Puzzle for Pilgrims (18 page)

“Get away,” he said. “All of you, perverting, twisting, hindering… All of you, get away from me.”

He turned through the dancers.

“Martin…” called Iris.

Marietta stood still. Her hand moved to the red spot on her cheek.

“Martin…” called Iris. “Martin, come back.”

But there was nothing but the dancers, body against body, dusky cheek against dusky cheek, moving slowly, almost ritualistically around us.

Borrachitá, me voy hasta la capital …

Jake glared through the eyeholes of the red hood at the spot where Martin had disappeared. His arm had slid around Marietta’s waist. Her eyes were still flat as green glass, and I could see the red stain on her cheek.

Jake said, “The bastard. When I get to the hotel, I’ll—”

“No,” said Marietta.

He pulled her around so that her face was close against the bizarre red hood.

“Don’t let it get you down, beautiful.”

“No. No, I won’t. I—”

“There’s dancing at Mocambo. Even wilder than here, they say. How’s about it?”

Iris and I might have been just any two of the dancing Mexicans for all the attention they paid us. Marietta was watching Jake fixedly now as if she could see through the scarlet hood, see the mouth, near to hers, the square line of his jaw.

Jake pulled her closer. “How’s about it, baby?”

Dimly I realized that for Marietta this was a moment of immense importance. There was revulsion in her eyes, but a strange fascination too. Her bondage to Martin had reached its climax. Now it was either one thing or the other, not both.

Suddenly she yielded to the pressure of Jake’s arm and to the strength of will that emanated from him. She leaned against him passively.

“Yes, Jake, let’s go.”

“Attagirl.” He laughed the laugh of a man who had always known he would get what he wanted to get. “What’s a town for, I always say, if you don’t paint it red?”

They turned their backs on us. Jake pushed a path for them through the dancers.

Iris and I were left alone. We seemed increasingly to be left alone together. The drama swept around us and we had no part in it. We had dwindled almost to spectators.

Behind us on the corner the lights of a cantina gleamed brightly. I thanked heaven that there was always a cantina.

I took Iris’s arm. “Let’s have a drink.”

She let me guide her through the dancers and through the grimy swing doors into the bar. It was the lowest kind of dump. It was crammed to overflowing, but most of the merrymakers seemed to prefer standing. I found a small, rickety table vacant in a corner. A waiter came. I ordered Cubas. The carnival was here as much as it was on the street. Beyond us a marimba was playing. People were singing. But I hardly noticed any of it. I was saturated with carnival.

Iris lit a cigarette, stooping over the wax match. Her hair fell forward, dark against the white skin. I had expected the scene in the street to have left her an emotional wreck. But when she looked up, her face was calm. It reminded me of the sort of serenity that comes to a patient in the hospital when she has been told that there is no more to hope, that the disease is beyond cure.

She said, “He doesn’t love me any more, Peter.”

I didn’t speak.

“He thought he needed me. He thought I could help bring back the spark after Sally. But that was before Marietta, before all this happened. Now…” She shrugged. “Now I’m just part of all the sordidness, part of the thing that’s holding him back.”

“From the top of the hill?”

“From the top of the hill.” She smiled a sudden, unexpected smile. “It’s funny. I know everything’s over. I ought to feel it everywhere, in my arms, my legs, my bones. I don’t feel anything, just a—gap.”

A few weeks ago I would have given my right hand to hear that. Now it had come, here in this dirty little cantina, and to me it was just words, brushing the surface of my mind while I thought of Marietta and Jake pushing away from us through the crowd, going to Mocambo to dance.

I said, “It’ll come later—the feeling.”

She shivered. “Yes.”

The marimba had stopped playing. Three of the men were carrying it out of the bar. The fourth was at our table with his huge straw hat held out toward me. I tossed twenty centavos into the hat. He went away.

Iris said, “I don’t think he ever loved me. There’s too much Martin Haven in him for him to love anyone else.”

“He writes books.”

“Yes. He writes books.” She laughed. “I’ll go on loving him for a long time. Funny, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said.

