Jeopardy Is My Job. Marlowe Stephen

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СКАЧАТЬ word cueva meant, but then it came to me. In Spanish cueva is cave.

      “Seguro?” Paco asked doubtfully.

      “Claro, mi hermano. You have no need to worry.” To me Ruy Fuentes said in English, “She is a very high-strung girl, my novia. You have upset her. I think it would be better if you flew home to America. Here you have no authority.”

      “I’ve been paid to do a job.”

      “And I have Tenley’s feelings to consider. I have warned you, señor.”

      He went out after Tenley, leaving his big gun behind. His big gun told me, “If you upset Señorita Hartshorn, you upset my brother as well. Three more days he must stick the bulls, señor. He must be calm, and of a single purpose. Go back where you came from, or go back to Torremolinos. That is where Señor Hartshorn lives, and where you should look for him. My brother must remain calm. I would not wish him to have an accident.”

      It was reasonable enough up to that point, but when I didn’t answer Paco said, “That is this time. This time it is words. But the next time I will not use words.”

      I watched him leave, all two-hundred and fifty pounds of him. A gorgeous dish who was contemptuous of her parents and called it pity, a couple of English-speaking bullfighters, a threat as thinly veiled as a belly-dancer’s navel, I thought, mulling it all over, and not a clue as to the whereabouts of Robbie Hartshorn. Unless the cave that had Paco all hot and bothered was a clue.

      I decided to find the cave.

      chapter three

      The only kind of secrets you can keep in a small Spanish town are the kind you take to the grave.

      By the time it got dark, which was an hour after I left the iron bull ring, and by dint of visiting two bodegas and drinking white wine and eating grilled sardines fresh from the sea and heaps of clams no bigger than my thumbnail, I knew most of what there was to know about the Fuentes brothers and their cave. Most, not all. That is the trouble with a town that seems to hold no secrets. It is the one it does hold, or has no knowledge about, that can get you killed.

      In the first bodega, an old monosabio—or wise monkey—who had dreams of wearing a suit of lights in Madrid and wound up raking the sand in the provincial bull rings and opening the gate and scurrying behind the barrier when the bull came thundering out, told me, “The cave of Fuentes? But of course, señor. All the world in Fuengirola knows the cave of Fuentes. One walks up the caretera three kilometers in the direction of Torremolinos. Then one takes the dirt track into the hills perhaps a kilometer more, and there on the left where a cactus as big as a house grows, one sees a burro-trail. Half a kilometer along the burro-trail, and one reaches the cave of Fuentes.”

      “The brothers own it?” I said. “What do they do there?”

      “They live there, señor.”

      “Live there?”

      “Claro. It is as I have said.”

      In the second bodega, the barman told me, “Si, señor. It is as you have heard. The brothers Fuentes live in a cave not four kilometers from Fuengirola.”

      “I thought only gypsies—”

      “Gitanos? Sí, but others as well. There is a feeling of the heart here in my land that it is the things of civilization which have brought hardship and poverty to Spain. There was a time, señor, when the rest of Europe did not say Africa begins at the Pyrenees, but they say it now. Many feel this is because we try to copy the ways of Francia and Inglaterra. But living in a cave—oh, yes, that is very Spanish.”

      The barman drew another wine from the cask for me. “The father of the Fuentes brothers, who was of an old noble family and a poet as well, but as poor as any gypsy—he died three years ago, señor—had a dream. We would return to caves, he said, we would leave the foolishness of big cars and telephones and ugly structures of steel and glass behind us, and we would think pure thoughts and our land would return to its time of greatness, when the conquistadores explored your land. Don Antonio, for that was his name, wished to gather a cave village of other poets and artists and men who make music, and live with them the simple life.

      “But fate struck him down early, a thing of the lungs, señor, and there was just the one cave. Don Antonio raised his sons there, and as his wife was dead he took a gypsy woman to live with him. Her name is Maruja, and it is a joke for all the world to call her Doña Maruja, especially as—now that Don Antonio is dead—his ghost must haunt that cave. For electric lights have been strung, it has been quarried out to make many rooms, there are carpets from Morocco on the floor and running water and a telephone and a phonograph that blares music into the night, frightening the burros on the mountain, and furniture has been brought in to make the caves of Fuentes a very palace. . . . More wine, señor?”

      “And one for you as well.”

      “Don Antonio always believed that if we would fight the ways of all that Francia to the north and of Inglaterra on its island in the sea, we must first understand them. So he took upon himself the education of his boys, and as he was a great scholar himself, he taught them French and English also. But still, they were strange wild boys, as in their youth they rarely saw anyone but Don Antonio and the gypsy woman Maruja. And all the world says when they decided on the fiesta brava as a way of life, that was what killed Don Antonio, not the thing of the lungs. But Maruja was pleased, as the fiesta brava meant money. She is still young, Maruja; she was only fifteen when Don Antonio brought her to the cave ten, perhaps eleven years ago. She cried when Ruy Fuentes was trampled by a bull the same year his father died, some say more for the son than the father. Since then she has been seen no more in Fuengirola, though because she sings in the night one still knows she lives in the cave of Fuentes. And, amigo, all the world laughs behind the back of an American woman, the tall dark one who truly has afición, for though she loves Ruy Fuentes, it is clear that if the gitana Maruja so much as crooks her little finger, Ruy will come running—and not as a son to his foster-mother. But then, the gypsies have strange powers. . . . Another vino blanco, señor?”

      How much of what he had said was truth and how much could be explained by the fact that the Spanish are the most voluble people in the world, I didn’t know. When he began to talk of a flamenco dancer who would perform at the bodega later, I asked for my check and paid it after he toted it up in chalk on the surface of the bar.

      As I was leaving, Stu Huntington and the blind sculptor Fernando entered the bodega. After the fun and games between their wives last night, I was surprised to see them together. But though the blind man’s face was impassive and his hand rested on Huntington’s forearm out of necessity, his companion’s eyes were stony, his face was red to the hairline of his gray crewcut and his jowls were quivering with anger. They passed me, and there was no flicker of recognition in Huntington’s eyes. I lingered in the batwing doorway. They sat at a table and leaned across it and argued in low tones. The tables on either side were occupied. Eavesdropping is as much a part of a detective’s work as planting his elbows on a bar and listening to a barman who talks a blue streak, but there was no way I could do it here without being obvious. I shrugged and went out.

      After I turned left at a prickly-pear cactus that was as big as a house, the burro-trail climbed steeply. On my right the foothills of the Sierra Tecada Mountains rose black against the moonlight. I smelled the smoke of cooking-fires and on the step-like tiers of the hillside saw the red fire-glow at the entrances to gypsy caves. On my left the hill dropped away sharply; far off I could see the white cluster of buildings that was Fuengirola in the moonlight, and the dappled reflection of the moon СКАЧАТЬ