“Crobey.”
And the door opened, throwing light.
She only saw the man’s silhouette — thickset, massive; and the hard outline of a revolver in his hand.
Crobey made an impatient noise in his nose and she felt herself propelled through the door. The man with the gun stepped back, lowering the weapon to his side — an exchange of glances with Crobey; the screen door slapped shut and Crobey leaned back against the solid door to close it.
Crobey said, “Santana — Miss Marchand.”
The other man smiled a bit and dipped his head to her. He put the pistol away in a pocket of his baggy pants. She heard him mutter something — “con mucho gusto” — and then Crobey walked past to drop her case on a rickety old parson’s table.
The room hardly registered on her awareness; it was a basic enclosure — rustic, beaten up, more than lived-in. The air smelled of garlic and sweat. Santana in the light was squat, shorter than she’d thought at first — no neck; jowls; dark unruly hair; a swarthy face. His little eyes kept watching her and she wondered if she was going to scream.
Santana said something in Spanish. Crobey said, “Talk English now.”
Santana shrugged and gave an apologetic smile. With a thick accent — annyWHAN for anyone, jew for you — he said, “Did anyone follow you?”
“No. I guess they weren’t looking for me at the airport. Well they wouldn’t care if I left — it’s my staying here that burns them.”
Carole drew a ragged shuddering breath. Crobey said to her, “If you want to wash up there’s a pump on the kitchen sink. The privy’s just outside the back door.”
“Talk to me,” she said. “Am I your prisoner here?”
“What?”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Santana? He used to be my ground-crew mechanic.”
Santana beamed at her. “I used to keep Crobey’s planes flying.” She barely understood him. “Then my brother, he died and I inherited this place.”
“I see.” She looked at Crobey. “And what do you and your old buddy here have in mind for me?”
“Maybe you’d rather sleep out in the rain?”
“It didn’t occur to you they have hotels in Puerto Rico?”
Crobey glanced at Santana, who only grinned infuriatingly; Crobey’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling, seeking inspiration from the Almighty.
“Crobey, tell me what’s going on.”
“We’re staying out of sight — I’d have thought that was obvious. It won’t kill you to spend the night here. Tomorrow we’ll put you back on a plane home.” He picked up her case and walked out of the room. She counted four doors: the front one through which they’d entered, one that led into a hallway through which she could see part of a rudimentary kitchen, two others. Crobey went through one of these and she glimpsed a cot before he blocked the view with his body. “This’ll be your room for tonight. I’ll bunk down on the couch there. Now sit down.”
With his gravelly manner Crobey made the most innocuous command sound like a ferocious threat. She backed up to the window and hiked her haunch onto the sill defiantly. She was still trembling slightly.
On his way to the couch Crobey’s limp seemed more pronounced; maybe it was the rain. He sat down, gave her a hostile grin and picked up the drink Santana had left on the table. Crobey said, “I’ve been making waves since I got here. Apparently I splashed the wrong people. I was at the Sheraton like any other tourist until yesterday. Then I went down to breakfast and a cop pulled up a chair at my table. Very polite, very diffident and the personality of a closed door. No threats, but a visit from those folks can be a threat in itself. He asked questions and I told lies, the kind where I know he knows I’m lying — he wanted to know what I was doing in Puerto Rico and I told him I was working for a movie director, which was true, and that I was down here scouting locations for a movie about the Bay of Pigs, which was not true. He wanted to know why I was going around asking peculiar questions and what gave me the idea I could pester citizens without an investigator’s license. The hint was that there are people here who can make their wishes known in official circles and that it wouldn’t take too long for the order to come down, and when it did I’d probably be collected by the security police and escorted to jail or the airport or something. We’re very sorry but you understand, señor, an irregularity in your papers. It’s funny in a way, if that kind of thing amuses you — I feel like I’m running out of places to hang my hat. Nowadays it seems you can tour all the friendly countries with an overnight bag.”
She had grown impatient with him. “You had a visit from a policeman and he didn’t actually threaten you but you read between the lines and as a result you seem to have spent the past twenty-four hours changing into dry pants, and now you run me through a wringer of mystery and intrigue and when I ask you what it’s all about, all you do is stick your jaw out at me and do an impression of Charles Bickford playing a warden who’s glaring at the convicts. Let me tell you, Crobey, the acting stops right now.”
She clapped her lips shut and glared.
“Let me remind you,” he said quietly, “that I’m not your lackey. For a thousand a week I’m not going to die in the service of the memory of a dead kid I never met. If the precautions seem excessive you’ll just have to humor me. Now I’m not entirely as Mongoloid as I look and I do understand a couple of things — I understand that you have this habit, when you get rattled you just tend to keep talking until you think of something to say, and I understand that flip snide insults are to you what fodder is to cannons and I don’t expect to break all your unpleasant habits for you overnight but I want you to keep a curb on your tongue because otherwise things could get a little dicey around here. There are people I take insults from but you don’t know me well enough to be one of them. You’re completely out of your element here and you’re scared — you’re a city kid out in the wild jungle and every last thing is going to cause fear and trembling until you get used to it. Mostly right now I expect you’re scared of me. I don’t have a lot of polish, I haven’t got any cocktail party chitchat, I’m not the kind of domesticated house-pet you can put in his place with wise-ass remarks.”
His insight startled her — she was, above all, afraid of him. There hung about him a kind of menace; the type of quality that might emanate from a dozing predator. It wasn’t just her private reaction; she saw it as well in the way Santana watched Crobey. And Santana was his friend.
Fear was something she wasn’t used to. She fought it and this brought out the anger in her. Knowing it was foolish she blurted, “I’d be more impressed with all that if I thought you were doing an acceptable job of chasing the mice. I didn’t ask you to lay your life on the line for a thousand a week but I did ask you to do a job. I don’t see much sign you’ve been doing it. For instance maybe you’d better run that Glenn Anders business past me one more time. Maybe you can explain who authorized you to make cozy deals with the CIA.”
“Apparently I was under a misapprehension — I understood I had a free hand.”
“Did you honestly think I wanted you to share everything with the CIA?”
“The CIA has facilities that I don’t have. It’s my intention to use them to provoke Rodriguez. When he learns they’re sniffing around his backtrail he’ll get nervous and a nervous man makes mistakes. It may provoke him into showing himself and when that happens I plan to be there.”
“Even though you’ve given the CIA the inside track.” She snorted theatrically.
“It’s no great trick to get there ahead of those jokers,” Crobey said mildly. “They move like slugs. Anders is all right by himself but he’s lugging all the dead weight of the bureaucracy behind him.” Then his voice turned hard. “Did you listen to anything I said before?”