Colonel Rutherford's Colt (11 page)

Five-thirty arrived and Carrasquel did not appear. Birds twittered in the crown of the ceiba tree, and a cart passed on the street beyond the wall, its wheels racketing. The colonel stationed himself just inside the door, afire with frustration. At first he blamed the quality of his information. Perhaps Doctor Lens had misled him as to the regularity of Carrasquel's entrances and exits. He admonished himself for not having brought his own investigation to bear. Then he realized that Susan and her lover might be so wholeheartedly engaged, they had lost track of time. He was tempted to creep up the stairs to Susan's chambers and burst in upon them, but decided he did not want to catch them at their passion. His imagination required no support in picturing their involvement. The original plan was best. He would wait.

The sun climbed higher, and the sapling palm was suffused in warm yellow light, seeming emblematic in its glowing solitude, as if it foreshadowed a holy imminence and were itself a point above which the Virgin might momentarily appear to tender sweet cautions to the world, or even Christ himself manifest in all his bloody glory, his wounds still yielding crimson droplets that fell upon the ground to fertilize with sacred life the tree where he had come to teach some material perfection. This sight and his interpretation of it reinvigorated the colonel's less-than-holy purpose and restored to him the force of emotion he had experienced upon learning of his wife's infidelity. His frustration swelled into a petulant fury that in turn elevated him to a reach from which he believed he could distinguish the entire field of possibility, and from that height he could find no impediment to his craving for vengeance. No, not vengeance, he thought. Balance. That was what he most craved. An evening out of things, the employment of counterweights to preserve a workable if not desirable level of engagement. He studied the Colt in his hand, perceiving it to be the instrument of unqualified conviction. Its cold weight satisfied. The slotted shells, silent yet about to speak. He firmed his grip, caressed the trigger with the ball of his forefinger, and grew calm.

At four minutes past six by the colonel's watch, he heard the voices of a man and a woman issuing from above, pitched low and urgent. Then the closing of a window and muted noises of exertion, a foot scraping against the wall. Steeling himself, the colonel stepped out into the light of day. Carrasquel, wearing a striped dress shirt and coffee-colored slacks, tie and jacket draped over one arm, was suspended six feet above and to the left, clutching the vines that straggled across the yellow stucco wall. When he saw the colonel he froze like a lizard on a twig, his features aghast.

“Come down,” said the colonel, backing away so as to prevent Carrasquel from leaping on him. He had, during the days preceding, prepared several versions of a speech, a recitation testifying to his disgust with the lovers and presenting his views on the finality of death. But seeing Carrasquel knocked all that from his mind. His brain seemed to have become a solid block of implacable hatred. “Come down” was all he could muster.

Once on the ground, his tie and jacket abandoned, Carrasquel said, “Colonel, listen to me,” and held his hands palms up as though about to present a defense.

Colonel Rutherford put a finger to his lips and then pointed to Susan's window. Carrasquel must have perceived this signal to offer some hopeful possibility, for he nodded vigorously in assent and made a placatory gesture—he wanted to cooperate, to get past this moment. The colonel gathered himself, drew in a breath of the fresh morning air, and with all his might he shouted: “Susaaaaan!” Birds started up from the ceiba. Scant seconds later the bedroom window was flung open, and Susan leaned forth, her black hair disheveled, holding a filmy robe shut at her breasts. It was apparent that for an instant she did not fully comprehend the situation, but then terror washed the confounded expression from her face and she cried, “Oh, God! Please . . . Hawes!”

Faint hope had been replaced by resignation in Carrasquel's face. He looked up to the window, to Susan, and Colonel Rutherford thought he could actually make out the transit of emotion between them, a transparent tunnel created by their fused stares, along which a faint rippling, as of heat haze, was passing. They might not have known he was there. This disrespect, this fundamental neglect, so enraged the colonel, he pushed aside the doubts that had been nibbling at his determination. He aimed the Colt, locked his elbow, sighted, all with an easy fluidity and precision, and shot Luis Carrasquel in the head, and—as he pitched sideways, half-turning in his fall—in the side just below the pit of the arm.

