The Long escape Page 10

  The kiss lasted two or three blocks. I came up for air as we stopped in front of the hotel.

  "Good night," I said, breathing like an old pump. "I'll call you when I get back from Antofagasta."

  I was out of the car before she could say anything The Packard pulled away.

  When I asked for my key at the desk, the clerk reached under the counter and handed me a Kleenex, without a word or a smile. I wiped my mouth, reminding myself to give him either a good tip or a good boot in the pants when I left the hotel.

  m

  Antofagasta isn't a bad place after you get there. It's an old city, and a lot of people put a lot of time into planting parks and trees to take the curse off what they had to start with, which wasn't much. The town lies on the coastal edge of the northern desert, where the nitrates come from. Behind the town, steep dirt hills shove up from the coast to a flat plain stretching away toward the Andes. The hills look like something left there by an excavator; nothing grows on them, not a scrubby bush or a cactus plant, only big whitewash letters painted on the dirt that say Smoke This and Drink That and Use Something Else for bad breath. Since it practically never rains in that part of the world, the signs stay on the side of the hill until somebody paints something else equally ugly over them. The best thing to do in Antofagasta is to keep looking seaward, if you can manage it.

  I came into town on a LAN plane that dumped me off at the airport an hour after sunup. I hadn't slept during the flight, so I hired a horse-drawn something that called itself a victoria and let it take me to the

  Hotel Maury, where I pounded my car for a couple of hours. After a bath and a pretty good lunch, 1 felt more like tackling the job.

  First I tried the Banco Anglo-Sudamerica.

  They didn't throw me out on my ear, although the thought was there. I don't know whether they had been tipped off or were only acting like a bank, but the answer was the same either way. They wouldn't even agree with me when I said it was a nice day. Every time I tried to ask a cjuestion, they wanted to know what business it was of mine. I couldn't answer that one satisfactorily, so I moved on to the office of the local camera de comercio.

  Don Rodolfo had told me that the family money came from nitrates. I told the chamber of commerce fellow that I represented a couple of million American dollars looking for a soimd investment, not including copper or guano. That left nitrates.

  He gave me a list of companies exploiting the nitrate beds. It was pretty long, and the name of Ruano didn't show on it, so I said of course I would only be interested in dealing with an organization in which ownership was concentrated in a fcAv hands, as I did not want to fritter away my youth and beauty running down minority interests. That cut the list way down. After a little more jockeying, I had the camera de comercio

  offering me the Compania Nitrata de Calama, S.A., as if it had been their own idea from the start. The Compania Nitrata de Calama, S.A., was a sound, old-time corporation wholly owned by el heredero de don Roberto Ruano Parker. I would find the office of the heir on Calle Prat.

  I found the office all right. It was one room at the end of a dark passageway in an old building that smelled like a chicken coop. The office ■was half as big and twice as dark as the inside of a steamer trunk. It held a desk, one chair, a lot of ledgers, and a little old wazened chile710 who was writing something in one of the ledgers with a scratchy pen.

  I said, "Buenos dias" from the doorway. There wasn't room for me inside.

  The old guy peered up at me.

  "This is the office of the heir of don Roberto Ruano Parker?"

  "It might be so."

  "I am interested in nitrate properties. I should like to make an offer to the heir for his holdings."

  "So?"

  "You are authorized to act for the heir?"

  "To an extent."

  "To such an extent that you could acquaint me with the nature of the holdings?"

  "Possibly."

  I'll bet he thought up filty different ways of saying "maybe" before I gac up. My idea was to work my way in with the bluff about nitrate properties, and then skillfully steer him around until he was telling me the life history of the Ruanos. He steered about as easily as a fire hydrant. He never said yes, he never said no, and he never let a dribble of information sneak away from him. It finally got under my skin.

  I said, "You have undoubtedly heard of the proverb concerning the ass which died in his master's service and was rewarded by having his hide made into a whip with which to lash his successor?"

