A Game for the Living

  “Señor Bejar, por favor. Salvador Bejar.” Without thinking it out, Theodore had decided to speak to the boy, tell him he knew he had broken into his room, and offer not to inform the police if the boy would give back what he had stolen.

  “Señor Bejar has checked out, señor.”

  “Checked out? Are you sure?”

  “Seguro, señor. Only half an hour ago,” said the woman’s voice.

  “Gracias.” Theodore put the telephone down and walked around the room. He stopped and looked at Leo’s four brown feet, pressed them so that the claws came out like an eagle’s arching talons, but there was no blood and no thread on them. The boy was leaving town, he thought, and if he stopped him at the bus station or the railway station, he would have to call in police help. He had another idea, and he went out and ran down the stairs.

  The slim young bell-boy was carrying two suitcases across the lobby towards the door. Theodore intercepted him by stepping right in front of him.

  “One moment, please,” Theodore said.

  “I am busy, señor!” the boy said.

  “I’ll tip you, too. Where is your friend Salvador Bejar?”

  “I dunno. He left.”

  “For where?”

  “I dunno, señor.”

  “I think you know,” Theodore said quietly. “I’ll give you a hundred pesos if you tell me.”

  The boy shook his head impatiently, and got past Theodore with his bags.

  Theodore followed him out, and watched the boy load the bags into the boot of a large American car. “Come here,” Theodore said as the boy turned round.

  With an air of irritation, the boy came over.

  “This is important. A hundred pesos if you tell me where he went.”

  “I dunno!” the boy said, spreading his hands.

  “Did he go by bus or train?”

  “He left in a car—a hired car.” The boy’s eyes flickered around Theodore’s hands as if he expected them to move immediately to produce his tip.

  Theodore did reach for his wallet in his inside pocket and handed the boy the hundred pesos. “Now where did he go? Didn’t he tell you? Another hundred if you tell me where he went—or even make a good guess.”

  The boy looked down at the money in his hand.

  “And I will not report you to the management. Come on. You will never see Salvador Bejar again, will you?”

  The Americans were waiting for the boy to come back and help them, but the boy took Theodore by the sleeve, and said: “Come over here.”

  They stepped around a corner of the hotel.

  “He said he was going to Mexico, señor. It’s the truth.” The boy’s dark brown eyes looked at him directly, and with all the truth they possessed, Theodore supposed.

  “Thank you.” He handed the boy the second hundred and replaced his wallet in his pocket as he walked away. He was heading for a telephone-booth when Ramón came out of the dining-room and saw him.

  “What’re you doing, Teo? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, Ramón. I have to make a telephone call now,” Theodore said, walking on to the booth.

  “But what’s happened?” Ramón asked, alarmed and anxious.

  Theodore hesitated. Ramón seemed like a child out of control. There was no telling what he might be thinking—something worse than the truth, probably. “Let’s go upstairs. I can make the telephone call from there.”

  They trotted up the steps. The blood would at least prove that there had been an intruder, Theodore thought. And after he had told Ramón about Salvador Bejar, he would call Sauzas, who would have the policía stop every car coming into the city of Mexico. If he could not reach Sauzas personally, he would send a long wire, including the detail that the boy probably had a bad scratch on one of his hands or his face.

  Ramón stopped at the sight of the blood and gave a whispered exclamation.

  “Another robbery,” Theodore said. “This time my camera and I don’t know what else. And Leo has drawn the first blood,” he added, stroking the cat’s back. “I know who did this, Ramón, and who broke into my house, too. And perhaps who killed Lelia. It’s the boy who was with us in the cemetery—when we saw the mummies. Remember, Ramón? The fellow who came to me at the pension yesterday to tell me we could get rooms here. He followed us here from Mexico, in fact.”

  Ramón frowned. “What boy?”

  “You remember the young man with us in the corridor of mummies, don’t you?—Well, he was there, take my word for it. There was one other person besides us and the caretaker. Don’t you remember that, Ramón?” Theodore asked in a desperately pleading tone, but Ramón still looked at him as if he were out of his mind, or as if Theodore were trying to hoax him into believing something clearly untrue. “Well, Ramón, I didn’t rob my own room and sprinkle blood on the floor, now did I?” Theodore picked up the telephone and asked for long-distance to Mexico.

  “Do you know what you’re doing, Teo?” Ramón asked. “Did you see the boy come in here? You were with me all the while.”

  “I did not see him even when I brought Leo up from the garden, but I know—” He stopped to give Sauzas’s telephone number; then there was a pause. He and Ramón looked at each other.

  Then Ramón with an offended air turned and walked into his bedroom.

  Theodore told Sauzas about the robbery of his room, and described the clothing the boy had been wearing when he last saw him. Sauzas asked if Ramón had also been robbed.

  “Are you missing anything, Ramón?” Theodore asked.

  Ramón was standing in the doorway of his bedroom, listening. “I think I am missing my address book,” he said indifferently. “I think it was lying on the chest of drawers.”