Susan screamed her lover's name, then screamed again, an inarticulate cry to heaven, and began to sob, to speak brokenly—whether outpourings of grief or hatred, the colonel could not tell. He refused to look at her. The shots had caused his heart to race, but it was slowing now. He felt considerably less satisfaction than he might have expected, but that did not dismay him—emotional satisfaction had not been his goal. He considered the body, the sprays and poolings of blood, making certain that the physical details had no substantial power over him. The second bullet had spun Carrasquel so that he had toppled onto his belly, with his face partly buried in the grass. The initial entry wound was obscured, but from his vantage the colonel saw that a sizeable portion of skull had been removed from the back of the man's head. Gore clotted the hair surrounding the cavity. He had an annoying sense of the pulse in his neck and felt no little revulsion at the profusion of insect life already scurrying to welcome Carrasquel into the lower orders of the food chain. But nothing, in his view, that presaged the abnormal or the untoward.

 

* * *

 

It had not occurred to Colonel Rutherford to worry overmuch about Susan's reaction to the murder. He knew that she would do nothing. For the next nine days she did not leave her rooms. Each morning the colonel asked her maid to inquire after Susan's health. Only once did she respond, and then to ask permission to attend the funeral, a request he declined to honor. On the tenth morning, as he cast about for his briefcase in the alcove, she came down the stair and addressed him in an exhausted voice. She wore a riding skirt and a gray blouse that had been misbuttoned. Her face was tear-stained, haggard, and she leaned on the banister with both hands, as if her legs could not support her. “I'm going to leave you,” she said.

The colonel spotted his briefcase, snapped it open to ascertain whether it contained certain papers. He glanced at Susan, stepped to the door, threw it open and said, “Leave.”

“I want your promise”—her voice caught—“that you won't harm my family.”

“Unlike you,” said the colonel, “I refrain from making promises I have no intention of keeping.”

Susan feebly brushed hair back from her face. “You bastard!”

“Revile me if you wish,” he said. “But it was not I who violated my vows. It was not I who brought my lover into the marriage bed.”

“I had no choice! You never let me out the house without one of your spies for company!”

“I see. If I had been less concerned for your safety, you would have slept with him in the . . .”

“Anywhere!” Susan descended a few steps, her face cinched with anger. “In the streets, the gutters. . . . Anywhere! When I was with him, nothing else existed. And that was such a blessing!” Her anger peaking, she hissed the word “blessing” and came down yet another step. “Do you know why? Because when I was with him, there was no you!”

The colonel was taken aback. He had not realized Susan was capable of such strong emotion. The task ahead might well be more difficult than he had presumed.

“If you force . . .” A sob bubbled forth, and Susan's mouth worked. Then she continued in the tight, hushed voice of someone near to breaking. “If you force me to stay, I'll kill you!”

The colonel met her gaze with studied indifference. “Should you care to dine tonight,” he said, “Porfirio will be doing his chicken.” As a final insult, one he was certain she would understand, he left the door open behind him.

 

* * *

 

Of all the problems facing the colonel as a result of the murder, the most pressing was that posed by General Ruelas. He had known from the outset that were he to rid the world of Carrasquel, an affair between Susan and the general's nephew would be suspected, and this would shed a wan light on his motives for the shooting. People would say—as, indeed, they were saying—why, if not for love, would a young man of so much promise attempt to climb to the bedroom of a beautiful married woman? In his grief, General Ruelas might very well be persuaded by this point of view. The colonel understood that he needed to confront the general quickly. To this end, using as an excuse a land dispute involving the United States government and a group of Cuban citizens from the general's home province, he invited Ruelas to lunch at a Havana restaurant popular among the wealthy and powerful, a place of linen tablecloths and icy chandeliers where he and Ruelas would command an attentive audience. The more public their conversation, the better it would assist the colonel's design.

