Murder Is My Dish (22 page)

“What number are you calling, please?” the American operator said. Her voice was so clear she could have been down town in Ciudad Grande instead of four thousand miles away.

“
Que numero, por favor
?” said the Paranaian operator.

“What number?” Lequerica asked me. His eyes were hard and cold and a little suspicious.

He offered me a cigarette and watched my hands. He lit it for me. Somehow I got it to my lips steadily.

“Well?”

“State Department,” I said.

Surprise replaced suspicion in his eyes. We both waited with our telephones. Pretty soon a new voice said, “Department of State. Yes, please?”

I said, “Protocol Section.”

Dead line for a moment. Then: “Protocol, Miss Sanders.”

“Jack Morley around?” I almost hoped he wasn't. It was a hell of a trick to play on Jack Morley, unless I could pull it off the way I wanted to. Also, he wouldn't know what I was talking about. If Lequerica learned that from our conversation, everything was finished.

“Just a minute,” Miss Sanders said. The connection was good. So damned good.

“Hello?” Jack said.

“Hi, Jack.”

“Chet? My God, you aren't back in the States already?”

“No. Calling from Ciudad Grande.”

“It sounds like you're around the corner.”

“I know.”

“What's happening? What's going on down there? Betty's been worried sick about you. She says next time I do this kind of thing for you I ought to have my head examined.”

So far so good. Lequerica seemed to go for it. I said, “About the book. I'm glad you're not going to be involved after all, Jack. I'm glad you couldn't talk me into it.”

“Huh?”

Lequerica looked at me sharply.

“Don't argue. Just do what I say. It's like Betty said, Jack. You've got a wife and kid. That's why I didn't bring you in on this directly.”

“Just what—”

“Don't argue with me, damn it. Tell Edgar to bring the book down to Asunción.” I looked at Lequerica and cupped my hand over the phone but kept the fingers apart. “Where in Asunción?” I said.

“Hotel Paraguay. A man will contact him.”

“Hotel Paraguay,” I said. “Right.” I took my hand away from the phone. I hoped Jack would get the idea I wasn't alone. I hoped he would get the idea about Edgar, too. The only Edgar J knew was J. Edgar Hoover. Sometimes I would get on the phone with Betty that way, telling her I was J. Edgar Hoover. It always brought down the house. It was a joke. It wasn't for real. I hoped Jack would realize that and shut up.

“Have Edgar fly down to Asunción with the book,” I told Jack on the phone. “A man will contact him at the Hotel Paraguay. Okay?”

There was a silence. Lequerica leaned forward with his phone. I held my breath.

“All right,” Jack said. “Is there anything else you want? Anything else I can do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing. Kiss Betty for me.”

“Yeah. Take care, Chet. Will you?”

“It's easy,” I said. “It's a piece of cake.”

We said good-by and I hung up. Lequerica hung up too.

“Who is this Morley?” he asked me.

“A friend of mine. Just a middleman. He relays the message, by phone. He doesn't know where Edgar is. He doesn't know who Edgar is.”

“Well, you know your business. But who is Edgar?”

“Uh-uh. That's something your man finds out in Paraguay. What about Miss Mistral and me in the meanwhile? We have to stay in that army jail up in the hills?”

“Oh, didn't I tell you? Encarnacion Grande hasn't had her jaguar hunt yet. The rains, you see. When Major Corso told me you were in custody, I told El Grande. Encarnacion heard about it. She is delighted. She has a crush on you, that girl.”

“Hebephrenia and all?” I said.

“She wants you along on the hunt.” Lequerica smiled at me with his lips. “We'll be such a congenial group. El Grande. Encarnacion. Duarte. Kiki. You and I. There's no reason waiting around for your man Edgar, is there? My man will meet him in Asunción. We can join the fun, can't we? Did you ever hunt
el tigre
?”

“I never saw a jaguar outside of a zoo.”

I shuddered a little, thinking about Lequerica's congenial group. He smiled the wolf smile again.

Chapter Nineteen

T
HERE
are six hundred miles of all-weather roads in the Parana Republic, most of them paved since the beginning of El Grande's regime by the highway and construction company owned by El Grande's dead wife's brother, and most of them connecting El Grande's lumber mills and ranches with the deep-water port at Ciudad Grande. One of these, a two-lane blacktop which skirts the foothills of the mountains and passes through the rich ranching country, runs for a hundred and eighty-five miles to the fringe of the Parana jungle, south of Brazil's Mato Grosso.