“You see, this made it all show. Anything would have been more bearable for Martin than this. It’s not the money. Money really isn’t anything to Martin. It’s Jake. Being ruled by Jake, patronized by Jake, smiled at, teased like a chimpmunk teased by a cat. It’s being possessed, almost physically, by a man. That’s what’s killing him. And because Martin doesn’t think, he only feels, I’m part of all that to him. Part of it—and I’ll never be anything else. That’s why he’s turned against me.”

“And Marietta.”

“Marietta?” Her face sharpened with anger and disgust. “Why shouldn’t he turn against Marietta? Why should anyone bother about her? Martin’s right. She’s just a—”

“Don’t say it.”

That strange, passionless closeness which I had felt when we were together in my apartment in Mexico City had come again. Iris and I. I wondered if very old people who had been married many years felt like this. Impersonal, but fond.

I said, “Anything’s better for Martin than this?”

“Anything. Anything.”

“And you don’t think Martin killed Sally?”

“No, Peter.”

“And you didn’t kill her yourself?”

“Do I have to say that again.”

“Then why did you let this go on? Why didn’t you go to the police? Martin didn’t do it. You didn’t do it. What did you have to lose?”

She watched me steadily. “I didn’t dare.”

“Because you were afraid Martin might have done it after all?”

“Because I was afraid they would think so.”

“And why do you suppose Martin didn’t go to the police if he’s innocent and if life is so intolerable to him this way?”

A faint flush showed in her cheeks. “There is this thing he did in the past. Jake has evidence of that. Martin knew that even if he wasn’t accused of the murder, they’d put him in jail.” She looked at her drink. “Peter, why didn’t you go? To the police? You were never involved at all. Even Jake never pretended you could have done it.” She shrugged. “That’s a foolish question of course. It was for Marietta.”

“And you,” I said.

“Me?” There was genuine surprise in her voice, surprise and a kind of pleasure as if I had complimented her. “You mean you could still worry about me—after the way I’ve behaved?”

“I’m not Emily Post.”

Very quietly she said, “In the street just now Martin accused Marietta of killing Sally.”

“That was only talk.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“And you, Peter? Do you think Marietta might have done it? Do you?” Marietta was so near then that I could almost see her sitting at the table between us. And for the first time her life seemed to fall into some kind of pattern. She was still an enigma, but I saw there was a sort of key. Marietta was passive. Marietta had no will. Martin had broken her will when they were children, and from then on she was in a void, belonging to Martin, losing Martin, drifting to Jake like a will-less steel filing to a magnet, always drifting, reacting to other people’s desires, having no aggression in her own. And I knew then, with a conviction almost strong enough to be true, that Marietta could not have killed Sally. She couldn’t have thought of a thing and clung to it and carried it through. Marietta couldn’t have gone to that house, struggled body against body with Sally, forcing her will on the other woman, pressing her back onto the rotten balustrade.

I said with a suddenness that seemed to rasp the individual silence of our table, “No, Marietta didn’t kill Sally.”

Iris said, “So you do think it was Martin—or me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Peter, you do know. There isn’t anyone else.”

Strange as it sounds, until then I had never faced the situation that squarely. Because I knew one of them was a murderer, I had shied away from the kind of speculation that might pin the crime on one of them in particular. Marietta? Iris? Now with this new conviction that it couldn’t have been Marietta, the censor was lifted. I was released into thinking, Iris’s sentence stayed in my mind like a challenge. And, as I considered it, a thought came, dazzling as the cascade of silver fire from the cathedral wall. Once it had come, it seemed unbelievable that it had not occurred to me before. Excitement flooded through me.

I said, “There is someone else.”

“Not…?” Iris’s eyes darkened with anxiety. “Peter, you don’t mean that you…?”

“No. Not me.”

“Then—who?”

“Jake,” I said.

“Jake.”

“Sally hired him. She took him into her confidence. She told him all her stupid neurotic fears that one of you wanted to murder her. She gave him the evidence she had against Martin and Marietta. He knew about the will. He knew Martin inherited everything if she died; he knew Martin and Marietta would be saved from jail if she died; he knew you would get Martin if she died.”

“So he killed her.” Iris leaned across the table, groping to complete the pattern. “Because we all had such terrific motives, he knew we’d be sure it would have to be one of us. He suppressed all the evidence. Maybe he even planted it. He squared the police. And he had us in the palm of his hand. He knew we’d pay for the murder he committed. He knew we’d go on until all Sally’s money… Peter.”

