Voyage into Violence (18 page)

“About the jewels?” Bill said, and was patient.

“You say you're a policeman,” she said. “How do I know you're not trying to steal anything you can lay hands on?”

Bill showed her his badge. She said, “Phooey.” She said, “Just because I'm not as young as I was.” She made, Bill thought, a great point of it. She might have been ninety from the point she made of it. She was not, he thought, much older than the middle or late sixties. It was surprising that, when she exaggerated, rather than minimized her age, she had gone to the trouble of youthening her face. Or, perhaps it wasn't.

“Have you or haven't you?” Bill said.

“Haven't,” she told him, and the dark eyes were narrowed slightly, and there was the suggestion of a smile on the thin lips in the skintight face. “What would I have jewelry for?”

The question was absurd. There was, indeed, a certain absurdity about all of Mrs. Macklin. Or—did she, for some reason, wish to appear absurd? He kept getting questions, Bill thought; questions when he wanted answers. He went in search of Miss Hilda Macklin, who probably would deny that she had, to Aaron Furstenberg, so much as mentioned precious stones. He visited the most likely places—he went past the swimming pool, and to the sun deck—and flicked a hand to his wife and the Norths, and went on. He went to the smoke room, and to the Grand Lounge, and circled the promenade deck. He did not find Hilda Macklin, which was odd, but only a little odd. A ship was, he thought, an easy place on which to hide, if one wanted to hide. It was also an easy place to disappear in, whether one wanted to hide or not. Miss Macklin might be in a women's lavatory, of which there were many. She might be visiting a friend in the friend's stateroom. Probably, Bill decided, he would be as apt to come across Miss Macklin if he sat somewhere in the sun, and waited for her to find him. He joined Dorian and the Norths.

“Hilda Macklin was wearing a white dress,” Pam said, sitting upright on her chair, speaking with the air of one who speaks of important things. “A
long
white dress.” She waited, her eyes bright with expectancy.

Bill looked at Dorian, at Jerry. Jerry nodded, confirming what Pam had said, clearly sharing her belief that what she said had meaning. And Dorian waited too.

“I came in late,” Bill reminded them.

“Last night,” Pam said. “It wasn't barebacked, but otherwise—Don't you see? It was almost dark on the deck and a woman in white—” She stopped, as one who did not wish to labor a point.

Bill's first reaction was to reject out of hand, since it was absurd to suppose that, even in semi-darkness, anyone else could be mistaken for Dorian. Or, more precisely, and as Pam was suggesting, Dorian for Hilda Macklin.

“It was quite dark,” Pam North said, helping him, recognizing his need for help. “And—they move alike. A little.” Bill raised his eyebrows. “Oh,” Pam said, “but they do. I remember thinking that yesterday or some time. That Hilda moved almost like Dorian. I told Jerry—didn't I, Jerry?”

“Yes,” Jerry said.

“Only that,” Pam said. “In the light—I don't say they're at all alike. But in the darkness, or almost—seeing somebody in a white dress, moving in a certain way. Don't you see?”

It was still hard to see. But it was not so hard as it had been at first. Bill's face showed that.

“It makes more sense,” Pam said. “Because, who would want to hurt Dorian?”

Dorian said, “Oh come now.” She said that she could have enemies as well as anybody, if she put her mind to it. Pam said, “I didn't mean—” and realized herself caught out, and responded to Dorian's smile. “All the same,” she said, “it does make more sense.”

Bill nodded slowly, and said, “Right.” What sense it made was not, to be sure, much clearer. If someone—certainly a very careless someone—had tried to kill Dorian thinking her Hilda Macklin things became, if not clarified, at least not entirely incoherent.

“Look!” Dorian said, and pointed, and there was Morro Castle, looking precisely like its pictures. The
Carib Queen
, moving very slowly now, nosed up the channel toward Havana Bay.

The public-address system clicked, and politely asked for attention. It then requested that all who wished to participate in the American Express Company's guided tour of Havana, in private limousines, make their arrangements at the desk in the grand entrance. It paused. It said, “We repeat,” and did.

