Puzzle for Pilgrims (19 page)

She got up and came to me. She put her hands on my arms.

“Peter, I’m frightened.”

“For Martin?”

“For you.”

“For me?”

“Jake’s dangerous. If he’s really killed Sally, he’s dangerous.”

I grinned. “I’m no woolly lamb myself.”

“Be careful, darling.”

“I’ll be careful.” I kissed her. She clung to me, tense and dry. I said, “Don’t worry. Maybe after tonight, after all this is over, Martin—”

“Don’t be nice, Peter. You treat me like an idiot child.”

I put my hand under her chin, tilted her face up. “Isn’t that what you are, baby? An idiot child?”

She smiled then, quickly, vividly. “Yes, darling. That’s what I am.”

She kissed me again. Her lips were warm. “What would I do without you?”

“Stick to the script,” I said.

I drew away from her, patting her arm.

“Goodnight, Iris.”

“Goodnight.”

I started for the door.

“Peter

“Yes.”

“If anything happens tonight, tell me.”

“All right.”

“However late. I won’t be asleep.”

“Okay.”

“Goodnight, Peter.”

“Goodnight, Iris.”

Dim light fanned in through the window of my room. The strengthening north wind rattled the shade. I could hear music from the Zocalo below. The carnival was still swirling on. I didn’t bother to turn on the light. I lay down on the bed and lit a cigarette. I had a job to do.

After weeks in which I had been forced, against my will, to play the role of onlooker, it was pleasant to be released into action again. But it was a different assignment. I was morally sure now that Jake had killed Sally. But I had absolutely no proof. Jake would know I had no proof. It would be my bluff against his.

I tried to work out a plan, but my thoughts strayed. The music drifting up from the square made me brood about Marietta. She was still with Jake. I could see the great, open-walled pavilion at Mocambo on the sea. The orchestra would be playing; the dancers would be pressed even closer than in the Cinco de Mayo. I could see Marietta clinging to Jake, crushed against the scarlet domino in the rotating throng, Marietta drifting on the tide of her own strange destiny, eschewed by Martin, wanted by Jake. And wanting him?

Marietta’s image haunted me. I couldn’t concentrate on what had to be done. I stubbed the cigarette. Better leave it till tomorrow. It was wiser anyway to wait, to exploit the advantage of the morning. I had no idea of the time, but I was tired. I undressed, put on pajamas, and lay in the bed, listening to the music against my will, trying to remember what life had been like before I met Marietta.

It was later, much later, when she came. I was still awake. The door opened and closed and I could see her, slim and straight, in the faint light from the window. I knew who it was before she reached the bed, and my heart seemed to turn over. She almost ran to me.

“Peter.”

She slid onto the bed. She put her arms around me. She was cold as ice and shivering.

“Hold me, Peter. Hold me.”

“Marietta.”

“Hold me.”

I propped myself against the pillows. I drew her close. Her whole body was racked with shakes like an ague. She was still in the Tehuantepec costume, but the headdress was gone. I could see her hair, like a shining shadow, against the white of the pillow slip. Her lips darted meaninglessly up and down my face, kissing my cheek, my ear, my eye. She was like a child, infested with night terrors, running blindly to the first human contact.

“Hold me, Peter. Don’t talk. Hold me.”

I stroked her hair. I kissed her cold forehead. I rocked her back and forth as if she were, in fact, a child. Gradually I could feel some of the violence subsiding.

I said, “What is it, Marietta? Tell me.”

Her teeth were chattering.

“What is it, Marietta?”

In the semidarkness, I could only see the shape of her, the outline of her shoulder, the white curve of her cheek, and a faint gleam that was her eyes. All in black and white, like a blurred spirit photograph.

Still holding her, I reached to the bedside table, lit a cigarette, and put it between her lips.

“Here.”

Her hand came up. It took the cigarette and brought it downward in a little arc of flame. The spasm of shaking was over, but her body was still quivering.

“Jake,” she said.

“Jake?”

“I’ve been with Jake. In Jake’s room… Jake.”

She said the name three times as if it were some dreadful rune. She dropped down so that her head was lying in my lap. She was completely quiet. The room was so quiet that the music from the square seemed to blare like a radio turned up. I couldn’t see her face, I couldn’t hear her, but I knew she was crying. There was something unendurable about the passive weight of her and the knowledge of that silent, desolate weeping.