  “His address book, he thinks, Señor Capitán. These things are not important, but I wish you would have the roads into Mexico watched so that we can find the boy. No doubt it’s too late now to stop him in Guanajuato. Señor Capitán, I don’t think I told you that the day I saw him in Mexico he rang my door-bell. He asked me if I had lost a muffler.”

  “A muffler?” asked Sauzas.

  “Yes. He had it in a paper bag under his arm. He talked in a sly way, I thought, and I—What’s the matter, Ramón?” Theodore asked suddenly, because Ramón’s eyes were boring through him, with hatred or incredulity.

  “Go on, Señor Schiebelhut,” said Sauzas.

  “That’s all. I told him I hadn’t lost any muffler. He said he found it in front of my house—and then he dashed off. I never saw the muffler, and I don’t know what he was up to.”

  “I see. Well, the roads will be watched, Señor Schiebelhut, every one of them into the city. I think I shall also alert the Guadalajara police in case he has gone in that direction.”

  “Good. Thank you, Señor Capitán. . . . Yes, I would like very much to see them. . . . Tomorrow evening, then. We’ll leave tomorrow morning. . . . Understood. As soon as we arrive. Adiós!” Theodore hung up and looked at Ramón.

  “The muffler you mentioned,” Ramón said. “I didn’t tell you that, Teo?”

  “Why, no. If you had—” Suspicion rose in him suddenly, like panic. “What do you know about it?”

  “A fellow asked me the same thing. I must have told you, and you’re just repeating it,” Ramón said, frowning.

  “When did a fellow ask you?”

  “I don’t know exactly when. It was before the postcard came, I think.”

  “And what did the fellow look like? Where did you see him?”

  “In front of my apartment house one day. I was going out—and he walked along beside me. I thought he was trying to sell me a muffler.”

  “Did you see the muffler?”

  “No. He had it in a paper bag. It happened just as you told it to Sauzas. I told him I hadn’t lost one a
nd I wasn’t interested, and he went away.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Shorter than I—”

  “Slim? About twenty or twenty-one?”

  “Maybe. I don’t remember.”

  “It’s the same boy. It must be. Now why does he want to get rid of the muffler, I wonder?” Theodore said, wandering across the room. “Whose muffler?”

  “It’s like a dream, Teo,” Ramón said, with a frightened edge in his voice. “Do you think we both could have dreamed it?”

  “No, Ramón. The fellow knows us. Maybe he knew Lelia. He stole my diary, and he knows a bit of English, too. . . . We have an appointment tomorrow night with Sauzas to look at some photographs. Criminals’ photographs,” Theodore said. “So this is our last day in Guanajuato. We ought to get an early start tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Theodore drove fast around the mountain curves, and he noticed that Ramón sat up two or three times in alarm. At least it was a reaction, Theodore thought, even a self-preservative one. In Morelia, he proposed lunch, but Ramón said he was not hungry, and Theodore drove on, eager to reach the capital.

  “The boy may be a robber, Teo, but it doesn’t mean he’s a murderer,” Ramón said.

  “We shall see.”

  “I know what the police will do if they catch him. They’ll keep him alone and question him and beat him until he’ll say anything just to get relief!”

  Theodore did not reply, only lighted a cigarette from the one he had been smoking.

  “And they’ll take his confession against mine, no doubt,” Ramón continued. “They speak of a man’s word in the law courts, and when he gives it, they don’t want it. They want something they can see and touch—bloodstains—witnesses—”

  “I hope you will see this boy, Ramón. You can see and touch him, all right!”

  “Yes! And I suppose that makes him guilty? In your mind it seems to! A youth twenty years old!”

  “I said I could believe him capable of it. They’ll have to question him, naturally. So meanwhile, why don’t you consider my judgment suspended?”

  Ramón gave a laugh. “Because it’s not! And since they’ve decided Ramón Otero is a madman or the next thing to it, nothing I do or say can help the boy.” Ramón folded his arms. “But I can try!”

  Theodore slackened his speed, because he thought it contributed to Ramón’s tension. Just as he had foreseen, Ramón would have to have every fact laid out for him before he believed the boy was guilty. And Theodore began to be afraid that not every fact would be available, in the form of something one could see and touch, and so Ramón’s illusion might continue in spite of everything. If the boy merely confessed, Ramón would still not believe him.

  Night was falling. Theodore saw the red lights of a Mexico, D.F., radio tower in the distance. Then lights appeared on both sides of the road. They were at the western end of the Paseo de la Reforma.

  “Here’re the policía,” Theodore said, slowing down.

  A pair of police officers were stopping cars ahead, looking inside them with torches, then motioning the cars to go on. The torch swept his and Ramón’s faces briefly, moved to the back seat and the floor of the car, then withdrew and signalled them to pass.

  “I hope they’ve already caught him,” Theodore said. “Maybe they have, and these men haven’t been notified.”

  “But wouldn’t he be coming in on this road?”

  “I suppose he could zigzag and take another road in. Or get out and walk.”

  Half an hour later they were at Theodore’s house, and Inocenza was greeting them like a delighted child. She brought the parakeet to Ramón. She told him she was trying to teach it to talk and asked him if he would give it a name.

  “It doesn’t matter. You may name him, Inocenza.”

