A Game for the Living (10 page)

“Let's go to the Café Tacuba!”

“Ah, no! Too many people!”

“But the chocolate's so good! And the
waffles
!”

“Dolores! Look! My heel came off!”

Then a cascade of laughter.

The interior of the Cathedral was almost as chaotic. A mass seemed to be going on in the centre. A sprinkling of people were deep in prayer or in sleep in the dark pews. A group of tourists, whose new-looking clothes caught the eye in the general grayness, shuffled down one of the broad side aisles behind a man who was pointing into the air. Theodore looked up at the narrowing grey dome that was lit now by a circle of yellowish electric lights. The height of it and the smell of the place made him feel slightly sick.

Ramón had installed himself on his knees before a dark niche, perhaps a special one to him, because some of the other niches with saints' figures in them were lighted. Sauzas sat down at the end of a
pew some three yards away from him, and Theodore took a seat
across the aisle from Sauzas. Theodore wondered if Ramón were confessing the murder now, or reciting some nonsense he had learned
by rote. The smell of the Cathedral irked Theodore—candle wax, incense, the hollow, stale smell of a tomb without even the virtues of coolness
and privacy, the smell of old cloth and old wood, the sweaty sweetness of crumpled peso notes, and, bringing it all out and binding it like salt, the smell of human bodies and breaths. Theodore supposed that Ramón reacted like Pavlov's dog to this particular smell and its variations in other churches.
Sanctity. Genuflect. Cross yourself. Tread lightly. This is a holy place. The air has not been changed in four hundred years
—or however old the place might be. This Cathedral was nearly four hundred years old. And now to bring his barbarity in here with him and spill it all out! With the bland certainty, too, that some invisible yet all-powerful thing was going to forgive him!

Theodore squirmed on the hard wooden seat. Ramón's sins were only different in degree, after all. People came in sometimes scheming how to pick somebody's pocket. A sign on the front of the door warned people in Spanish and in English to beware of pickpockets within the Cathedral. It was impossible to get one's mind off money. Wooden alms boxes on pedestals everywhere pleaded in printed notices for money for the children, for the poor, for the upkeep of the church; and each had a huge padlock on it to keep those very poor from taking what was as much theirs as anybody else's. His disconnected thoughts surged through him like emotions, warming his cheeks and quickening his blood, as if his body were readying itself for a fight, or was already fighting.

The dozen men in white gowns in the centre of the Cathedral were reciting in Latin, murmuring fast after the leader, with an air of being pressed for time.

Ramón suddenly crossed himself and stood up. He walked towards them in the aisle, but might not have seen them. Sauzas took his arm. At the front of the Cathedral, Ramón turned, half knelt, and made the sign of the cross.

“Did you confess to that saint, Ramón?” Sauzas asked him as they crossed the court.

“Yes.”

“Confessed the murder?”

“Yes,” said Ramón. He walked with his head up, but his eyes looked—apparently sightlessly because they had to keep yanking him out of people's way—at some place ahead of him on the sidewalk.

Sauzas hailed a
libre
at the corner.

Ramón got in first. Now, Theodore thought, for all his good looks, Ramón looked like just any other murderer whose picture was on the front page of the tabloids. Once, Theodore remembered, he had thought he saw something fine and honest in Ramón's eyes, something that could never change.

“You don't want to come?” Sauzas asked Theodore. “You can come if you like.”

“No,” Theodore said.

CHAPTER TEN

Ramón's confession appeared in the
Excelsior
and
El Universal,
which Inocenza bought the following morning. Theodore had told her that Ramón had confessed, and Inocenza could not believe it, but the picture of Ramón at the police station, holding the kitchen knife suspended between his two palms, apparently convinced her. Inocenza began to cry, and, for the first time in Theodore's presence, sat down on the edge of a chair in the living-room and bowed her head.

In the photograph on the third page of the
Excelsior,
Ramón looked out with stubborn, haggard intensity—like any other murderer. They would not kill him, unfortunately, but they would give him fifteen years at least, Theodore thought, perhaps in some wretched, evil-smelling jail. And it might be that Ramón's conscience would punish him more severely than death.

That afternoon, Theodore had another of the mysterious, silent telephone calls.

