Jeopardy Is My Job. Marlowe Stephen
the Fuentes brothers, who was of an old noble family and a poet as well, but as poor as any gypsy—he died three years ago, señor—had a dream. We would return to caves, he said, we would leave the foolishness of big cars and telephones and ugly structures of steel and glass behind us, and we would think pure thoughts and our land would return to its time of greatness, when the conquistadores explored your land. Don Antonio, for that was his name, wished to gather a cave village of other poets and artists and men who make music, and live with them the simple life.
“But fate struck him down early, a thing of the lungs, señor, and there was just the one cave. Don Antonio raised his sons there, and as his wife was dead he took a gypsy woman to live with him. Her name is Maruja, and it is a joke for all the world to call her Doña Maruja, especially as—now that Don Antonio is dead—his ghost must haunt that cave. For electric lights have been strung, it has been quarried out to make many rooms, there are carpets from Morocco on the floor and running water and a telephone and a phonograph that blares music into the night, frightening the burros on the mountain, and furniture has been brought in to make the caves of Fuentes a very palace. . . . More wine, señor?”
“And one for you as well.”
“Don Antonio always believed that if we would fight the ways of all that Francia to the north and of Inglaterra on its island in the sea, we must first understand them. So he took upon himself the education of his boys, and as he was a great scholar himself, he taught them French and English also. But still, they were strange wild boys, as in their youth they rarely saw anyone but Don Antonio and the gypsy woman Maruja. And all the world says when they decided on the fiesta brava as a way of life, that was what killed Don Antonio, not the thing of the lungs. But Maruja was pleased, as the fiesta brava meant money. She is still young, Maruja; she was only fifteen when Don Antonio brought her to the cave ten, perhaps eleven years ago. She cried when Ruy Fuentes was trampled by a bull the same year his father died, some say more for the son than the father. Since then she has been seen no more in Fuengirola, though because she sings in the night one still knows she lives in the cave of Fuentes. And, amigo, all the world laughs behind the back of an American woman, the tall dark one who truly has afición, for though she loves Ruy Fuentes, it is clear that if the gitana Maruja so much as crooks her little finger, Ruy will come running—and not as a son to his foster-mother. But then, the gypsies have strange powers. . . . Another vino blanco, señor?”
How much of what he had said was truth and how much could be explained by the fact that the Spanish are the most voluble people in the world, I didn’t know. When he began to talk of a flamenco dancer who would perform at the bodega later, I asked for my check and paid it after he toted it up in chalk on the surface of the bar.
As I was leaving, Stu Huntington and the blind sculptor Fernando entered the bodega. After the fun and games between their wives last night, I was surprised to see them together. But though the blind man’s face was impassive and his hand rested on Huntington’s forearm out of necessity, his companion’s eyes were stony, his face was red to the hairline of his gray crewcut and his jowls were quivering with anger. They passed me, and there was no flicker of recognition in Huntington’s eyes. I lingered in the batwing doorway. They sat at a table and leaned across it and argued in low tones. The tables on either side were occupied. Eavesdropping is as much a part of a detective’s work as planting his elbows on a bar and listening to a barman who talks a blue streak, but there was no way I could do it here without being obvious. I shrugged and went out.
After I turned left at a prickly-pear cactus that was as big as a house, the burro-trail climbed steeply. On my right the foothills of the Sierra Tecada Mountains rose black against the moonlight. I smelled the smoke of cooking-fires and on the step-like tiers of the hillside saw the red fire-glow at the entrances to gypsy caves. On my left the hill dropped away sharply; far off I could see the white cluster of buildings that was Fuengirola in the moonlight, and the dappled reflection of the moon on the Mediterranean. In one of the caves someone was plucking a guitar and singing. The melody had Africa and the Levant in it, and a thousand years of gypsy wandering. It sang with a strange affectionate sadness of hunger and hardship and death.
The burro-trail was wider than I had expected, ten feet across, but unpaved and seamed with the twisting, dry beds of streams that already had run out of water by late spring. Along with the mournful gypsy music they reminded me that Spain was a harsh, hard land where only the very rich among men, or the dishonest, and only the carrion-eaters among animals, ate well.
I began to wonder how I would tell the cave of Fuentes from the others dotting the hillside when I heard a car behind me. I got off the road and crouched against the flank of the hill, waiting. The car roared closer, the sound of its engine as incongruous on that burro-trail as a Spanish accent at a meeting of the D.A.R. Then I saw it, a low-slung sports job pursued up the steep trail by its own cloud of dust. There had been a sports car just like it, a sleek Lancia that would clip you for eight or ten thousand bucks, parked outside the second bodega in Fuengirola. The top was down then and it was down now. In the moonlight as it sped by I saw Stu Huntington behind the wheel and blind Fernando beside him. I decided for no reason at all that they would lead me where the Fuentes brothers lived. Then I was choking in their dust, and then I started walking again.
It wasn’t far, but they had two-hundred horsepower and I had shank’s mare. By the time I reached the car, it was parked and empty. But the engine was still ticking under the long hood, like an expensive watch.
The burro-trail ended there. Ahead loomed a rocky slope that even a mountain goat would have shunned. At the end of the trail gaped a small cave entrance, and ten yards below it a much larger one. A burro brayed nearby, its startlingly loud hee-haw resounding in the mountains.
Big cave or small? Chester Drum, spelunker, scowled, and rubbed his nose, and scratched his head, and listened to the unseen burro bray again, and said, “Don’t give me the horse-laugh, brother,”—and heard a motor grind, cough and kick over with a roar. Not the Lancia; it was bigger, and the sound came from inside the large cave.
I poked my nose in there. I took three steps and heard the rattling idle of the truck’s engine smooth to a loud purr as an expert hand adjusted the choke. I took three more steps and headlights sprang blindingly on in front of me. The easy idle became a roar. The truck began to move. Fear slid down my spine like a pellet of ice when I thought the truck might be wide enough to fill the width of the cave. Then I bared my teeth in something like a smile. By hugging the left wall of the cave, I’d have room to spare. It was just as well: who’d hire a long, flat private detective?
The truck rumbled by. I breathed its fumes and saw a high cab and a six-wheeled truck-bed, canvas-covered. I watched its taillights recede. If the driver hadn’t seen me in his headlights, I decided, he’d be too nearsighted to tool a big rig down the mountain trail. Which meant he had seen me, and that meant whatever he was doing here was not the sort of thing to make him stand on his brakes and leap out of the truck with a tire iron in his hand by way of greeting an unexpected snooper.
That was what I thought. But then I heard a sound behind me, as of a shoe dislodging loose rock, and I had time to pivot halfway around before the roof of the cave slammed down like a punch-press, fragmenting the night and my incorrect deduction.
chapter four
Sterling Moss would have envied me.
They had installed night-lights at the speedway in Indianapolis, and all the lights had coalesced to look like a big fat full moon, and there I was sitting in the bucket-seat of my Lancia so far ahead of the pack that another car wasn’t even in sight. Not only that, but look ma, no hands.
Maybe I wasn’t driving though. It was a two-man racer, and a big figure sat hunched over the wheel to my left. That put me in what they call in the trade the suicide seat. The wind of our slipstream rushed by. We were really zooming along. Suicide seat? Ha-ha, that was a good one. My partner was hunched over the wheel as if his life depended on it, and his hands were glued at ten and four o’clock. He was a driver who knew his business. He wouldn’t wrap us around a tree.
But he might wrap us around a rambling, spreading, thick- and twisted-limbed cactus as big as a house.