To see a large and unfamiliar city in which the language is strange as the streets are strange, a guided tour is best, although of course faintly repugnant. “I think,” Dorian said, “that we ought to swallow our pride,” and to that Pam agreed, although pointing out that it would probably entail a great many churches. “To stand in the middle of and look at,” she said, amplifying. In spite of this, they sent Jerry forward to arrange for three. Bill would, somehow, overtake them, when he could. They went below to freshen up for Havana. The ship, going ever slower, crept past other piers toward her own—crept past a strange large ship full of freight cars (outbound for Florida) and past low merchant ships, and among bright, darting launches. Now and then, for reasons not apparent to landsmen, the
Carib Queen
hooted, conversationally. At a little after eleven, she tied up. Fifteen minutes later, after what seemed a good deal of fussing, the guard at the head of the gangplank stepped aside and the passengers of the
Carib Queen
—or such of them as did not, thriftily, remain to lunch aboard—surged into Havana. Bill and Dorian were just in time to surge with the others. They had, Bill explained, waited for Dorian to finish a sketch.

Havana was a long pier, with a passageway between stacked crates and bales. Havana was a street, no more grimy, and no less, than all streets which abut on piers. Havana was a line of cars—two of which were limousines, the rest taxis—and three seemingly excited men wearing caps banded with the words “American Express.” The men talked very rapidly in what was often English, and apportioned tourists among cars.

They saw Hilda Macklin, then—saw her just as she was whisked into a car in which there were already three other people. Bill tried, without success, to identify the others; thought none of them was Mrs. Macklin, but could not be sure. Almost before Hilda Macklin was seated in the car, its horn blasted and it leaped away, turning violently into a narrow street. “Señors, señoras,” a guide urged, and compressed Pam and Jerry North and Dorian into a cab. He reached out for Bill Weigand. Bill shook his head, and went to a waiting police car. The guide shrugged, and said, “Señor?” to Captain J. R. Folsom, who wore an orange-colored shirt, and no jacket and looked very hot indeed. Captain Folsom was propelled into the car with the Norths and Dorian, the door was slammed, the car squawked angrily, shivered and leaped like a cat with its tail stepped on. Moving, the car continued to squawk, as if its tail still hurt.

It darted through narrow streets, frowned down upon by massive buildings. It turned when least expected, its horn protesting angrily. It darted furiously between other cars at intersections; when, as happened infrequently, it was out-squawked, it stood on its fore-wheels and Pam and Dorian, in the back seat, were catapulted into Jerry and Mr. Folsom, in the jump seats. “Uff!” Mr. Folsom said. The cab plunged into the openness of a square, dashed head-on to a curb and stopped, as if it had balked a jump. They unscrambled themselves and climbed out. Folsom said, “Phew!” for all of them, and the small, dark and engaging man at the wheel removed his hand from the horn button, turned to smile brilliantly and said, “Name of Mike.”

“What?” Pam said.

“Sí,” he said. “Mike. The cathedral. You find me. Name of Mike.”

Cars plummeted into the square, on one side of which the cathedral loomed. From dark buildings, from the shelter of colonnades, children popped, to stand with round dark eyes and expressions of enthrallment—and to suggest the purchase of oddments. The square filled with cabs and the tourists of the
Carib Queen
poured out of them, and looked about dazedly, and counted their arms and legs. A small, anxious man under an American Express cap emerged from a limousine, and said, in a voice too big for him, “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you will please try to stay together, yes?”

“I'm sure,” Pam said to Dorian and Jerry, “that we're doing our best.”

The cathedral—“Columbus Cathedral”—is massive and of stone, with belltowers at either side; it is aged and massive and not, save for its dignity of age, particularly beautiful. They were led into it, and a good deal of the dignity vanished—it is not dim, but lighted. Rather, as Pam North noted—but in a voice low enough for reverence—like a Christmas tree. Electric lights festooned it, outlining doorways, ringing the altar, winking dimly far above. The guide gathered them about; he spoke admiringly of the woodwork, of murals, of sacred paintings. He reminded them that the remains of Christopher Columbus had rested in the cathedral for more than a hundred years. He moved them on.

