Beecher shook out the paper and turned to page two. It was like snapping on a light while facing an unexpected mirror. His picture glared at him from the middle column. The caption read: “Murder Suspect Lost in Missing Plane.”
Beecher willed himself to sit perfectly still. He made a project of drawing two deep, unhurried breaths. Keep it slow and deliberate, he thought. No panic. He lit a cigarette and dropped the match carefully into the ashtray. The soldiers weren’t watching him; he didn’t risk looking at them, but he could hear the dice rattling on their table, tinkling against the backstop of beer bottles. The sound lent him a fragile confidence.
Beecher looked at the date line of the story and counted back on his fingers. They had left Mirimar on Monday night. This was Thursday. They had spent forty-eight hours in the desert. The story was two days old then, commencing with the discovery of the Frenchman’s body at his villa on Monday morning. Poor Adela, he thought, poor Encarna.
His picture had apparently been reproduced from a Spanish paper, for the printing was bad, and the edges had bled, blurring the distinctive outlines of his face. It was a snapshot Trumbull had taken of him on the beach in the shade of the Casa Flore, a wine shop built against the cliffs below Mirimar. Beecher was wearing swimming shorts and holding a bottle of beer in his hand, although that wasn’t evident in the newspaper cut; the picture had been cropped below his shoulders and enlarged to sharpen the detail of his features.
The story was sketchy, but basically accurate. They had his name and age right, and the details of his arguments with Maurice and that he had left Mirimar in an aircraft, which (at the time of writing) was a dozen hours overdue at Rabat. The crew and passengers were listed parenthetically. (Captain Miguel Davoe, 29, Pilot. Fransisco Menoja, Co-Pilot, 28. James Lynch, Esq., 41, Laura Meadows, 26.) The Esquire was inevitable, he thought.
The “color” on Beecher was tinged with fantasy. He was described variously as a “wealthy sportsman” and a “handsome expatriate” and an “author in Spain to write a book.” Beecher closed his eyes and resisted a nervous impulse to burst out laughing; he could imagine his friends at work, Trumbull, Nelson, the Irishman perhaps, upgrading him out of fierce and final loyalty. Nelson would have contributed the “wealthy”; he wouldn’t want anyone to think Beecher was living in Spain only because it was cheap. The Irishman took his sport gravely, and Beecher could see him shaking his handsome head and saying, “Ah, the lad was a useful hand with a rod and reel.” The “to write a book” nonsense had Trumbull’s touch for he was convinced that authors were mysterious, God-starred creatures drifting serenely above all conventions and commonplaces.
At the end of the story, Don Julio, the constable of Mirimar, was quoted. A murder had been committed, and an aircraft was missing, he said in substance, but refused to speculate on whether there might be a casual connection between these events. There was a significant omission in Don Julio’s account, Beecher saw; he had chosen not to mention that the suspected murderer was also an experienced flyer.
The telephone rang demandingly in the silence, and Beecher’s muscles became tense as the bartender went to answer it. He looked out of the booth an instant later and cried in a singsong voice: “Monsieur Norton. Monsieur Norton.”
Beecher thanked him and hurried to the booth.
“Yes?” he said.
“It’s all right. There was no trouble.”
“What room are you in?”
“It is 841.”
“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Is anything wrong? You sound strange.”
“No, everything’s fine.” Beecher drew a deep breath. “Don’t worry. Relax.”
Beecher replaced the phone and paid his bill at the bar. He was turning with blundering haste toward the door, when the sergeant called out sharply: “Hold it, Mac.”
Beecher looked around slowly, a hand on the doorknob, a fixed smile on his face. “Yes?”
The sergeant was standing with his hands braced on his hips, a tall, purposeful figure in the dim light of the room. He pushed his cannon-ball head forward, as if he were staring down a line of recruits.
“The paper, Mac,” he said, in a deceptively gentle voice. “My paper, if we’re going to be finicky about it.”
“I’m sorry,” Beecher said. He felt stiff and awkward as he walked slowly down the bar. “I forgot. I figured you were through with it.”
Unexpectedly, the sergeant grinned at him. “I’ll tell you how it is. I save Art Buchwald to the bitter end. So if I don’t run into something interesting, well I got Art to keep me company in the sack. And the way this night’s shaping up he’s all the company I’m going to get.”
Beecher fingered the paper under his arm. He had a wild impulse to tear it to bits. The paper was folded open to page two, he realized; his picture was the first thing the sergeant would see. “Buchwald is very funny,” he said, and moistened his cracked lips.
“He sure is. Wild.”
“He’s very original,” Beecher said, and looked away from the sergeant’s eyes; in the gloomy light they seemed to be bright with suspicion. He stared down at the dice on the table. The sergeant put out his hand for the paper.
Beecher said suddenly, “Is the game open to strangers?”
“Hell, yes, it is,” the sergeant said. He punched the redhead on the shoulder. “We got some action, finally. Garsong! Start the beer flowing this way.”
Beecher pulled up a chair and dropped the newspaper on the floor at his feet. The sergeant loosened his tie and nodded at the row of beer bottles along one edge of the table. “No dice unless you hit ’em. Understand?”
Beecher nodded and dropped his last money — three thousand Moroccan francs — in the middle of the table.
“I’ll roll,” he said. “Okay?”
The sergeant stared at the three notes and shook his head slowly. “Gook money. It’s not good, Mac.”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“For Christ’s sake!” The sergeant sighed. “Okay, what’s it worth? Three thousand gook francs. Say six bucks. That’s giving you a fancy rate. What’s open?”
“All of it.”
The soldiers faded him with six American dollars.
Beecher rolled a seven.
“Damn!” the sergeant said. “A hot hand. What you shooting?”
“Twelve bucks.”
“Roll ’em.”
This time the dice bounded off the bottles with a gay, tinkling sound, and came up six-five.
“Goddamn!” the sergeant said. “Can’t even make a point. Just throws naturals.”
Beecher felt light-headed. The bus fare to Casablanca was lying on the table. And it belonged to him. “I’ll shoot the twenty-four dollars,” he said.
They had to go to their wallets then. “Okay,” the sergeant said. “Now make them bottles ring like a brass band, Mac.” Beecher rolled a six. They offered three to two against it, but he shook his head. “I’m all in the middle.”
“For Christ’s sake,” the sergeant said. “So what are we fighting for? A lousy three thousand Moroccan francs?”
The redhead smiled tentatively. “He offered to shoot it, we said all right. So all right.”
“So all right, balls,” the sergeant said. “So shoot.”
Beecher made the six on his third pass.
“Now ain’t that cute,” the sergeant said, staring at Beecher. “You’re starting to irritate me, Mr. Shooter. There’s forty-eight bucks down now. What you shooting?”
“I’ve got to leave,” Beecher said.
“Ain’t that sweet. You’re going to meet the chick now, I guess. Buy her some champagne with our dough.”
“With my dough,” Beecher said evenly. He reached for the money, but the sergeant caught his wrist.