Marietta had always been impervious. Marietta had walked through disaster, serene, cryptic, never demanding. Seeing her like this was wrong as thunder in January.

I said, “Nothing matters, Marietta. Remember that. Nothing really matters in the long run.”

She moved her head on my lap so that she was looking at me. The tears had made her eyes luminous. In a quick, breathless voice, she said, “I’ve got it. He doesn’t know. After he said that, I knew they were there with him somewhere. I found them in a brief case when he was in the bathroom. I threw it into the harbor. I destroyed the ticket. He doesn’t know.”

I said, “Threw what in the harbor, Marietta? Destroyed what ticket?”

“The bracelet. The pawn ticket.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The things—the proof Sally had against Martin.” She repeated,” I took them. He doesn’t know.”

I said, “I never knew about that, Marietta.”

She brought the cigarette to her lips. As she drew on it, the glow illuminated her face. It looked naked, violated, like a face in Poland during the German occupation.

“Three years ago, Peter. Before Martin married Sally, we had no money left. The book wasn’t finished. He had to finish the book. The woman came. She was a tourist. She was horrible, grabbing, greedy, rich. She wanted Martin. There was the emerald bracelet. Martin stole it. They never knew. They thought it was the guide. But they didn’t do anything to the guide. There wasn’t any evidence.”

I put my hand down. I laid it on the smooth skin of her shoulder above the deep swooped neck of the embroidered blouse.

“Go on.”

“He brought it to me. I knew he’d stolen it. He told me. We had to have money to live, to keep us from being sent to the British Embassy for deportation. He didn’t know what to do with it. Martin never knows what to do. I didn’t know either. But I took it to Mexico City. I found a place. I pawned it. The money was enough.”

The fall and rise of her shoulder under my hand was gentler.

“Sally was suspicious. Sally was always suspicious. After the marriage, she searched around in Martin’s things. She found the pawn ticket. She went to Mexico City. She redeemed the bracelet. She knew then. She kept it. Somehow she kept the ticket too, tucked away. Scheming, waiting, so she could have them as an ace against Martin if she needed them. Then, after Martin and Iris went away together, she threatened him with the bracelet. She threatened me too. She hired Jake. She gave the bracelet and ticket to Jake because she was afraid we would try to get them back. Jake had the bracelet. But now they’re gone. I took them. I threw the bracelet in the harbor.”

She stopped speaking, bringing the silence back. Now that the tawdry story was out at last, it seemed almost insignificant to me. The only aspects that still had life were Sally’s devious planned spite—and Marietta. Marietta, who always seemed so remote from action, had been the one who had stepped in and turned the spoils of Martin’s feckless theft into bread and butter. And here in Veracruz, while the rest of us had been sunk in apathy Marietta had set herself a goal. She had determined to retrieve the evidence against Martin, to outwit Jake. She had outwitted him.

A curious elation began. I said, “So all this time you’ve been playing Jake’s game, giving him the come-on, just for a chance to get the evidence away. Poor kid, you’ve put up with him, let him maul you, been through all that—just for Martin.”

“No.” The word was bleak as a cry in the night. “No.”

She pushed herself up into a sitting position. She had moved away from me. The physical contact was gone. I said quietly, “Then you did want him. Jake.”

Her voice was very soft. “From the first moment he looked at me in the bar. From the first moment his knee was against mine and his hand was moving over my shoulder, hot, feeling it through the dress. Hot.”

I felt lost, defeated. I said, “And tonight?”

She was shivering again. She sat huddled on the bed with her legs tucked under her, in desolate loneliness, struggling with the horror, whatever it was, that was in her.

“It’ll never be different,” she said.

“Things get to be different.”

“It’ll never be different. I’ll always be the same. In the old days, it was better, you could put the blame on something else, you could be possessed of a devil, damned.” She paused. “I’m damned,” she said.

“Beautiful and damned? That was the twenties, Marietta. You can’t be beautiful and damned today—not with atomic bombs and Mrs. Truman.”

I could feel her slipping away from me. She hardly knew I was there any more. This moment was much bigger than I. What had happened in Jake’s shoddy hotel room had brought her against a wall. There was only looking back now. She wasn’t talking to me, she was talking herself back. I waited for the enigma to go, almost afraid.