  "Perhaps."

  "There is another proverb which attributes wisdom to the man who sells what he has to sell when the market is available. It would apply to asses as well."

  His upper lip lifted enough to show his teeth. It was as close as he ever came to a smile.

  "There is also a third, senor: Into a closed mouth, no flies enter. Even an ass can appreciate the beauty of the saying."

  I tipped my hat, bowed, and turned away, leaving him there in his hole with the faint grin on his wrinkled old puss.

  I felt pretty low when I wandered back to the hotel.

  It had been a mistake to let Terry know I was coming to Antofagasta. They had had plenty of time to dain up all the available sources of information arainst me. As long as they knew where I was and what I was doing, I was wasting my time.

  I ate a terrible dinner at the hotel. Afterward I strolled through the lobby to see if I could find a magazine or something to help me pass the time before I cried myself to sleep.

  There was an announcement board in the hotel lobby. It was one of those things with a slotted black background in which the hotel management sticks white metal letters to spell out whatever is cooking locally that might interest the hotel guests. The Club Rotario de Antofagasta was having a meeting at nine-thirty. That left me cold. So did the local movie, and a dance at the Automobile Club. What caught my eye was an announcement that hotel guests might apply at the desk for guest cards making available to them the privileges of the British Club and the Club Union.

  I almost broke a leg getting over to the desk. One of the cards don Rodolfo had given me was to the Club Union in Santiago. In Chile, the Club Union is like the Lion's Club, or, better yet, the Republican Party. You may move around from place to place, but you go right on belonging, wherever you are. If don Rodolfo

  was a club menibcr in Santiago, he damn near had to have been one in Antolagasta when he lived there. And if I couldn't find at least one old-timer at the club who had known the Ruano boys, I would turn in my suit to the coach.

  It was as easy as dropping an egg. At the club I showed the boy at the desk the guest card from the hotel and the corner of a bill, and asked him if a don Rodolfo Ruano had been a member of the club up until four or five years before. He said yes, without hesitation. I asked him if a don Roberto Ruano had also been a member of the club many years earlier, say twenty years back. He couldn't answer that offhand, but he looked through the records and came up with another yes. Don Roberto Ruano had been dropped for non-payment of dues eighteen years before.

  "One more thing." I wadded up the bill so he could take it without anybody seeing him break the club rules. "Is there, perhaps, someone in the club at the moment who has been a member for more than twenty years? Or can you tell me . . . ?"

  "Don Guillermo Unfres has been a member of the club for forty years. You will find him in the cantina."

  "Unfres?" It didn't sound like any Latin name I had ever heard before.

  "Unfres. An old one, wdth a colored nose."

  He wasn't fooling about the colored nose, either. It looked like the port light on a steamboat when I found the old boy sitting alone at a table in the bar, peering at himself in a gin rickey. There were other men in the bar, but they were in tight knots as far as they could get from the Nose, facing away. It was the double wing-back formation you use to keep the club bore from grabbing your lapel.

  I said, "Senor Unfres?"

  "Humphreys." He had
a thin, scratchy voice. "Willie Humphreys. Glad to see you again, son. Siddown."

  I sat down.

  "I don't think you've seen me before, Mr, Humphreys. My name . . ."

  "Call me Willie, son. Everybody calls me Willie."

  "OK, Willie. My name is Al Colby, I heard you were an old-timer here. I want to know something about the club members."

  "I was standing; on the curb when the club was built," Willie said. "I spit on the cornerstone when they were putting it down. What do you want to know?"

  He didn't say spit, either, but I have to clean up his conversation. He was a bawdy old bastard. He must have been eighty, at least, but whenever his conversation wandered away from the point—and it wandered a lot—he always ended up talking about the girls and

  related sul)jects. He was pretty funny to listen to, onte. I suppose the other club members had heard him gab so often that they had to shut him out in self-defense. That made me very popular with him as a listener.