The general was a fit sixtyish man of diminutive stature who looked more at ease in a business suit than the comic opera uniform he wore at state functions. He had a closely trimmed gray goatee, thinning hair, and a bony, birdlike face. Not a menacing figure, yet he had a reputation for relentlessness both in war and in the political arena, and—if one were to believe the rumors—had no qualms concerning torture. This day he sported a black armband and was accompanied by a portly aide, also dressed civilian-style. Colonel Rutherford had previously sent a written apology to the Ruelas family, but once the general had seated himself and finished obsessively arranging his silverware into perfectly ordered ranks on the linen, the colonel again offered an apology, saying that if he had only recognized Luis, he would never have fired. All he had seen in the half-light had been a stranger attempting to break into his house.

The general inclined his head in what the colonel interpreted as an acknowledgement, but not an acceptance, and said, “Why do you think my nephew was at your house?” He kept his gaze focused on his aide's salad fork, as if coveting it for his little silver troop.

“I have no comprehension of your nephew's motives,” said the colonel. “But I assure you, I have utter confidence in my wife's.”

“My Dolores has not seen your wife at the Palace of late,” the general said. “Is she ill?”

Though nearly full, the restaurant had grown quiet since General Ruelas had entered. Judging by the stares turned their way, the colonel was certain that everyone was straining to hear the exchange between them.

“Not ill,” the colonel said, spicing his words with a trace of indignation. “Terrified.”

At this, the general cocked a bright black eye toward him; a stirring arose from the adjacent tables. “The experience has . . . upset her, then?”

“Why would it not?” The colonel propped his elbows on the table and clasped his hands. “A woman wakes to discover that her husband has shot and killed a man, an acquaintance, as he attempted to climb through her window. She is somewhat more than upset. She has kept to her rooms ever since that morning. She no longer feels secure in a country we both have come to think of as our home.”

The general nodded, or rather tossed his head first forward, then sharply back, like a horse startled by a June bug. “Luis . . .” he began, hesitated, then said, “I have been told that your wife and Luis spoke often at the Palace.”

“My wife speaks often to many people. Most of them have not been inspired to enter my property unannounced.”

“I do not like your tone, Colonel.”

“Nor do I like your implication that my wife may have been unfaithful.”

Ruelas stroked his goatee, thoughtful, and then said carefully, “I am not implying it.”

“I'm afraid,” said the colonel, “such a neutral statement only serves to impugn my wife's honor . . . if not my own.”

A waiter approached—Ruelas waved him angrily away. His aide sat motionless, hands in his lap, gazing at the brocaded wallpaper. Ruelas seemed flustered, as if he had not been expecting this sort of aggressiveness from the colonel.

“I have made no such imputation regarding your nephew,” the colonel went on. “I am willing to subscribe to a theory that may explain his actions in a kindly light.”

“And do you have such a theory?”

“Not a particular favorite. But I have heard it espoused by some that his actions were not premeditated. Perhaps it was a prank gone wrong. Or perhaps Luis was celebrating and mistook my house for that of one of his lady friends. Young men frequently commit rash acts of the sort. My point is”—Colonel Rutherford built a church and steeple with his clasped hands—“if I am willing to countenance your nephew's actions as innocent, and further to cast myself as the inadvertent villain of the piece, why are you unwilling to extend a similar courtesy to my wife?”

A vein pulsed in Ruelas' temple, but he said nothing.

“I know my wife,” said the colonel with ringing sincerity. “She is a modest creature. Not worldly in the least. An honorable woman. I can bring forward innumerable witnesses who will attest to her good character. Can you produce even one who will testify that she is not as I describe?”

The silence that ensued extended throughout the restaurant. Watching Ruelas, the colonel concluded that the general had become aware of the fact that he was being forced to make a decision in public that he had planned to make in private, and he did not much like it. In effect, he had allowed the colonel to maneuver him into an ersatz trial before a jury of his peers in which the colonel served both as witness and advocate—a trial whose focus was not upon the colonel's guilt or innocence, as the general might wish it, but upon his nephew's character.