in the corner and sat with their backs to the wall facing the bar. A waiter brought them white wine and slivers of sausage and bread skewered together with toothpicks.
She looked at him gravely. “And you are going to Rabat?”
“That’s right.”
“Last night you weren’t sure.”
“Now I am.”
“I am hoping it will go well,” she said. “I will pray for you. I can do nothing else.”
The moment seemed incongruously solemn, Beecher thought, and rather ridiculous considering that she had denounced him as a smuggler to the police just a few hours before; but her offer was obviously earnest and serious, and he accepted it on those terms.
“Thank you,” he said, and lifted his glass in a small salute. “And when are you leaving?”
“Tonight. I am driving to Madrid. I will leave the car at Don Willie’s office and go on by plane to Austria.”
Beecher drained his glass. “I think we’d better go,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” she said quickly.
Beecher had seen the Frenchman, Maurice, come in the door. Maurice looked very drunk, with a lock of black hair hanging down between his milky eyes, and a muscle which twitched convulsively at the corner of his mouth and jerked his lips into the travesty of a smile. He wore a yellow sweater with a shawl collar, and the knees of his tight black slacks were stained and caked with mud.
“You have been very good about—” Ilse stopped and wet her lips. “About this thing. Please forgive me. I have caused much trouble.”
She had obviously misunderstood his reasons for wanting to leave. “I’m not rushing you,” Beecher said and put down money for the drinks. “We’ll go somewhere else. You see the Frenchman at the bar?”
“Is he the one who made trouble at the party?”
Beecher nodded. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
But the Frenchman had seen them by then. He had turned from the bar and was staring at Beecher, hands hanging motionless at his sides and the pointless smile flickering rhythmically and uncontrollably across his lips. He started toward their table with careful, deliberate strides, maintaining his balance and direction with painful concentration. And his milky eyes blazed in his cold narrow face.
“The American,” he said thickly. He stood swaying in front of them. “Looking and watching as always. And who is with him now?” He turned toward Ilse, lurching with the effort to keep his balance. “Ah!” he said with a deep sigh. “It is the little whore. The pig German’s little whore.”
Beecher came to his feet then, but not quickly enough; for the Frenchman wheeled and lunged across the table at him, hands clawing for his throat, and his face twisting and working with rage. His weight knocked Beecher back against the wall, and as he struggled to tear the Frenchman’s hands from his throat, he felt a hideous moment of revulsion and panic; the fingernails clawed and scratched at his skin like those of a maddened rodent, and the reek of the man’s breath and body, the mixings of heavy cologne and sour sweat and wine, sent a shudder of fear and disgust through him.
Beecher caught hold of the Frenchman’s wrists and pulled the trembling fingers from his throat. Then he heaved himself to his feet and slammed the heel of his hand into the man’s jaw. The blow jarred them apart, and when Maurice tried to close in again Beecher held him off with a hand against his chest.
The café was boiling with excitement by then: all were on their feet shouting injunctions and exhortations, and a woman screamed as a table tipped over with a crash of glass. The dogs that had been begging scraps of food scrambled for the doorways and windows, ears flattened back, and wild yelps tearing from their throats. A waiter pulled the Frenchman away from Beecher, and two others helped to push him back to the bar. Two uniformed police ran in from the terrace with leather truncheons in their hands.