Jeopardy Is My Job. Marlowe Stephen

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СКАЧАТЬ liked the menace sprouting like a weed in his voice.

      “I wouldn’t fight with Señor Hartshorn,” Ruy Fuentes told me. “All the time he is muy borracho—very drunk. We argued, yes. He left still angry. Tenley is a woman. No man, not even her father or perhaps least of all her father, can guide her steps. We are in love.”

      “That’s all that happened? An argument?”

      “Yes, I have told you. And then he left.”

      “Where’s Tenley Hartshorn now?”

      As if in answer to my question, a girl’s voice called, “Ruy! Oh Ruy, you were magnificent!”

      I didn’t watch her approach, but looked at Ruy Fuentes’ face instead. It was as if the soft, sensitive, girlish mouth had taken over from the proud masculine eyes, nose and jaw. Ruy Fuentes looked suddenly shy. He held his hat in front of him and fingered the broad brim nervously. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and smiled like a sub-deb greeting her first date. Then he walked past me. As far as it mattered to him, I was no longer there.

      And then I saw why. A girl, and from the look on Ruy Fuentes’ face she had to be Tenley Hartshorn, was crouching at the end of one of the grandstand benches on a level with my shoulders. She reached her hands out, but he caught her above the hips with his own hands and gently lowered her to the sand. She smiled at him as if he had performed an act of gallantry meriting knighthood. He smiled at her as if his world was complete for the first time today.

      I didn’t blame him. Even the aficionados still jabbering away at the toreros stopped to stare. She was a tall and slender sun-tanned brunette in a simple summery dress the green color of the Mediterranean under a bright sunlit sky—which is like saying Dominguén kills cattle for a living. She moved lithely and unself-consciously, like a cat. Her eyes were the same green as her dress and their whites were very white against the tan of her face. The rest of her features were nice enough, but nothing to make an aficionado forget what had brought him to the iron bull ring in Fuengirola. Still, there was something intangible about her that really got you. She was beautiful the way a painting you don’t quite understand can be beautiful. Maybe it was those eyes. Maybe it was the way her high and wide-spaced cheekbones made those big green eyes seem even bigger, or the way they drew her tanned skin taut, or the way they shadowed her cheeks and accentuated the ripe red surprise of her lips. Or maybe I was staring too much, because Tenley Hartshorn’s radiant smile changed to a wry one, and the wry smile was one she had used before and for the same reason, a wry acceptance of the fact that men will be men, and Ruy Fuentes cleared his throat and said, “Tenley, this is Mr. Drum. He says he is looking for your father.”

      “What for?” Tenley Hartshorn said, not smiling.

      “He’s been missing two weeks. The Governor was worried.”

      “He’ll come home when he runs out of money. He always does, after one of his benders.”

      “You think he’s on a bender?”

      “If you knew my father,” Tenley Hartshorn said sullenly, “you wouldn’t have to ask that question. He’s gone off on them often enough when my mother can’t keep up with his drinking. Not that she doesn’t try,” Tenley added spitefully.

      “Admire them both, do you?” I said.

      “Is that supposed to be funny?”

      “If you think it’s funny. The Hartshorn women, mother and daughter, throw me. You mother wouldn’t cooperate at first because she didn’t want to drag you into this. You’re convinced your old man’s on a harmless bender even though the Governor was worried enough to send a detective three thousand miles to find him.”

      “I’ll start worrying when I think there’s something to worry about.”

      “Your grandfather does.”

      “He hasn’t spent his life with them, and neither have you. But I have. Starting before breakfast they drink themselves into a stupor all day—until it’s time to brush their teeth with Fundador before going to bed.” I must have given her a funny look, because she went right on, “And if you think I have no right telling this to a stranger, it’s no secret. It’s something the whole Costa del Sol knows—when the whole Costa del Sol isn’t doing likewise. Have you been here long enough, Mr. Drum, to see the pathetic little feral-eyed and dirty-faced children slinking around all the patios on all the villas on the hills over Torremolinos? They can’t speak English and the Spanish they learn from the servants is gutter Spanish, and maybe if they’re lucky they can read and write by the time they’re nine or ten. Their parents are too drunk to care about them, you see. When you’re an alcoholic expatriate in Spain, mañana isn’t just a word, it’s a way of life. I was one of those kids until the Governor sent me off to school in Switzerland. If he hadn’t, the monthly checks would have stopped coming, so Andrea and Robbie gave him the green light. Come to think of it, they were probably glad to be rid of me for a few years.”

      That was quite a speech. It left her with a flush under the tan of her cheeks, and her green eyes looked two shades darker.

      “Why’d you bother coming back from Switzerland?” I asked.

      She looked at Ruy Fuentes, and the way she looked at him was answer enough, but she told me, “Because I feel sorry for them. I guess pity’s the worst emotion you can feel for someone you love, but that’s the way I feel.” Her almost pulverizing beauty and her indictment of the expatriate set made me forget she was just a kid, but when she spoke of her own feelings with a teen-ager’s grave and somehow weary self-assurance, I remembered she was only nineteen. I forgot it again when she displayed a bear-trap brain by asking, “Andrea didn’t want to drag me into what?”

      When I told her, she turned angrily to Ruy Fuentes. “You never said my father came to see you.”

      “It would only have upset you, Tenley.”

      “How Spanish can you get? I’m not in a cloister. I’m living the only life I’ll ever live. Let me decide what’s going to upset me and what isn’t, will you?”

      “I am Spanish,” Ruy Fuentes said gravely.

      She glared at him, and then the glare became a grin, and then the grin faded and the way she looked after that was very much in love. “Sure,” she said. “You are Spanish. Maybe that’s why I love you. Take care of me, Ruy. Take care of me always.”

      If the look that passed between them meant anything, that would be easy. Then Ruy Fuentes told her to wait outside.

      “Does that come under the heading of taking care of me?”

      Ruy Fuentes said that it did.

      “All right, but first I want to ask Mr. Drum something. Are you going to keep on looking for him? You’ll be wasting your time. He’ll come home. But the Governor’s got lots of money, hasn’t he, and you earned a free trip to Spain as well. I can see I’m really going to like you.”

      “Like mother like daughter,” I said, though of course she wouldn’t understand. Instead of trying to, she walked out under the grandstand and through the gate where the bull truck had been backed earlier.

      There was a silence which Paco broke by asking his brother in Spanish, “Does the little one know?”

      “No. How could she? СКАЧАТЬ