The Marchand Woman

If the question surprised Crobey he gave no sign of it. “I don’t know,” he said.

“When did you see him last?”

“I don’t rightly recall.”

“I suppose I wouldn’t answer questions either if I were sitting where you’re sitting. It won’t help you to talk, will it—you have to assume we’ll kill you either way.”

“You won’t kill me right away,” Crobey said. “I might come in handy as a hostage.”

Chapter 18

She soaked small wads of cotton in the last of the witch hazel and placed them on her eyes and tried to relax. She’d only slept in fits and starts for the past two nights and it looked as if this one would be no different. At midnight she’d gone around the house checking the restraints on the two prisoners—Emil Draga in the front room and Stefano, who was small and ruddy and middle-aged and not frightening at all, in the bedroom. He had a fuzzy mustache and comical buck teeth and a wart on his lip and he told amusing stories about his family in south Florida. It was Stefano who had told her the sequence of incidents that had climaxed in Robert’s death.

And these, she thought, were the terrorists who had so exercised her.

She had spent a great deal of the past twenty-four hours resisting what Stefano had told her. She did not want to believe any of it and it was quite possible Stefano was lying: He had every reason to coat the truth with opaque paint. He claimed he didn’t know which man had actually shot Robert.

Robert.…

Before dark she had made sure all the lights were extinguished. Now, making her hourly rounds, she carried the revolver into the front room and had a look at Emil Draga. The smell of his sweat clouded the room. He seemed asleep. She went back to the kitchen. The waiting had gone far past dragging on her nerves; it had numbed her. She drank coffee and sat with her hands flat on the table, drooping in the humid heat, listening to the rain drum against the roof. It must be two or three in the morning. She had the jitters but attributed that to the coffee; fatigue prevented her from stirring. This afternoon she’d gone into the bathroom and studied herself in the mirror and judged she must have added a minimum of five years to her visible age in the past week’s time. I look older than Harry does.

It didn’t matter. She’d taken three showers today but nothing helped. She felt sticky—the heat perhaps, but a Freudian would have found interesting speculations in that persistent feeling of un-clea

Was it possible that one day—if she lived to be old enough—she would be able to forget this nightmare aberration? The absurdities of it piled up one upon the next and she could not cope with them any longer. She cast a dulled eye at the coffee cup between her hands. Harry, come back here and take me away from all this. I’ll show you Las Vegas and Palm Springs and we’ll never be without Dewar’s and cologne and clean sheets again.

It had gone beyond the unreality of a dream. It had become the unreality of a failed movie: The kind where the director, the producer, the writer and each player in the cast had a completely different notion of what the movie was about. The sort of movie—A Touch of Class came to mind—that started out as a farce and ended up a dreary melodrama.

Something alerted her. She snatched up the gun and went to the window, stumbling against the sink in the dark. Nothing out there but blackness; the rain pummeling the house. She felt her way to the corridor and looked both ways. She’d left the twenty-five-watt light burning in the hall closet, the door open two inches, and it threw a bit of light both ways, enough to see the hall was empty. She looked in the bedroom: Stefano smiled, his buck teeth glistening in the soft light. She went on to the front room and Emil Draga was tugging petulantly at the handcuffs and he wasn’t going to strip them off over those big knobby hands and she left him to it, prowling back through the house, wondering if perhaps it hadn’t been merely the faint metallic struggle of Emil’s manacles.

The back door began to open.

She lifted the revolver in both hands and pulled the hammer back.

“Don’t shoot me.” Gle

She kept looking past him, looking for Harry. She lowered the gun slowly, easing the hammer down, waiting.

“He’s not coming.” Anders, visibly in the last stages of exhaustion, lifted both hands a few inches from his sides in a gesture of helplessness. “I’m alone.” Then he staggered past her, pushing himself along the wall with both hands, lurching into the kitchen. She heard the muted crash when he dropped into one of the chairs; its legs scraping the floor. She went in and Anders’ arms slid out across the table, knocking the coffee cup off—it shattered on the floor and Anders dropped his head onto the table.

For the longest time she only stared at him. Then with somnambulistic deliberation she opened the refrigerator door and propped a chair there to keep it open. The light exposed Anders’ profile and she saw his eye was swollen almost shut and scabbed with blood.

He muttered, slurring the words so badly she could barely make them out, “They didn’t spot me. I don’t think they spotted me. They were banging around up there, looking for tracks I guess, but it started raining again, harder than hell and I’m sure that must have washed my tracks out. They didn’t follow me. I guess they think he was alone.”

In a fury she snatched a handful of his hair and jerked his head up off the table. Anders whimpered. She threw him back so that he sat more or less upright in the chair. Now she could see his face clearly for the first time: His eye was a mess and something had clawed great red welts down his cheek.

“Where’s Harry?”

“They took him.…” She watched him gather himself with a terrible effort of will. “He was alive the last I saw of him. I heard a shot—by the time I got to where I could see through the jungle they were marching him down into the camp. He was limping but then he always limps. I don’t think he was hurt. They’ve captured him, see. I guess they’ll work on him till he talks. We found the guard they’d posted on the trail, you see, we hit him with Mace and handcuffed him to a tree with a gag in his mouth and then we went in to scout the place but one way or another Harry got unlucky and they spotted him. I don’t know how it happened, I didn’t see it. I was still back in the woods and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do for him, there were eight or ten of them scattered around the camp and mostly they had guns. I thought about shooting the camp up, driving them to cover and giving him a chance to run for it but Harry can’t run with that leg of his and it just wasn’t any use. Honest to God I’d have tried if there’d been any chance. But what was the sense of getting myself killed if it couldn’t do him any good? I got the hell out of there, didn’t make any noise at all.…”

“He’s alive?”

“He was the last I saw of him.”

“Were they hurting him?”

“Not that I saw. Nobody was beating up on him or anything. They had him at gunpoint—they took him prisoner.”

“What happened to your face?”

“I got lost in the dark. Slipped in the mud and fell into a goddamned cactus. I can still see—it didn’t blind me, maybe it looks worse than it is. But Jesus, I feel sick as a dog.”

“Why don’t you see a vet,” she said with a violent contempt. She wheeled away from him and kicked the chair aside and slammed the fridge shut and tried to think.

She tried to cleanse the wounds on his face. She found a small bottle of iodine in the bathroom and boiled up a pot on the stove and dropped a torn section of bedsheet into the boiling water, retrieved the cloth with a fork and let it cool a bit and then went at his face with it, not as gently as she might have; she was disgusted with him.