  Like a lot of people when they get that old, his memory was better for things that had happened a long time ago than remembering what he had eaten for lunch. And he telescoped once in a while, so that something that had happened to him fifty years before would lead on to something else that happened forty years later, all in the same sentence. Biit I learned that he had come to Chile from the Statps as a kid, not long after the war in which Chile yanked the coastal nitrate fields away from Bolivia and cut her off from the Pacific. It had been a catch-as-catch-can scramble for the loot in those days, Bolivian land titles against Chilean land titles, another gold-rush where anybody with a gun to hold his claim and a mule-drawn scraper to operate it could skim a fortune in nitrate right off the ground. Willie had made his claim stick and milked his pile out of it.

  "Those were the days, son," he said. "Rough, tough and rambunctious. Work all day, drink all night, and nothing to do on Sundays but play billiards and guess-what."

  He winked at me. A mesero came by. I ordered a beer and another gin rickey.

  "Did you ever know a man named Roberto Ruano, Willie?"

  "Sure. Fine boy. Operated a property near me up by Calama. Used to play billiards with him."

  "Here in the club?"

  "Here and before the club was built. Any place there was a billiard table. The country wasn't like it is now, since this god damn government started spending money on damn fool moving picture palaces for a bunch of god damn rotos. There wasn't anything to do but play billiards, after we got too tired to guess-what. That wasn't often, though. I remember once in Beque-dano . . ."

  "You knew Roberto Ruano pretty well, then?"

  "Like a son. Fine lad."

  It was strange to be sitting there listening to him saying "Fine lad" about a man who was old enough to be my father, but I realized that he had twenty-five or thirty years head start on Roberto. That made Roberto a lad as far as he was concerned.

  I said, "Remember when he left here?"

  He squinted an eye at me.

  "Who?"

  "Roberto Ruano."

  "Quite a while back, was it?"

  "Nearly twenty years, I think. He may have turned up again later, but I'm thinking of the first time. At least twenty years ago, maybe longer."

  Willie took the rickey the mesero had brought him and sucked at it.

  "Live to be a hundred on this stuff, ' he said. "Stick to gin and lime juice and you can't go wrong. I remember that he wasn't around for quite a spell. Had to get a new billiard partner." Willie scowled at the double wingback formation across the way. 'None of these squirts know a billiard cue from the east end of a snake. Club's going to hell fast. I remember once . . ."

  "Did you ever see Roberto Ruano afterward?"

  "After what?"

  "After he left here twenty years ago."

  "Nope. Can't say that I have. Don't remember not seeing him again, though. If he was around the club, I probably saw him. Spend all my time here."

  "That's what I'm trying to find out. Did he turn up here again after he went away?"

  "After he went away where?"

  I swallowed a mouthful of beer. My neck muscles were so tight they hurt. After I got them relaxed, I tried again.

  "You don't remember seeing Roberto Ruano again after he left here twenty years ago. Is that right?"

  "That's what I said, isn't it? Finish that slop and I'll buy you a real drink. Stick to gin and lime juice and you'll live to be a hundred."

  "Gin doesn't agree with me, thanks. I'll have another beer. Do you knoAv why Roberto Ruano left here?" "Nope. Probably wanted to go somewhere else." Later I checked with the boy at the desk, hoping the club records would show something more, and drew a blank. Roberto had been dropped from the club after his unpaid dues piled up for a couple of years. They had no other record of him. All I could get out of Willie was that he had known Roberto well in the boom days, had played billiards and catted around with him at one time or another, and had never heard of him asain after he disappeared twenty years before. I tried the fuzzy snapshot on him. He said it wasn't a very good picture, which I knew already, but it could be Roberto, all right. He remembered once they had been helling around Coquimbo . , .

  I said, "How well did you know Rodolfo Ruano?" "Rodolfo. Rodolfo. Which one was he?" "The brother. He plays a good game of billiards, too." "Oh, Rodolfo. Sure. Fine lad, fine lad. Knocked the balls around with him many times. Haven't seen him around lately, either."