“Elissa?” he asked. “Elissa, if it's you—just say it's you.” He thought—but he wasn't sure—that he heard a sigh. And how could one tell if a sigh were male or female? He strained his ear to hear any background noise, then put the telephone down in anger.

He called Sauzas's number, asked for Extension 847, and after a wait of five minutes or so Sauzas came to the telephone. “
Bueno.
Teodoro Schiebelhut,” Theodore said. “I've just had another telephone call in which no one speaks. I thought I should tell you, so that at least we know it is not Ramón.”

“Hm-m,” Sauzas said in a preoccupied way.

Thedore did not know what to say next. “What're you going to do to Ramón?” he asked.

“
Do
to him? Ugh! If he is guilty, twenty years.”

“
If?
”

“He is a strange one. I think he is guilty, yes, but he's now saying he sent the postcard. This I just don't believe—” Sauzas trailed off in a dubious grunt.

“That's not very important, is it? He probably thinks, since he confessed, he should confess everything.”

“Yes—but I am not absolutely sure. I am going to have some psychiatrists look at him.”

“If they pronounce him insane, that's not true,” Theodore said quickly. “He has spells—temper, headaches—but it's not true that he's insane.”

“We'll see, Señior Schiebelhut!” Sauzas interrupted. “Are you nervous? Would you like to have a guard at your house?”

“Why, no,” Theodore protested. “Why?”

“No reason. Just for your sake. It would be easy to arrange, but if you think it's not necessary
.
.
.
”

Theodore felt most dissatisfied with the conversation after he had hung up. Of course, it was easy to post a guard in Mexico, they did it readily for the rich, but Theodore was not used to a system in which he was supposed to decide whether a guard should be posted or not. The police should know whether a guard was necessary, and if so simply post one.

It was Sauzas's doubt that upset him most. “
.
.
.
not absolutely sure
.
.
.
” Psychiatrists! Well, the police were being cautious, Theodore supposed. There would be justice done, even in Mexico. Ramón's fingerprint was on the knife, after all!

Once more the telephone calls came in. From Isabel Hidalgo, Olga next door—but not from Elissa Straeter, who perhaps slept until afternoon and had not seen the papers.

“A terrible surprise,” Theodore said into the telephone. “No.
.
.
.
Of course I had no idea that he had done it.
.
.
.
”

But of course he had, from the start.

Then, in the afternoon, the lawyer Castillo called. He wanted to know if Theodore wished to engage his services again for Ramón Otero.

“I think not now. He will be given a lawyer,” Theodore said.

“This is very odd. I really did not think he was guilty. But—the best of us can make mistakes,
verdad
?”

“Yes,” Theodore said. “Evidently.”

“Evidently. Well, now he will need a very good lawyer to get him off with a light sentence.”

“I'm afraid, señor—that is no concern of mine right now.”

“No. I understand, señor. Ah, so—salutations to you and
adiós
.”

“
Adiós.
”

A good lawyer, perhaps, but Ramón could certainly not afford to hire him on his own. Theodore smiled a little bitterly at the thought that he had hired him for poor Ramón just three weeks ago. Poor Ramón! It was more bitter to remember that he had considered Ramón his best friend. In spite of their difference in temperament—Latin from Anglo-Saxon, south from north, difference of education, upbringing, religion, everything—he had thought of Ramón in a brotherly way. He had never felt jealous in regard to Lelia, nor had Ramón seemed to feel any jealousy towards him. And perhaps there had been no logical reason for Ramón's killing her. Perhaps it had been quite unpremeditated, the result of a horrible burst of anger.

This thought removed much of his resentment against Ramón, and left only a tremendous regret that anger had taken from him both the woman he loved and his friend.

In the next days, Theodore scanned the papers for news of Ramón's investigation, but the papers said only that it was ‘continuing' and that psychiatrists were making tests, not that they doubted or did not doubt his guilt. When Theodore on the second day of Ramón's imprisonment tried to call Sauzas, he was unable to get him. He left a message that he would like Sauzas to call him, but the man on the other end of the telephone sounded indifferent, and Theodore doubted if Sauzas would ever get the message.