We drove along it all through the hot afternoon in two ancient Pierce Arrow touring cars, possibly the last two in existence. We had an escort of motorcyclists in the jungle-green uniform of the Republic, who clattered along in front and behind the two touring cars and then went roaring into the towns along the way ahead of us.

They were sleepy little towns, faded by the sun and drugged by the heat, towns with names like Dolores and Concepcion and Santa Rosa. Our passing through was a big thing in. the life of the towns, and crowds from the surrounding country lined the road to shout at us and wave flags and proclaim,
“Viva El Grande!”
and
“Muerte al tigre!”
El Grande would stand in the rear of the lead car as we passed through the towns, a truly enormous smile on his face and a big white floppy-brimmed safari hat on his head. He would wave his hands and shout at everyone over the roaring clatter of the cyclists, calling everyone his children and enjoying it as much as they did.

And the damn thing was, they really liked it. They ate it up. They wanted us to ride north and hunt
el tigre
just because we had decided it would be fun. They wanted us to come tearing through their little towns with outriders on clattering, bouncing motorcycles. We were the sporting events they didn't have and the books they couldn't read and the television sets only some of them had heard of. We were a lot more than mere men and only a little less than gods.

In the leading Pierce Arrow were El Grande, Pablo Duarte, Encarnacion and her
dueña
, Señora Rivera. I sat in the second touring car with Lequerica and Kiki Magyar. Lequerica had left his charm in Ciudad Grande. He was sullen and morose. He had not expected to ride in the second car and he had not expected to share it with his estranged wife. He smiled with his lips as we passed through the towns, though, and sometimes he waved. Kiki Magyar wore jodhpurs, a white linen shirt, a floppy hat like El Grande's, and her diamond.

Leaving Santa Rosa she also wore a grin. “Hah-nee,” she said, “what is it? You are sick?”

Lequerica said in a flat voice, “Shut up, you bitch.”

Still grinning, Kiki slapped her knee. “Schoolboy,” she said. “I am not your first wife. I will not be your last.”

Lequerica glared at her.

“Ah, it is Pablo. That one, as you say here in your contry, he is much man. You are jealous of Pablo.”

“Bitch.”

I sat looking at the back of the driver's neck. Every few minutes he mopped the sweat off it with a damp handkerchief.

“Then I know,” Kiki said with a false bright enthusiasm. “You wish to be in the first car with El Grande. But how can you be in the first car with El Grande when he seeks a hosband for his little Encarnacion and you already are married?”

Lequerica's eyes, already narrowed to slits against the fierce sun, seemed to close. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“Señora Rivera. She tells me. She's a very happy
dueña
, that one. It is a charming custom. I am of course very insulted that I cannot ride with that
mucho hombre
, that Pablo—”

“Bitch.”

“But for true love what will a sentimentalist like your Kiki not do?”

Lequerica grabbed her wrist and jerked her around to face him on the wide rear seat of the touring car. Kiki looked at him, and smiled, and laughed very softly in his face. “That much man,” she said, “that Pablo, has never married. El Grande is pleased. señora Rivera is pleased, not that it matters.” She went on smiling. “I do not know if Encarnacion is pleased or not. She is strange, that one.”

“Tell me exactly what you know,” Lequerica said.

Kiki Magyar smiled and said nothing. I didn't know what was making her taunt him like that. Maybe it was something that had happened in New York. Maybe after a certain period of time, the much-married Miss Magyar grew tired of her current mate. Maybe I'll never understand dames who wear fifty-carat diamonds.

“Tell me,” Lequerica said.

“Hah-nee, my arm!”

He let go of her wrist and watched her rub it. Then she said, “El Grande wishes his Encarnacion to marry that Pablo, so in time he may have, what you say, an heir of the blood.”

Lequerica didn't say anything. He leaned back and cupped his hands to light a cigarette. He smoked it with studied casualness. Kiki and Duarte had been bad enough. Kiki and Duarte had hurt his pride in the one place it could be hurt. But Encarnacion and Duarte could really hurt him. Encarnacion and Duarte could make him a man with a successful past, a promising present, and absolutely no future.

The bush was growing wilder. The last of the ranches and the ranching towns had dropped behind us. Then we drove down a little hill, the cyclists rocketing ahead, into the town of Encarnacion Grande. Sunset bathed the town blood-red. The great stands of mahogany and andira trees cast long fading shadows, then no shadows at all, down the single street, which was also the end of the all-weather road which led up to the edge of the deep jungle and stopped there.

