Jeopardy Is My Job. Marlowe Stephen
them often enough when my mother can’t keep up with his drinking. Not that she doesn’t try,” Tenley added spitefully.
“Admire them both, do you?” I said.
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“If you think it’s funny. The Hartshorn women, mother and daughter, throw me. You mother wouldn’t cooperate at first because she didn’t want to drag you into this. You’re convinced your old man’s on a harmless bender even though the Governor was worried enough to send a detective three thousand miles to find him.”
“I’ll start worrying when I think there’s something to worry about.”
“Your grandfather does.”
“He hasn’t spent his life with them, and neither have you. But I have. Starting before breakfast they drink themselves into a stupor all day—until it’s time to brush their teeth with Fundador before going to bed.” I must have given her a funny look, because she went right on, “And if you think I have no right telling this to a stranger, it’s no secret. It’s something the whole Costa del Sol knows—when the whole Costa del Sol isn’t doing likewise. Have you been here long enough, Mr. Drum, to see the pathetic little feral-eyed and dirty-faced children slinking around all the patios on all the villas on the hills over Torremolinos? They can’t speak English and the Spanish they learn from the servants is gutter Spanish, and maybe if they’re lucky they can read and write by the time they’re nine or ten. Their parents are too drunk to care about them, you see. When you’re an alcoholic expatriate in Spain, mañana isn’t just a word, it’s a way of life. I was one of those kids until the Governor sent me off to school in Switzerland. If he hadn’t, the monthly checks would have stopped coming, so Andrea and Robbie gave him the green light. Come to think of it, they were probably glad to be rid of me for a few years.”
That was quite a speech. It left her with a flush under the tan of her cheeks, and her green eyes looked two shades darker.
“Why’d you bother coming back from Switzerland?” I asked.
She looked at Ruy Fuentes, and the way she looked at him was answer enough, but she told me, “Because I feel sorry for them. I guess pity’s the worst emotion you can feel for someone you love, but that’s the way I feel.” Her almost pulverizing beauty and her indictment of the expatriate set made me forget she was just a kid, but when she spoke of her own feelings with a teen-ager’s grave and somehow weary self-assurance, I remembered she was only nineteen. I forgot it again when she displayed a bear-trap brain by asking, “Andrea didn’t want to drag me into what?”
When I told her, she turned angrily to Ruy Fuentes. “You never said my father came to see you.”
“It would only have upset you, Tenley.”
“How Spanish can you get? I’m not in a cloister. I’m living the only life I’ll ever live. Let me decide what’s going to upset me and what isn’t, will you?”
“I am Spanish,” Ruy Fuentes said gravely.
She glared at him, and then the glare became a grin, and then the grin faded and the way she looked after that was very much in love. “Sure,” she said. “You are Spanish. Maybe that’s why I love you. Take care of me, Ruy. Take care of me always.”
If the look that passed between them meant anything, that would be easy. Then Ruy Fuentes told her to wait outside.
“Does that come under the heading of taking care of me?”
Ruy Fuentes said that it did.
“All right, but first I want to ask Mr. Drum something. Are you going to keep on looking for him? You’ll be wasting your time. He’ll come home. But the Governor’s got lots of money, hasn’t he, and you earned a free trip to Spain as well. I can see I’m really going to like you.”
“Like mother like daughter,” I said, though of course she wouldn’t understand. Instead of trying to, she walked out under the grandstand and through the gate where the bull truck had been backed earlier.
There was a silence which Paco broke by asking his brother in Spanish, “Does the little one know?”
“No. How could she? You heard her say it. There is no need to worry. She did not know her father was at the cueva.” At first I didn’t know what the word cueva meant, but then it came to me. In Spanish cueva is cave.
“Seguro?” Paco asked doubtfully.
“Claro, mi hermano. You have no need to worry.” To me Ruy Fuentes said in English, “She is a very high-strung girl, my novia. You have upset her. I think it would be better if you flew home to America. Here you have no authority.”
“I’ve been paid to do a job.”
“And I have Tenley’s feelings to consider. I have warned you, señor.”
He went out after Tenley, leaving his big gun behind. His big gun told me, “If you upset Señorita Hartshorn, you upset my brother as well. Three more days he must stick the bulls, señor. He must be calm, and of a single purpose. Go back where you came from, or go back to Torremolinos. That is where Señor Hartshorn lives, and where you should look for him. My brother must remain calm. I would not wish him to have an accident.”
It was reasonable enough up to that point, but when I didn’t answer Paco said, “That is this time. This time it is words. But the next time I will not use words.”
I watched him leave, all two-hundred and fifty pounds of him. A gorgeous dish who was contemptuous of her parents and called it pity, a couple of English-speaking bullfighters, a threat as thinly veiled as a belly-dancer’s navel, I thought, mulling it all over, and not a clue as to the whereabouts of Robbie Hartshorn. Unless the cave that had Paco all hot and bothered was a clue.
I decided to find the cave.
chapter three
The only kind of secrets you can keep in a small Spanish town are the kind you take to the grave.
By the time it got dark, which was an hour after I left the iron bull ring, and by dint of visiting two bodegas and drinking white wine and eating grilled sardines fresh from the sea and heaps of clams no bigger than my thumbnail, I knew most of what there was to know about the Fuentes brothers and their cave. Most, not all. That is the trouble with a town that seems to hold no secrets. It is the one it does hold, or has no knowledge about, that can get you killed.
In the first bodega, an old monosabio—or wise monkey—who had dreams of wearing a suit of lights in Madrid and wound up raking the sand in the provincial bull rings and opening the gate and scurrying behind the barrier when the bull came thundering out, told me, “The cave of Fuentes? But of course, señor. All the world in Fuengirola knows the cave of Fuentes. One walks up the caretera three kilometers in the direction of Torremolinos. Then one takes the dirt track into the hills perhaps a kilometer more, and there on the left where a cactus as big as a house grows, one sees a burro-trail. Half a kilometer along the burro-trail, and one reaches the cave of Fuentes.”
“The brothers own it?” I said. “What do they do there?”
“They live there, señor.”
“Live there?”
“Claro. It is as I have said.”
In the second bodega, the barman told me, “Si, señor. It is as you have heard. The brothers Fuentes live in a cave not four kilometers from Fuengirola.”
“I thought only gypsies—”
“Gitanos? Sí, but others as well. There is a feeling of the heart here in my land that it is the things of civilization which have brought hardship and poverty to Spain. There was a time, señor, when the rest of Europe did not say Africa begins at the Pyrenees, but they say it now. Many feel this is because we try to copy the ways of Francia and Inglaterra. But living in a cave—oh, yes, that is very Spanish.”
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