Theodore attempted a portrait of Inocenza, only the second that he had ever tried, and he found the picture neither very good nor very bad, which irritated him more than a total failure would have done. He could not get his mind off Ramón, and he was in a mood of mingled hatred and apprehension. He even imagined that the police might release Ramón. What then? Theodore realized that the block in his thinking was that he could not believe in Ramón's innocence, whatever the police might say. If the police found him guilty and insane, that would not satisfy him either, but that had not happened yet. The chances were, Theodore thought, that Ramón would be pronounced guilty, and sane enough to be held responsible for his act.

He went over to visit Olga Velasquez. She cheered him superficially, planning and chattering about her Carnaval party and the decoration of the house and the garden.

“Promise me you will come, Teodoro. I know you are still depressed, but the party is three days from now. Maybe by that time you will
like
to come to a party.”

She sounded quite like Elissa Straeter. Theodore pushed his hand through his yellow hair and tried to smile.

“You think I am silly, talking of nothing but a party for days now, don't you?” she asked, with a happy laugh.

“I love you for it,” Theodore said, meaning it sincerely, but wondering if he had said something vaguely improper in Spanish, because Olga looked at him with a surprised smile and her head on one side. When Theodore and Olga had first become acquainted, about three years ago, he had asked her to correct him when he made a blunder in Spanish, and she still sometimes did. But his accent was not so bad, he thought, in Spanish as it was in English. Theodore wrote his diary in English and read a great deal of English aloud to himself to try to improve. “Do you think I should make sure Ramón has a good lawyer, Olga?” Theodore asked suddenly.

She sat up a little in surprise. “You? Why should you?”

“It's the law. If a man is guilty or not—and there are differences in lawyers.”

“Who says he deserves a lawyer!” Olga exclaimed impulsively. “Teo, I don't see how you can
think
of that! And you still taking care of his bird! You should give it to your cat!” She slapped her hand down on her thigh and smiled.

But Theodore did not smile. “Perhaps I'm too exhausted to hate, Olga. When a man does a crime like that—he is out of his head, at least at the moment. Later, he regrets it himself. After the first shock of it, one's hatred dies down.” He looked at her uncomprehending face.

“Still, he has done it. He has to be punished. I never thought Ramón was perfectly normal, Teo. Very charming, surely, and he knows how to behave with women! But it's a look in his eye sometimes. Anyone could have seen that he had a temper like a wasp. And this—this horrible thing! Ramón deserves to pay for it, or else he'll just do it to somebody else!”

“Oh, I didn't mean that he shouldn't pay for it. I didn't mean a lawyer to get him off free,” Theodore protested, and stopped, because the conversation suddenly seemed futile to him. Besides, he was not sure of his own motives. It was a curse to be able to see two sides of things, perhaps three. He himself, along with the majority of Mexicans, did not believe in capital punishment, and yet when it came to something personal, it was an eye for an eye again. “You are right, Olga. It's none of my business.”

“What is happening to him now? Isn't there going to be a trial?”

“I suppose so. When they finish questioning him. They're still questioning him. It's been five days now.”

Theodore got the answer half an hour later, when he went home. Sauzas telephoned him and said that Ramón was to be released. His story did not hold water. There was no trace of blood on the knife, even under a microscope, and no blood on any clothes or shoes belonging to Ramón.

“He could have thrown his clothes away,” Theodore said.

“Hm-m. Well, it is my opinion and the opinion of the doctors that Ramón is just a psychological confessor—a psychological confessor,” Sauzas repeated, as if to lend weight to the phrase, which had no weight at all to Theodore when he heard it. “I suggested to Ramón that he dropped the knife behind the stove accidentally when he was drying the dishes with Lelia. He admits they used the knife that evening. And when you dry a knife and start to put it somewhere—in the box on the shelf right over the stove, as it happens—there will likely be a thumb-print, if one hand is holding the dish-cloth. Do you see?—Are you there, Señor Schiebelhut?”

“Yes, I am here.”

“There were, in fact, some traces of grease on the knife. But nothing else. No, señor, I think we must go back to the postcard and perhaps to the silent telephone calls you are getting. But the telephone calls will be very hard to trace. We shall have to try to trace the typewriter. The main reason I called you is because I would like to see you now. Are you free?”

“Yes,” Theodore said.

“Good. In about twenty minutes, then.”