“It’s Martin,” she said. “I’m damned because of Martin.”

She was looking down at some point in the darkness of the bedspread, looking fixedly, as if, somehow, the key to her life was there, embroidered on it, if only she could find it.

“Ever since I can remember, I loved Martin. It wasn’t just love. When I was a little girl, Martin and living seemed the same. Martin was the sunshine, the summer, warm winter afternoons in front of the fire cooking chestnuts. Martin was me. Just being me was Martin.”

She dropped back against the pillows and looked up at the shadowy white of the ceiling. Her face gleamed pale.

“It was the same when I grew up. Oh, it was more bitter then, because I knew I could never hold him. I lost him first to boys at school, then later to girls. There was always someone else he was dazzling. But then, he dazzled me too. It was the same. There were lots of boys in love with me. Nice boys, good family, boys my mother would have liked me to marry, the sort of boys who invite you to the Hunt Ball and kiss you in the conservatory. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t let them touch me. When they touched me, it was like a desecration—because my skin, my blood, everything, wanted Martin.”

I let my hand move to her soft, cold cheek.

“It’s like being a mother,” she whispered. “A dreadful kind of mother, with Martin my son, wanting him, not letting him get away, and he not really wanting to get away from me.”

I said, “You don’t have to tell me, Marietta. I know.”

“Know? How can you know?”

“I know you, don’t I? I’ve been with you. Do you think I’m blind?”

Her hand came up to mine, gripping it. “Let me tell. I’ve never talked about it. Never. Let me tell you.”

“Okay, Marietta.”

“It was the same, later, when we moved to London, Martin and I. Worse. I grew so I was afraid of being alone in a room with a man, afraid that he might touch me and I would scream.” She shivered. “I knew it was ugly then. I knew that the thing which had seemed so shining and wonderful was ugly. And I knew that Martin would never help. He needed me loving him. It was something steady, going on and on behind the glamour. Someone he didn’t have to keep up a front with, be physical, be the golden lover. He didn’t care that it was destroying me. Martin doesn’t care.”

She stopped speaking. Music still trailed up from the square. It seemed bittersweet, false.

I said, “And when did the next thing come?”

“What next thing?”

“The wrists. The wrists with the red hairs on them?”

“You
do
know!” she breathed. “Don’t you?”

“Sort of.”

“It was in London. I’d been to a ball with Martin. He’d left me, gone off with some woman. A man wanted to take me home, but I slipped away. I was going home alone. It was very late. There was an all-night coffee stand. I stopped for some coffee. A man was having coffee too, just one man. He was a lorry-driver. His lorry was parked by the curb. I saw his hands first, curved around the cheap white china cup, big hands, coarse, square, oil stained, with broken fingernails. His shirt sleeves were rolled up. His arms were thick and hard like tree roots. His shirt was dirty around the neck. I could see the band of dirt. The shirt was open. I could see the bare skin, little golden hairs. And suddenly something happened to me. He looked at me and he knew. Right away, although I was in an evening dress and a wrap, he knew. He paid for his coffee. He didn’t say anything to me. He went to his lorry and he waited for me to follow him. I followed him. I climbed up onto the seat next to him.”

The grave English voice moved quietly on.

“He drove out of London into the country. He never spoke. He never looked at me. He kept his eyes all the time on the road. The seat was narrow. His thigh was pressed against mine. His arm was against mine. His skin through the shirt seemed warmer than any skin I had ever felt. I could smell sweat.”

She waited.

“It was a desecration, of course, but it was somehow a release too. Because there was nothing of Martin here. This wasn’t Martin any more than an animal was Martin. He stopped the lorry. There was darkness everywhere, no lights. He didn’t make love to me, no pretense, no romance. He twisted around, he grabbed me toward him. His arms were like steel, like some impersonal power. The hotness of him seemed almost to burn me. I felt a kind of wild excitement as if a spell was breaking. And then—-’ Her voice shriveled. “I couldn’t, Peter. I wanted to. It seemed as if it would be salvation. But I couldn’t. I started to shiver. I was in his arms, shaking, out of control. The thing for Martin was still there, you see, deep, deep inside, rebelling. There wasn’t any more. He must have hated me, despised me. But he didn’t say anything. He drove me back to the coffee stand. He left me. That was all.”