“Have you been out of the country?”
“Yeah. A long time out.” He thought about the long time, his heavy chin sinking towards his chest. Iron-gray tendrils of hair grew out of his open collar. “But I didn’t bring you out here to talk about me.”
I waited.
“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll tell you what the pitch is.”
Avoiding the broken settee, I sat on a straight chair in a corner. He spoke rapidly, like an embarrassed amateur making a prepared speech:
“There was this girl, beautiful girl named Rose, auburn-haired. I fell for her, hard. That was a long time ago, but I still dream about her. I wanted to marry her at the time, but it was no go then. I had woman trouble on my hands, other kinds of trouble. I went into the army – the war was on at the time – and after the war was over I didn’t come back to this country. I wanted to make it big and come back in style.
“I made it big, in case you’re wondering.” With the air of a conjurer, he flourished a roll of fifties in my direction. The outside bill was a fifty, anyway. “I have a nice little chrome mine in New Caledonia. I can give Rosie everything she needs. And I’m not old,” he added with harsh wistfulness. “There’s still time.”
I waited. A spider descended from one of the rafters, swinging into the sunlight. The sound of the surf was like a giant systole and diastole slowing down time. A jet went over, very high, leaving a shrieking track.
Barr started. “Goddamn, I hate those things. A shock wave woke me up this morning, I thought it was the Russians.”
He shook his fist at the ceiling. The spider climbed up his rope. Another jet went over.
Barr sneered. “They can take ’em and they can shove ’em. A man comes looking for a little peace.” He took a twisted cigar out of a box and rammed it into his face as if he needed something to keep his lips still. His brown teeth started to chew it.
“You were telling me about Rose,” I reminded him. “You want me to look for her? Is that the problem?”
“That’s it. I want to see her in the flesh. See if she’s still got her looks, see if she’s married. If she isn’t, I’ll make her a proposish – a proposal, I mean. It’s why I came back to this country. It’s why I’m here. I love the girl, see. I can’t go on living without her.”
It wasn’t very convincing. Middle-aged romanticism seldom is, except to the one who’s bitten by the bug. He had been bitten by something. His eyes were hot, malarial with passion.
“If you haven’t seen her for twenty years, she won’t be a girl any more.”
“Fifteen,” he corrected me. “It’s fifteen years since I had word of her. She was only twenty-one or -two at the time. She still isn’t old, no more than thirty-seven. She’s still got twenty good years in her. So have I.” He spat out flakes of tobacco onto the floor, and pointed the frayed end of his cigar at me. “I come from a long-lived family.”
“Good for you. What’s her full name?”
“Rose Breen, unless she’s married. If she’s married and raising a family, I guess it’s all off. But I got to find out.”
“Where was she when you heard of her fifteen years ago?”
“Up the pike a piece from here, in a town called Santa Teresa. You know it?”
“I know it. What was her address?”
“I don’t have that. All I can give you is the name of the people she worked for. She was a kind of a baby-sitter, or nurse. They hired her to look after their little boy. He isn’t so little now.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Yeah, I went up there day before yesterday on the bus. He gave me a bad time. They all did. They’re very la-di-da.” In a flash of savage satire, he minced on his misshapen feet, making effeminate gestures with his hands. “All I wanted to ask them was where Rose went, but they didn’t even let me get to first base. Something about me that puts people off, I dunno. Maybe I lived too long in a – on an island. People don’t like me.”
He looked at me as if he hoped I’d deny it. I didn’t like him. There was an odor about him, and it wasn’t the odor of sanctity. It was whiskey and fear and cigars and appalling loneliness. And sickness or evil – they have the same smell – as penetrating as chlorine in my nostrils.
The word goodbye rose like a gorge at the back of my tongue. I swallowed it. He interested me.
“You haven’t told me the name of the family Rose worked for.”
“It was Chantry. It isn’t any more. She lost her husband or something and married a second time – a doctor named Leverett. They’re still living in the Chantry house on Foothill, though, 265 Foothill Drive. That’s the rich end of town.”
“I know.”
He didn’t hear me. He was off on a private kick: “When I realize my finances, I got a good mind to buy in there, spang in the middle of the Foothill district. They think they can brush me off? I’ll show ’em. Naw.” His voice dropped, and he shook his head. “It’s too rich for my blood, I guess.”
I prompted him: “You say they gave you a bad time.”
“They froze me out. The lady – Mrs. Leverett – she acted like I was trying to insult her when I brought up the name of Rose Breen. But then she said she never heard of her. I told her I knew damn well she did, I had it on good authority. Then she admitted she knew her, fifteen years ago. I asked her where Rosie went, and she called in her husband and son to throw me out. I could have handled them.” His fists clenched and unclenched. He looked down into his palms, crossed by curved black lines of ineradicable grime. “But what was the use? I didn’t want trouble. All I wanted was Rosie. And I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar the Leverett dame knows where Rosie is.”
“What makes you think so?”
“The way that she reacted to the name. The way they all reacted. You’d think I was asking them for the keys to their safe.”
“Why wouldn’t they tell you, if they knew?”
“Because I wanted them to,” he said with a sour grin. “People never give me what I want. I have to take it, always have had. So I take it.”
He laughed. It sounded like machinery. He tramped around the room swaggering, swinging his shoulders, jostling shadows.
The money test isn’t a particularly keen one, but it was one I had available. If he had made it big, as he said, he wasn’t spending any of it on front.
“There’s a Spanish proverb: ‘Take what you want, then pay for it.’ Under my credit system, you pay for it first.”
“How much?”
“A hundred a day. Two-fifty in advance.”
“What happens if you don’t find her?”
“That’s your tough luck, Mr. Barr. I sell my services, period. You understand a job like this could take me a day, or it could run into weeks.”
“Yeah.”
“Also, she could be dead.”
“Rosie dead? She better not be.” It was a queer smiling threat: I’ll kill you if you’re dead. “You trying to talk yourself out of work?”
“No. I simply want you to understand the conditions.”
“I understand ’em all right.” Better than you do, said his gap-toothed leer. “I understand ’em fine, and mainly you want two-fifty. How do I know you won’t walk out of here with my money and never come back?”
From most other men it would have been an insult. From him it was a natural thing to hear. Barr was living on the ragged edge, holding on with bitten fingernails while hope and suspicion took turns at his liver.
“That’s a chance you have to take. I’m taking a chance on you, too.”
“How’s that?”