The Marchand Woman

She said with a trace of uncertainty, “Mr. Crobey?”

“Yeah, Harry Crobey.” English accent—that or South African or Australian.

“Carole Marchand.” She thrust out her hand. He took it with a bit of a smile. His hand was coarse but he wasn’t a knuckle-crusher.

“Have a seat. What can I get you?” He had a harsh deep voice.

“Fruit juice, a soft drink, I don’t mind. I think alcohol would give me a headache in this heat.”

“If you’re not used to the heat you’ll get the headache with or without booze. But whatever you want.”

“All right. Would they have Dewar’s here?”

“I doubt it. They’ll have something that passes for Scotch whisky. On the rocks?”

She watched him walk to the bar. He had a bit of a sailor’s roll to his walk. The big head was set square on a size-seventeen neck and his biceps were hard beneath the rolled-up sleeves. Very narrow hips like a horseman. When he returned from the bar bearing drinks she saw why he rolled his walk: He had a very slight limp and the roll almost concealed it.

He showed that he could smile. She felt she could have lit a match on his jaw. She said, “You’re not exactly what I’d expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Three hundred pounds, a brush crew cut and a loud brutal voice.”

“A thug.”

“Maybe. Dwiggins was a little vague.”

“Probably drunk,” Crobey said.

“You are a mercenary, aren’t you?”

“Honey, I’m Harry Crobey. Also I mercenare.”

“Why?”

If he was surprised by the question he didn’t show it. “It’s a living,” he replied.

She had wanted to shake him a bit, find out what was under the facade of easy self-confidence; it hadn’t worked and she was momentarily nonplussed. She looked about the cavernous barroom. The jukebox had gone silent. The place seemed to extend away into an infinity of darknesses. She said, “Where do they keep the caskets?”

He didn’t chuckle or smile. “You want to make small talk all afternoon?”

“Look, I suppose you’ve done this lots of times. I’m new to it.”

“Okay. The first thing is, most of the people in my trade don’t like to be called mercenaries. It’s like calling a Japanese a Nip. Personally I don’t mind it, I know what I am. But keep it in mind for future reference.”

“I wasn’t pla

“Hiring yourself a mercenary? I guess not—you don’t look the type. But soldier-of-fortune has a better ring to it.”

“That sounds like something out of a cheap men’s magazine.”

“What kind of literature did you think these guys read?”

“But you’re different, is that it?”

“You’re a little abrasive, you know that? What’s your first name again?”

“Carole,” she said. “You can call me Miss Marchand.”

“More like Mizz Marchand from the look of things.” He waved his glass toward her shoulder. “There’s the door, right there, behind you. Any time you want to excuse yourself.” He was chewing up an ice cube the way a dog would grind up a bone—with loud sharp crunching noises.

She said, “I thought you needed a job.”

“You can look at that one of two ways. Either I’m unemployed or I’m free.”

“From the looks of your boarding house—”

“I eat.”

She said abruptly, “Why couldn’t you come to Washington to discuss this? Dwiggins offered you the fare money, didn’t he?”

“I’ve temporarily exiled myself from the States. To avoid alimony jail. Next question?”

“You’re married to an American?”

“I used to be. The answer to your next question is Liverpool. But I left there when I was fourteen. My passport’s American. Naturalized. I mention that in case you’re leery of foreigners.” He was studying the plunge of her neckline. Then his eyes lifted and he smiled with cool insincerity—the polite wintry insolence of a clerk in an exclusive shop. Belatedly she saw the extent to which he was putting her on.

She said, “As long as we’re inventorying your perso

“Sometimes when I’m drunk with a pretty lady I claim that’s what it was. Actually the ankle got busted by a bouncer in Macao—a bar that looked kind of like this one. It wouldn’t have caused any trouble but it was set by some virgin surgeon who didn’t know an ankle bone from a hole in the ground. I can still run as fast as I need to. If that enters into your considerations.”

“Dwiggins told you the nature of the job.”

“Sort of. Your kid was killed by the people who snatched the Ambassador in Mexico. You’re not the type to go lying down on the tracks. That’s what he said. I see he had a point. You want them tracked down.”

“I want them to hang.”

His laugh was a bit cruel. “Here I’m the one who’s supposed to be the nihilistic professional but that’s as cold-blooded as anything I’ve heard in a while. What do you do for a living again? Produce films?”

“I don’t produce them. I direct them. Sometimes I write them.”

“Same difference. I don’t go to the cinema much. I think the last one I saw was My Fair Lady. Not counting some Roy Rogers movies on black-and-white TV sets dubbed into Portuguese.” He picked up her empty glass and went to the bar. She tried to compose herself. She’d expected a crude simple tough who would take her money and obey orders without questions. But on reflection she realized that type wouldn’t have been very useful to her. The thought startled her: Had her intentions been that unrealistic? Was she in fact merely going through the motions of something she didn’t really mean to carry through? Was her passion already cooling?

He settled into his chair. The table was hardly big enough for two glasses and four elbows. Crobey said, “Tell me about yourself, then,” contriving to look interested.

“What for?”

“I’m having a little trouble sizing you up. You’re a product of that lofty bit of WASP society where they take charm and wit for granted and that doesn’t sit too easy with the image of somebody who travels two thousand miles to sit in a grungy saloon hiring a middle-aged gunslinger.”

Middle-aged gunslinger. He had a curious way of regarding himself simultaneously as a romantic hero and a worn-out loser. In an odd way he reminded her of New York and the unwashed tramps who sat in Washington Square Park playing chess: at once quaint and repellent. Crobey was clean enough in the hygienic sense—he was close-shaven, he’d had a haircut recently, there wasn’t any grime under his fingernails—but he exuded the shabbiness of a well-worn coat, expensive once but gone green with too much use.

The jukebox began to thunder again. Crobey bellowed at the bartender: “Turn that thing down.”

The bartender’s black startled scowl came around to their table; after a moment Crobey’s expression impelled the man to go around to the end of the bar and reach behind the jukebox. The volume dropped to half its former decibels. The bartender returned to his slot without looking at Crobey again. It made Carole look at her companion in a new way: Something in him had terrified the bartender.

Apparently struck by the edge of the same reaction, the four black youths at the pin-bowl table strolled insolently out of the bar, one of them looking back over his shoulder, staring at Crobey.

She said, “I had a brother, a reporter—Warren Marchand. Did you know him?”

“Yes. He was all right. Kind of stupid to go in there and get killed the way he did, but I liked him. His stuff was good.” He pushed the tumbler of whisky toward her. “Now drink up and tell me everything you know about this situation.

He took her to a fish place for di