“It could be.”

“It is, it is.”

She went on excitedly. I hardly listened, because I was feeling now and not thinking. There was the relief that neither Marietta nor Iris nor Martin need be a murderer any more. I was feeling Jake too, with his crude cleverness. There was a sort of outrageous genius in the idea of killing a woman whom a lot of people wanted to kill and then blackmailing them for his own crime. Jake was exactly the type to have that genius.

If it happened that way, there was a sort of justice, too, of Sally hiring a detective as a final, malicious twist to make us suffer, Sally being destroyed by the monster she had created.

“Everything’s different now.” Iris was radiant with a new optimism. “We can call his bluff. All this can be over. We can go back.”

Already she was thinking futilely that Martin would love her again.

I said, “We have no proof.”

“We don’t need proof. He bluffed us. Why can’t we bluff him?” She got up. “Come on, Peter. Let’s find Martin. Quick. Let’s tell him.”

“No,” I said.

Her face fell. “Why not?”

“Because we don’t have proof. Because we’ve got to go slowly. Because Martin hates his guts so much, we couldn’t trust him.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, you’re right. We shouldn’t tell Martin.”

“Or Marietta.”

She looked at me curiously. “You mean Marietta might—be on Jake’s side?”

Somewhere down at Mocambo, down near the night-pounding roar of the Gulf, Marietta was dancing with Jake, pressed close against him, his hand hot against her back, his mouth near her dark, soft mouth.

“Yes,” I said. “I think Marietta might be on Jake’s side.”

And saying that hurt as much as if I had dug a toothpick under my nail.

We walked back to the hotel up the Malecon. The broad water-front avenue was strung with lights. Their little reflections glowed in the dark harbor water. But all the curio stalls were closed. Hardly a person was on the street. Everyone had been drawn to the Zocalo, the Cinco de Mayo, the nerve centers of the carnival. An Argentine freighter was in dock. Its silhouette loomed black as charcoal, illuminated only by lonely riding lights. A wind was blowing in from the north. It brought flying grains of sand from the great dunes beyond the town. It skittered the fiesta flotsam, the twisted streamers, the soiled confetti -the relics of that morning’s triumphant parade of the Queen of the Carnival.

After the noise, the quietness was a balm. It seemed to smooth away my uncertainty. I was sure now that I was right about Jake. In the whole group, Sally and Jake had been the only positive characters. Martin, Marietta, even Iris, were all, in a way, destined to be victims rather than protagonists. The pattern made sense with Jake, the predatory male animal, killing Sally, the predatory female animal, and with Martin, Marietta, and Iris suffering for it.

Looking back, a fatal meeting between Sally and Jake seemed inevitable. Jake with his thick, cruel wrists and his sadistic virility. Sally, small, female, bright-eyed at the bullfight, in love with death.

They fascinate me, the bullfights… blood and the ballet… dressed up for death…

I could see Sally, struggling in Jake’s big arms, being relentlessly carried to the balcony. Perhaps she had enjoyed it. Perhaps, without knowing it, that was what she had been waiting to find at the end of her pilgrimage, a man crude as a bull to kill her.

We reached the hotel. The light showed in the transom of Martin’s room. Iris veered to the door.

“No,” I said.

She looked at me pleadingly. “I only wanted to know if he’s all right.”

“No. Better not tonight.”

She obeyed me passively. I went with her to her room. She dropped down on the edge of the bed. Beneath the dark hair, her face and the skin of her throat were white. She looked like a gardenia that had been pelted by a rainstorm—drooping.

I said, “I’ll handle Jake.”

She looked up. “Alone, Peter?”

“He’s got nothing on me. I’m on his level. It’s best that way.”

“You—you think we’re right?”

“I’m sure we are.”

“What’ll you do—say?”

“Something. I’ll think of something. I’m not going to rush. Maybe later tonight—or tomorrow.”

“Peter?”

“Yes.”

“There’s still the evidence of the thing Martin and Marietta did. If you expose Jake, Martin and Marietta will still go to prison.”

“We don’t have to expose him. The police are satisfied. He’s seen to that. We’ve just got to get rid of him.”