‘I’d met a man,’ she said, ‘who works in one of the airline offices. I thought, if I made charm to him, he might pull wires to airmail me home as perishable merchandise. I let him take me out to dinner. That’s when I was wised up. He told me you need more than your carfare to get back to the States. If you come with a tourist card, you’re okay. If you didn’t - and I didn’t - you need proof of citizenship. What proof do I have? My aunt, maybe, could dig out a birth certificate in Czech saying I was born in Opava. That’s not going to slay the U.S. immigration officials.’
The nervousness behind her voice had completely gone now. He suspected that she knew she was attractive to him and was confident for that reason. He never trusted people who thought they were clever enough to charm him.
She asked: ‘Does this bore you?’
‘It will soon if you don’t get to my wife.’
‘I’ll cut it as short as I can. Next scene: me yesterday in a bar yakking over a bunch of tequilas with the barman, an American kid who came here to study under the G.I. Bill of Rights. I was in a mood to let down my hair. I told him my sad story of being a Displaced Person from Brooklyn. He’s one of those big-hearted Harrys. He said he could fix me up.’ She waved at the elegant living-room. ‘This is it. This is how he fixed me up.’
‘Am I meant to understand yet?’
‘Soon. You see, this barman knows things. Barmen always do. He told me there was an American girl who’d just come to Mexico to do a temporary disappearing act. She was looking for someone to take over her identity for a while. He could get me her tourist card, he said. There’s no photograph on them. I could use it. And they would give me money for a plane ticket home. All I had to do was to hang around here for a week pretending to be her.’
‘And this girl is my wife?’
‘Mrs Mark Liddon. That’s the name. Of course, I jumped at the deal. I made a date to meet him later. He brought me some suitcases of clothes - your wife’s clothes, I suppose money and the tourist card. He told me to check in here at the Reforma as Mrs Mark Liddon. After a week I could fly home. That’s all I know, Mr Liddon.’
‘Show me the tourist card.’
Her eyes flickered with sudden anxiety. ‘Don’t take it away from me, Mr Liddon.’ Her hand with the chipped fingernail settled on his arm. ‘Of course, you want to find your wife. That’s all you care about. I understand that. But she gave me the card. It was her idea. Don’t take it away.’
‘Show me that card.’
‘Why should I?’ Her face flushed with anger and instinctively she clutched the red handbag closer to her. ‘I’ve told you everything I know. Isn’t that enough?’
Mark reached out and put a hand on the handbag. ‘I didn’t come all the way to Mexico to play guessing games. Your whole story may be a lie. At least I can see that card.’
She looked down rather helplessly at his hand and then, with a shrug, pushed it aside, opened the handbag, searched in it and brought out a card. He took it. It was the regulation tourist card for visitors to Mexico. It had been filled up and signed in Ellie’s bold, sloping writing. There was no doubt at all about that.
There was then, at least, this amount of confirmation to her story. And it could, of course, be true. With certain variations, it fitted the theory he had already evolved. The barman could be the blond American who had picked Ellie and her bags up at the Hotel Granada. The two of them could have cooked up this thing together as a precautionary measure.
It seemed odd that Ellie should have taken a barman so deeply into her confidence. But, in a way, that was like Ellie too. She knew no one here in Mexico City. Inevitably she would have drifted to a bar, and barmen are traditionally sympathetic and omniscient.
The girl was watching him bleakly. He twisted the card between his finger and thumb.
‘Is this barman a blond guy, smaller than me?’
‘Yes.’
‘He told you to check in here at the Reforma last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you never actually saw my wife?’
‘No, no.’
‘You don’t know where she is?’
‘No.’
‘Who was the man you were with at the bullfight?’
She blinked. ‘Mr Riley? He’s just a man I met at Tony’s Bar. He asked me to the bulls. It was something to do.’
‘What’s the barman’s name?’
‘George.’
‘Where does he work?’
She asked brightly, helpfully: ‘Do you want me to call him and ask him around?’
‘Yes. Don’t tell him anything about me. Just say you want to see him.’
She picked up the receiver and gave a number in Spanish. He stood at her side, watching her. There was much more to her than showed on the surface. He was almost sure of that now, although he wasn’t sure whether that made her merely interesting or dangerous. She talked to a voice at the other end of the wire. There appeared to be no veiled warnings in what she said. She put down the receiver.