  "He's been living in Santiago for four or five years." "Is that so? Hey, mesero. Me muero de sed."

  He beat his glass on the table.

  The waiter brought him another ritkey before he finished dying of thirst. I got him back on the subject of Rodolfo long enough to learn that he had known Rodolfo only around the club, long after he and Roberto had done their helling in the rough, tough rambunctious days of the nitrate boom. That tied in with what don Rodolfo had said about his brother doing all the development work on the family properties, and I wasn't much interested in don Rodolfo anyway. When Willie wandertd off on the subject of what a devil he and Roberto had been with the girls in Tocopilla, I let him talk, hoping he'd spring something about Roberto that might help me. He didn't.

  When I think back and realize how close I was then to wrapping the job up in a parcel, it makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Two or three more questions to pin the old windbag down and I would have had it. I asked a lot of questions, but they weren't the right ones. Willie wandered on through four or five more rickeys, repeating himself half the time and mixing his dates up so that I never knew whether he was talking about something that had happened before I was born or the day before yesterday. I could see why the other club members had put the freeze on him.

  I got away from him about 2 a.m. I felt logy from all

  the beer and baloney I had absorbed, so I walked back to the hotel instead of taking a victoria.

  I had to go through the Plaza Colon on the way home. It was more of a park than a plaza; grass, a few trees, statues parked here and there along the walks. One statue was a bronze lion that had been presented to the city by somebody or other for some reason. A metal plate set into the granite pedestal gave all the details of the presentation, but it was too dark for me to read even if I'd been interested. All I cared about was the pedestal, which made a good windbreak against the breeze coming in off the ocean. I stopped to light a cigarette.

  The bullet went SPLAT! against the granite by my head. It was maybe an eighth of a second later before I heard the shot, and my hand was already starting up to brush at the hot lead that had stung my ear before I knew what had happened. I let go everything and dropped flat. There wasn't another shot, but I felt too naked against that nice tombstone-colored granite to stick around. I took two corners of the statue on my hands and knees and stayed there until a couple of carabineros ran up and wanted to know what was going on.

  As soon as my legs got steady enough to hold me up, I showed them the bullet-pock on the granite. T
hey got

  out their guns and nosed around the plaza without finding anything or anybody. One of them said the guy must have been a terrible shot.

  I didn't argue with him. I didn't know whether it had been a terrible shot or just a warning to pull my ears in, but I didn't want to think about it. When the carabineros asked my name, address, nationality, height, weight, occupation, religion, marital status and why would anybody be trying to send me to the boneyard, I told them I didn't know the answer to the last one but that if they wanted to get in touch with me at anv time after the next plane left town, they could communicate wixh me at the Hotel Carrera in Santiasjo. In the meantime, would one or both of them kindly accompany me back to the Hotel Maury?

  They both did. I gave them some pesos for the Widows and Orphans fund. I might be leaving widows and orphans of my OAvn some day, if I lived long enough.

  In case anybody thinks I was scared, I was. There is something about the splat of a bullet next to your head that stays in the memory, particularly when it hits close enough to leave a blister on your ear.

  Thinking about it later, I decided that it must have been a warning. There had been no need to shoot at my head while my whole body was outlined against the light-colored granite of the pedestal. I didn't overlook the possibility that the shooter might have been inexperienced, in which case the kick of an unfamiliar gun could lift the bullet several feet over its target, but an inexperienced shooter "who was really anxious to pot me would have blazed a"way three or four times while I was scuttling around corners on my hands and knees. I was being told to watch myself.

  Bearing this in mind, I left Antofagasta without asking further questions. As long as they could keep an eye on me and know what progress I was making they might decide to snooker me with another and better-placed bullet. My hide came first. Secondarily, I had decided to stop fooling around. Having bullets thrown