That night fireworks burst and glared and exploded in the dark hot air over Encarnacion Grande. We all ate with the
alcalde
, the mayor, of the town; and the mayor, a sweating, fat man—whose brother, the
pirotecnico
, even fatter and more covered with sweat, set off the Roman candles and the rockets at the edge of the main street with the black jungle as a backdrop—was a very nervous
alcalde
calling us all sir as if his life depended on it. There was much drinking after dinner, and even more confusion. I could have slipped away at any time and possibly even stolen a car to drive like hell until I left the country or ran out of gas. But Eulalia was in the fort above Ciudad Grande, and Lequerica knew I knew it.

After dinner the sweating mayor introduced El Grande to his hunters, three leather-faced brothers with ivory smiles and a fantastic capacity for hard liquor. They spoke of the hunt and what a good season it had been for jaguars, and they asked El Grande which of the three methods of hunting
el tigre
he would favor on this occasion. Spears were out, El Grande said, and Duarte looked disappointed. Encarnacion was a novice but, it could be hoped, a good shot with the rifle. Likewise, the professional style of hunting was out. It lacked sport, El Grande said. The professional method consisted of leaving a bound goat or young capybara near a water hole known to be frequented by
el tigre
, and waiting with rifles ready. The three brothers assured El Grande that everything was ready for the third style of hunting, if that was what he wished.

Outside, fireworks hissed and exploded and made pale lightning in the night. It was some night for the mayor's brother. The villagers used the visit of their
caudillo
as an excuse for a fiesta. There was a great deal of drinking and dancing in the street and after a while I went outside to watch it. Arms locked, faces bathed in sweat, all in their Sunday best, men and women cavorted wildly by in the glow of the fireworks and the electric lights which had been wire-strung overhead, buzzing and alternately waxing and waning because they put too much strain on the town's single small generator.

Pretty soon Duarte came out of the mayor's house. He walked unsteadily toward me, his face bisected by an enormous drunken grin and his mild blue incongruous eyes looking shy and uneasy. I'd had more than my share of the whisky El Grande had brought along from Ciudad Grande too, and it occurred to me all at once that this was the place and this the time to give Duarte back what he had given Andy Dineen. My head whirled and danced with the thought and with El Grande's whisky. Why not? My promise to Robles had been nullified at the airport. Besides, if something happened to Duarte now, while he was drunk and the whole town was drunk, who would ever know how it had happened or why?

“Hey, gringo!”

It was Duarte, calling me. I watched him push through the crowd, weaving, a little unsteady on his feet. He looked about nine feet high and five feet across at the shoulders, but his eyes were shy.

“I want to talk to you,” he said. He wore a gunbelt which one of the three brothers had given to him. The leather of the holster slapped against his thigh as he walked. The big six-shooter in it was pearl-handled.

Duarte took my arm in his monkey wrench of a hand and we went down the length of the street through the crowd to the
pirotecnico's
wooden stand. We watched the mayor's fat, sweating brother set off his rockets. They went wooshing overhead in smooth, curving, sputtering arcs, and then they exploded.

“Listen,” Duarte shouted over the roar of the crowd. “Listen, gringo!”

“I can hear you,” I shouted back at him.

He blinked his incongruously mild blue eyes. He was quite drunk. He told me, “All I want to say is, no hard feelings. No hard feelings. Well?”

Then over the hissing woosh of the rockets, Hipolito Robles's words came back to me: the men who surround a dictator on his rise to power; the failures and perverts and neurotics and psychotics; the little boys in grown-up bodies who had never bothered to mature morally and never would; the Hermann Goerings. Drunk or not, Pablo Duarte was like that. He had the moral sense of a capybara. Beating Andy Dineen to death on the docks in New York meant nothing to him. Absolutely nothing. Sinking Rafael Caballero with an anchor chain meant nothing. Torturing a girl in the old hospital on the hill above Ciudad Grande? A necessary part of the game you played. He meant it. He was drunk, but he meant it. It had never been so clear before and it will never be so clear for me again. Maybe I was a little drunk too, but I understood. It explained the shifts and deviations and protean party-line loyalties in a totalitarian state. It was a game without rules. The more you played at it, the higher you went. You could be a Hermann Goering or a Pablo Duarte—if you forgot to grow up.