There is much to see in “Columbus Cathedral” and the American Express Company is diligent. The guide led his followers from place to place, through the nave and the transept, into and out of chapels. The followers diminished; men went outside for cigarettes and neglected to return; women began to complain of their feet. Cathedrals are very hard on feet.

Dorian—who likes pictures of many kinds—proved the most diligent of the three, and Jerry, polite, went with her, on the fringe of the lessening group. Pam promised to wait for them, where she could sit down, and admitted that she was not really good at cathedrals. She sat and waited, and the guide's voice grew fainter in the distance. Folsom passed her, on his way toward a door, and was taking out a cigarette package as he passed. The idea of a cigarette was suddenly very appealing to Pam North and she stood up, reached into her bag. She, also, began to drift toward a door.

She passed a chapel, through which, earlier, the guide and his followers had moved. It was dim; instead of electric lights, candles burned in it. And, in it, Hilda Macklin and Jules Barron stood, close together, talking, their voices low. They were drawn a little to one side, were only just visible in the semi-darkness. It was, Pam decided, a surreptitious meeting if she ever came on one. And it was very interesting. She drew back, into a window embrasure, and gave up thought of cigarettes. After all, she thought, we're official this time, or almost. This sudden close association of purported strangers—there was something intimate about the way Hilda and Barron stood, the way they talked—was worthy of attention.

She had come in near the end of the conference, if it was a conference. She had hardly withdrawn into the shadow before Hilda and Barron came out of the chapel. They immediately separated. Barron went, apparently, to rejoin the party—a tardy tourist, which he did not much resemble; it was difficult to believe him intensely interested in sacred murals. Hilda, thin and somehow brittle in gray linen suit, went toward an exit, and went quickly. She went, Pam thought, like somebody up to something. She carried a black bag, held tight under an arm.

It was not Pam North's habit to linger when duty calls, or even when it whispers. This had got her into trouble before now. She went after Miss Hilda Macklin, who was surely up to something—and up to it with Jules Barron who, if he had been trying to strike up an acquaintance with Mrs. Macklin's thin daughter, had certainly, and abruptly, succeeded. Pam took out a cigarette and did her best to look like a woman who was simply dying for one.

She was in time to see Hilda Macklin briskly crossing the cobbled square. She was in time to cross it briskly after her. Hilda went down a narrow street, with the air of one who knows where she is going, and Pam went after her, rather wishing—now that she was committed—that
she
knew where she was going and, perhaps, why. She also wished it were cooler; she had not, until then, realized quite how hot it was in Havana. Hilda turned, suddenly, into a passageway.

The buildings of old Havana are massive, and a little dour. They are given to colonnades. Their walls are thick; passageways vanish mysteriously into them.

Following such passages, one may enter a labyrinth—or may come, unexpectedly, on a hidden, shaded patio. The early residents of Havana wisely sought shelter from Havana's almost tropical sun; many of their survivors are somewhat dazed by such glassy buildings as the American Embassy, planned—like the United Nations building it somewhat resembles—to let sun in.

It was cooler in the passageway, once Pam had followed Hilda into it. The walls on either side were close enough to touch with arms outstretched. There were dark openings in the walls, like the openings of caves. In one she passed—following now the click of heels ahead—a brazier burned and several people, including two children, were clustered around it. They did not pay any attention to Pam North.

She came out into a square, walled by buildings. It did not appear that any streets led out of the square, only other passageways. She was in time to see Hilda Macklin going into one, and went after her. It appeared more than ever that Hilda knew where she was going, and this became increasingly important to Pam, who no longer had the faintest idea where she was. Hilda was now not only quarry; she was guide as well. Pam heard Hilda's heels clicking, echoing in the passageway of stone—and heard the staccato clicking of her own heels. So much did the sound echo that Pam had an uneasy feeling that she might, in turn, be being followed. Which was absurd. She hoped.

She came out of the dark tunnel into a narrow street, which at once curved away to the right. The character of the surroundings had somewhat changed; now there were dimly lighted, rather secretive, shops at intervals, where before the buildings seemed to house only cluttered dwellings—and too many people; so many that they could be felt all around, as if the soft breathing of so many were turned palpable. Here, too, in the narrow street, the sun slanted its way. Then it was hot again.