‘He can get away in half an hour but he doesn’t have time to come here. He’ll meet us at the Salon de Lisboa.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A cantina. It’s near where he works.’ She looked at him pleadingly. ‘He’ll know where your wife is. He’ll take you to her. Please, Mr Liddon, let me have that card.’
He studied her thoughtfully. She was attractive, and if she was to be believed, she was in a jam. But thousands of other girls were attractive and in jams too and they weren’t impersonating his wife. She had stirred him, absurdly, because she had come or said she had come from Czechoslovakia and reminded him of his own family. He resented her for having moved him.
He said: ‘Maybe I’ll give it to you when I find my wife.’ He put the card in his pocket and took her arm. ‘Let’s go see George.’
SURELY this time he was on his way to his wife.
It was strange how little what had actually happened in New York seemed to matter now. The chase had carried him so far from that apartment that the chase itself was absorbing all his emotional reserves.
The taxi had passed out of the tourist section of the city into a long, tired street of little shops and shabby barred houses. As always, it seemed, in Mexico, a Ferris wheel in some corner lot carnival loomed against the evening clouds. What was it in Mexicans that made them want to swing up in the sky on little seats in a child’s toy? Was it the same passion for the Big Moment that kept them buying lottery tickets and yelling at the bullfights?
Sidewalk stalls of a market had narrowed the street to the proportions of an alley. The taxi had reluctantly slowed its speed. Shoddy merchandise — cheap rosaries, hanging dungarees — brushed against the car window like twigs in a country lane. The taxi turned a corner and stopped at the broken curb beside a black-shawled woman frying tortillas over a charcoal brazier. Behind her, painted swing doors showed the entrance to a cantina. Above them, in faded white lettering, were the words:
Salon de Lisboa.
Mark and the girl picked their way past a half-starved dog and a pock-marked beggar to the swing doors. This wasn’t Mark’s idea of a place to meet anyone. He paused suspiciously outside the swing doors.
The girl glanced at him with faint mockery. ‘Don’t be elegant, Mr Liddon. All the real Mexican cantinas are like this. The others are for tourists.’
She pushed through the swing doors. He followed.
The cantina was small, squalid and loud with guitar music. A wooden bar curved at one side and wooden chairs and benches stood around rickety wooden tables. There was a sour odor of people and a strange sweetish stench of fermentation. The customers were all men, quiet, dark men sitting alone or in couples playing dominoes or in crowded groups. Three musicians in costumes ornate as matadors were standing, strumming guitars, by one of the tightly packed clusters of men. One of the musicians started to sing in a high, off-key tenor.
The girl studied the room. ‘George isn’t here yet.’
She made her way to an empty table in a corner. They sat down. She was the only woman in the room, fantastically conspicuous for her white skin, her blonde hair, her elegant clothes. Black male eyes watched her guardedly, but she showed no embarrassment.
A waiter came. The girl ordered tequila. She said: ‘You’re going to end up drinking tequila, Mr Liddon. You might as well get used to it.’
The waiter brought two jiggers of colorless liquid and a plate of sliced limes. The girl put salt on the base of her thumb, squeezed lime juice on it, swallowed her tequila and licked the salt. Mark followed her lead. He didn’t like the tequila. He didn’t like this place. It was too much like a trap.
The girl was looking at him across the table.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Liddon. George will know where your wife is.’
‘He will?’
‘And he’ll take you to her — ‘She paused. ‘Unless, of course, it’s you she’s disappearing from.’
‘It isn’t me.’
‘I’ve heard about your wife. Eleanor Ross. She used to show up all the time in the New York columns, didn’t she?’
‘I guess so.’
‘What’s the trouble?’ She started playing with a slice of lime. Or is it none of my business?’
‘It’s none of your business.’
She smiled a quick, warm smile. ‘How come you’re mixed up in that fancy café society bunch, Mr Liddon? You don’t belong.’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Providence.’
‘The Liddons of Providence?’
‘The Liczdonskis. My folks came over from Czechoslavakia before I was born.’
‘No!’
‘Some little hick town there on the border of Poland.’