  “Pepe,” she said at once. “Will that be all right, señor?”

  “All right,” Ramón said.

  Theodore was on the telephone, waiting for Sauzas to be found. “Would you put some ice in the bucket, Inocenza?” he asked her.

  Then Sauzas came on, and said that they had not found anything yet. “We are watching Morelia, of course, and tomorrow morning—Well, suppose I bring the photographs to you and maybe we can identify this fellow. . . . Very good, señor. In about fifteen minutes.”

  “They haven’t caught him,” Theodore said, hanging up.

  “Caught who?” Inocenza asked.

  Theodore related quickly the story of the second robbery, the missing camera and Ramón’s address book and the other things they missed finally—the stud-box and the five ties from the inside of the wardrobe door. He described the boy to her and asked if she thought she had seen him in the street.

  “I don’t know, señor. There are so many boys.”

  “Did any boy ever talk to you in the street?”

  “Sí, señor, but I do not talk to them. I don’t even look at them.” She frowned. “No, señor, I cannot remember a boy like this.”

  But there was Constancia, Theodore thought, more talkative than Inocenza. The boy could have found out from Constancia that they were going to Guanajuato, for instance. Theodore made himself a drink. Ramón declined one, and carried his suitcase—which he never let Inocenza carry for him—up the stairs to his room. Theodore told Inocenza that Sauzas was coming in a few minutes, and said they might all have some supper, if there was anything in the house.

  “Sí, señor. Cold chicken, guacamole, macedonia of fruits—”

  “Good. And be sure the heater is turned up. We’ll want a good hot bath tonight.”

  Inocenza called them to supper before Sauzas arrived, and they had hardly been served their plates when the doorbell rang. Inocenza flew out by the kitchen door and ran down the patio. The iron gates grated open.

  Theodore greeted Sauzas warmly and invited him to sit down at the table. Sauzas said he had eaten.

  “But if you are dining, I shall wait,” Sauzas said.

  “Oh, no! Ramón, you go ahead, if you like.”

  But Ramón had folded his napkin and stood up.

  Sauzas sat down on the sofa. “What could have happened,” he said, pulling some photographs out of a manila envelope, “is that our young friend saw that cars were being stopped at the entrance of the city, paid off his driver and got out and walked in. We are watching the bus stations, too. Is he this boy?” He handed Theodore a photograph about the size of a postcard.

  Theodore shook his head. “No.”

  “This one?”

  “Tampoco no.”

  “Take a look at these.” Sauzas spread out twenty or thirty pictures on the sofa.

  “This one! This is he!” Theodore said, seizing on one. It showed the boy in an open-collared shirt. There was no moustache. His smile was weak and shy in the thin, pale face.

  Sauzas rapidly lighted a cigarette, looked at the back of the photograph and said: “Salvador Infante. Twenty-one. Stole approximately seventeen thousand pesos from a jewellery shop—March sixth. That’s the day after your house was robbed, señor. You are sure it’s the boy?”

  “Absolutely sure. Look, Ramón. I want you to know what he looks like, too.” He handed Ramón the photograph.

  Ramón looked at it for a moment, then handed it back.

  “This is the fellow who was with us when we saw the mummies, Ramón.”

  Ramón did not reply.

  “Infante was employed as a messenger in the Palacio Real Silver Shop in the Avenida Juarez from December fifteenth until March sixth.” Sauzas looked up from the photograph. “On the night of March sixth, after hours, when only the cashier was there, totalling up the cash, Salvador got in, struck the cashier—a woman—and incidentally killed her, and got away with the money. At least we’re reasonably sure it was Infante, beca
use he never came back to work again. His parents have no idea where he is. But—we have no fingerprints from the shop. Only prints from some things in his parents’ house.”

  “He must have found out we were going to Guanajuato,” Theodore said.

  “Evidently. I learned from his employer that he’s a fluent talker, a fancy dresser, and likes the girls. We questioned two girl friends we were able to find, and neither knew where he was. His employer was about to fire him, because he didn’t trust him. That’s putting it mildly, eh?” Sauzas’s smile grew wider and he chuckled. “This is the kind of fellow who’ll spend all his money at once and attract attention to himself. He can’t help it. He drops clues everywhere for the police.”

  But they haven’t caught him yet, Theodore thought. “Señor Capitán—you said the Palacio Real Silver Shop?”

  “Sí señor. Why?”

  “Ramón! That’s the shop where I took Lelia’s necklace to be repaired. You know, the obsidian necklace that had a broken link? You remember, don’t you, Ramón? Just before I went to Oaxaca, Lelia said it was broken? One night when we were all there together?”

  Ramón nodded. “Yes. I think I remember.”

  “Did you see the boy when you went into the shop, Señor Schiebelhut?” asked Sauzas.

  Theodore shook his head. “I talked to an older man there about repairing it. But Lelia probably called for the necklace, and he may have seen her then. Or maybe the boy delivered the necklace. Do you remember, Ramón, if it was delivered?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “She didn’t say anything about a boy who brought the necklace to her? Try to remember, Ramón.”

  “I am trying. I don’t think she mentioned the necklace at all.”