“Don’t throw ultimatums at me,” she said. “I might call your bluff.”
“Then you’re ready to give it up?”
“No. I’ll look for somebody a bit less prickly. You can’t possibly be the only man alive who knew those people in the Bay of Pigs days.”
“Ducks, I don’t think I can be happy here if we have to have this conversation twice a day. It doesn’t give me a sense of job security.”
“Security? You?”
“I’m not talking about the long term. I’m talking about maybe getting the rug pulled out from under me at the wrong moment.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Ah, ducks, tell me why I should.”
She touched a finger to one of his guns and twirled it on the table, picked a stray hair off her cuff, leaned back, crossed her legs, put an elbow on the table and her chin in her palm, looked him in the eye and said, “Nobody can do that. It’s a trick question and you know it. The only way to find out whether you can trust someone is to trust the person and see what happens.”
“You’re a truly contrary creature.” He stood, pulling the Levi’s down from his crotch.
She watched him limp toward the back door. “Where are you going?”
“To the loo, ducks.”
“Why’ve you started calling me by that awful epithet?”
“Ducks?” In the doorway he turned; the smile was more sardonic than amiable. “When I use it, it’s a term of endearment.” Then he went.
She heard the slap of the privy door and realized she was smiling. She straightened her face. She kept catching herself trying to ingratiate Crobey — it was a warning sign; she had to guard against it. It wasn’t a contest of will or pride; in effect he’d imprisoned her and rendered her ineffectual; if she remained she could only sink into passivity. That wasn’t what she’d come for.
When he came in from the yard he said, “I wasn’t intending to switch cars right away but there was a problem in town — I left it parked while I went to see the man about the guns and when I came back I found it jammed in by two parked cars that hadn’t been there before. One of them had a couple of smokers in it. So I stepped into a hotel and got lost. I phoned the rent-a-car people to go pick it up and we got the Bronco from a pal of Santana’s.”
“Who were the men in the car?”
“Locals. I’ve no idea whose.”
She said, “If someone’s putting pressure on the police to scare you out of Puerto Rico, it shouldn’t be impossible to find out who that is. If the police are impressed by this person or frightened of him, it means they know who he is.”
“I realize that. But I can’t think of any coppers I’d like to talk to right now.”
“Would Anders know?”
“Anders could find out,” he conceded.
“Then let’s arrange to see him.”
Crobey said, “A while ago you were chastising me for consorting with him.”
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” She smiled. “Besides, I want to give you a fighting chance.”
“Good. I already made a date for tonight: seven-thirty at the Tres Candelas.”
The Tres Candelas struck Anders as a Harry Crobey sort of place. The long dismal narrow room was mostly bar. A row of tiny tables, a back room with half a dozen tables-for-four. There was a Wurlitzer jukebox that might have fascinated a dealer in fifties kitsch.
Anders had his jacket hung over his shoulder by one fingertip and Rosalia held his hand like a teen-ager. The bartender, in soiled apron and halfheartedly trimmed beard, waved them toward the tables in back. No one was back there. Anders seated Rosalia under a cockfight poster and selected a chair from which he could watch the entrance. According to his watch it was 7:05. He was surprised by Crobey’s absence.
Rosalia reached for his wrist and heaved it around to see the face of his watch. “We’re awfully early.”
“Once in my life I want to be somewhere ahead of Harry.”
“He’s got some kind of hex sign on you, hasn’t he.”
“Not really. Sometimes I envy him a little.” He was looking at her breasts, not smiling. “Want to know what I’m thinking?”
“I think I already do,” she said in a mock-cool voice. She had extraordinarily long natural eyelashes and knew how to use them; she batted them at him. Anders made a point of tracing the lines of her body with his eyes. Rosalia began to chuckle. “How’d you ever turn into such a lout?”
Anders shook his head gloomily. “You see it was like this. When I was nine I ran away from home and got picked up by a very smooth hair-tonic salesman who hooked me on smack and used me as a courier until he got run over by a Chinese tank, and then I was all by myself on the streets mugging old ladies until this kindly fat man took me in to his establishment and I worked upstairs there on the line until I got arrested for selling atomic secrets, and after that things just started to go wrong somehow.”
Mirth captivated Rosalia, making her shake. Anders laughed at his own absurdity. Then he looked up in time to see Harry Crobey walk in, escorting a striking woman.
Anders watched the brisk-gaited clipclip of the woman’s good long legs as Crobey limped beside her. She wasn’t especially tall but she managed to carry herself as if she were. The skin of her face was drawn over precisely defined bones — she was at least forty and didn’t attempt to look younger; very little make-up and she’d been out in the humid wind but dishevelment suited her. In a rust-hued skirt and brown satiny blouse she managed to look cool. Her eyes were shaped for scorn and for easy laughter; her hair was reddish but not red and something made him certain she didn’t tint it. She wasn’t pretty in any of the usual ways — the bone ridges were prominent, the nose sharp, the impression one of planes and angles rather than soft curved features — but she was extraordinarily attractive and it was clear by her carriage that she knew it and was assured and confident in herself. Possibly it was a pose but if so it was one she’d had plenty of time to rehearse.
Anders shook Crobey’s hand and introductions went around: Rosalia gave Carole Marchand an ingenuous beaming smile. Crobey held the woman’s chair for her, an event that astonished Anders — he’d never seen Crobey do that before — and she sat down with unstudied grace; she seemed almost wholly without selfconsciousness.
Crobey hooked an overhand wave toward the bartender and sat down with a wince that betrayed the chronic troublesomeness of his knee. “Christ, this humidity. Like Dante said, it’s a nice place to visit but...”
The bartender distributed menus enclosed in fly-specked plastic. Rosalia was asking Carole Marchand if it was her first visit to Puerto Rico — it was all very desultory; Crobey seemed in no hurry to get to business and Anders decided Crobey wanted the delay in order to give his client an opportunity to size Anders up.
After a time Carole Marchand wrinkled her nostrils in the direction of the kitchen. “Do I hear someone rattling my dish? I’m famished. It had better be edible, Crobey.”
“I doubt it comes with a written warranty, ducks. Last time I was in here it wasn’t half bad.”
Anders said, “Harry’s a connoisseur of greasy-spoon dives from Macao to Dar-es-Salaam. He’s got an unerring nose for the worst food in town.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” There seemed to be an easy tolerance in Carole Marchand’s acceptance of Crobey’s eccentricities and Anders wondered how much of it was sham. It was difficult to believe she didn’t actually dislike the man; Crobey wasn’t her sort — the juxtaposition struck him as something like thowing a groomed show-bred poodle into a cage with a timber wolf.