The musician had stopped singing, and the guitars stopped too. Without the music the cantina was remarkably quiet. There was the clatter of dominoes. That was all. Unlike Americans, Mexicans didn’t seem to talk in public places. Once again, without meaning to, Mark had become interested in the girl. There was something about her that put him off his guard.
He asked: ‘What’s your name?’
‘Frankie.’ The girl glanced over his shoulder towards the swing door and tensed. She put her hand on his arm. ‘Here he is. Here’s George.’
A young man was coming quickly through the tables. He was slight and as towheaded as Mark. He walked with his thin shoulders held exaggeratedly straight from arrogance perhaps or perhaps, Mark thought, because he had taken a mail-order course in weight-lifting. He had the intense, pigeon-chested look of a body-builder.
He came straight to the table. Frankie said: ‘Hello, George. I’m glad you could get away from the bar.’
Her slight emphasis on the word ‘bar’ was unnatural and it brought Mark’s suspicions rushing back. That word could be a follow-my-lead cue.
George didn’t smile a greeting. He merely looked from the girl to Mark with pale, intense blue eyes. The effect once again was one of arrogance or the bluster of the extremely shy. Frankie had referred to him as a big-hearted Harry. This was not Mark’s idea of a big-hearted Harry.
The girl gestured at Mark. ‘This is Mr Liddon, George. Mr Mark Liddon from New York.’
George was quick. Mark had to hand him that. Whatever his status, this must have come to him as a big surprise, but he took it in his stride. He merely fixed the pale-blue eyes on Mark. They were burningly alive with a kind of cold Puritan flame as if he were seeking out Evil preparatory to castigating it.
He said: ‘I suppose you’re looking for your wife, Mr Liddon?’
Mark said: ‘Frankie tells me you know where she is.’
‘I didn’t tell him that,’ said the girl quickly. ‘I told him you might know.’
George pulled up a third chair and sat down. Frankie ordered two more tequilas from the waiter. She said to Mark: ‘George doesn’t drink. Barmen never do.’
There it was again? that signaled ‘barman’. George put his hands on the table. They were small and delicate, the sort of hands people call musical although real musicians usually have the hands of bricklayers.
‘You’ve been away, haven’t you, Mr Liddon? Out of the States?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your wife didn’t expect you home so early?’
‘That’s it.’
George was looking down at the scarred table top as if his eyes were weapons only to be used in an emergency. The fair hair tumbled over his forehead. The effect was almost naively boyish, but there was none of the boy’s gentleness. The thin body was taut as a set trap.
The waiter brought the tequila. Frankie picked hers up. She was watching George. Mark, watching them both, saw that her hand was unsteady. She was scared. He was sure of it. And if she was scared, then she had been lying, because there was nothing in the story she had told him that should make her afraid of this interview.
Suddenly George said: ‘You don’t know anything about this trouble your wife’s mixed up with, do you?’
‘I’m waiting for you to tell me.’
The musicians had started to sing again — all three of them, three high sweet voices singing flat. Mark noticed that George’s nails were bitten down to the quick. The cuticle was gnawed too. Bartenders were not usually nervous people.
‘If the girl’s dangerous,’ he thought suddenly, ‘this boy is ten times more dangerous.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘My wife’s obviously talked to you about me and she’s obviously in trouble. If you’re guarding her from something, fine, and I’m grateful. But you know it isn’t me she’s hiding from. You know she’ll want to see me.’
George did look up then. The blue eyes, fixed without expression on Mark’s face, were fanatic’s eyes. That was it, Mark thought. He’s hipped on something — Communism, stamp-collecting, building boats.
‘Oh yes, Mr Liddon, I know your wife would be crazy to see you.’
‘Then where is she?’
George smiled then — it was as unreal a smile as a smile on a scarecrow or a Hallowe’en pumpkin.
That’s the trouble. I’m very sorry, Mr Liddon, but I’m afraid you’ve just missed her. She flew to Guatemala this afternoon.
FRANKIE had finished her tequila. She had never taken her eyes from George’s face. Mark felt a stultifying weariness. If Ellie was in Guatemala, it was infinitely depressing. If this young man was lying, it was more so. Perhaps it was hunger, he thought, that brought on this apathy. He had hardly eaten since he had arrived in Mexico.