Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (9 page)

He turned, grinning from ear to ear. “Nothing, Hildegarde. Nothing at all. Only that pretty girl in the taxi, the one that was rattling off Spanish a mile a minute …”

“Well, what about her?”

“That,” he said, “is your former pupil, Dulcie Prothero.”

The schoolteacher’s eyes widened. “She? As pretty as that, eh?” She nodded. “Dulcie would turn out just like that!” she said. “She’d be good at languages. She was good at everything except deportment.”

“Anyway …” began the inspector. But Miss Withers was out of earshot.

“M
AIL ISN’T IN YET!”
snapped the woman behind the desk at the American consulate. She was a plump woman with streaked white hair, and looked rather like a character actress made up for a mother role, in costume and shoes that fit too tightly.

“I’m not expecting any mail,” said Dulcie Prothero. “Can you tell me please how to find somebody? Somebody that’s down in Mexico?”

“Look in the book,” said the woman. She pointed with her pen toward a register on a table near the door. “All Americans are supposed to sign their names, but some don’t.”

Dulcie had already looked in the book in vain. “You see, I really must find this person …” she began again.

“Mail isn’t in yet!” snapped the woman at a newcomer. It was a man, an exceptionally pleasant and well-dressed man with a beautiful tan and grayish wavy hair. He smiled down at Dulcie, small and lost looking, as she turned to go.

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Michael Fitz pleasantly, “perhaps I’m the person you’re looking for.”

Dulcie looked at him, shook her head.

The Fitz smile was engaging. “Then perhaps I can be of help to you. It’s a cinch that Old-Mother-East Wind won’t. Here’s my card—I’m something of a fixture down here in the American colony. Always finding apartments for somebody, or getting them out of a traffic ticket.”

“My problem is more serious,” said Dulcie politely. “Thank you, Mr. Fitz, but I’m afraid—”

“Wait,” he said. “Do I look like the Big Bad Wolf?”

“N-no,” she admitted.

“Well, then! We Americans must stick together. If you go running around the town, especially without knowing Spanish, you’ll get into all sorts of trouble. I know everybody in the city, and all the angles and all the shortcuts. And I’m at your service.”

“Well,” Dulcie admitted, “I’m looking for a man.”

“That ought to be easy—for you,” he said jovially.

“A certain special man,” she told him. “It’s a long story …”

Mike Fitz offered his arm. “We have a proverb down here that says ‘Long stories need long drinks!’ Or at least a good lunch. I know a place not far from here, about five minutes in a taxi …”

He was very nice in the taxi, Dulcie found. Didn’t even sit close to her, but chatted gaily and impersonally. “Teach me the Spanish for that proverb about the long stories,” she begged him. He taught her that and several more. “A bird in the hand is worth a hundred flying,” she repeated a moment later. “That’s much nicer than the other way, about birds in the bushes!”

“It’s true too,” Michael Fitz said. But he didn’t leer, not the slightest.

They inched down Madero in the midst of the late morning traffic, turned south for half a block, left the taxi.

“Oh, for goodness sake!” Dulcie said. Inside the door she was staring at the walls of the long darkish place, walls covered with anemic Harlequins and Pierrots and Pantaloons who seemed to be making merry with some very buxom and lightly clad ladies. “Are you sure this is a restaurant?” Dulcie said to her companion. “Looks like a bar …”

Fitz pouted. “Of course,” he told her, “you can eat here if you insist. But I don’t advise it. Always bad to eat on an empty stomach.” He waved at the waiter, who ushered them into a red-leather booth.
“Dos
champagne cocktails.” He gave her a long and interesting black cigarette which tasted, Dulcie thought, like the odor of burning leaves. Then he leaned upon his elbows, studying her white skin as if he wished to commit every soft brown freckle to memory. “Now then, drink your medicine and then tell your Uncle Mike all about it. You’re looking for a man.
A young
man?”

“Yes,” she answered quickly. “Younger than I. You see …” Mike Fitz listened, now and then ordering more cocktails.

“Waiter!” Fitz cried. The waiter was at the moment having his troubles in the next booth with an angular lady tourist who had obviously wandered into the Harlequin bar under the impression that it was a soda fountain, and who was demanding lemonade. “Lemonade with lemon, and not those nasty little green limes!”

Dulcie was talking, her eyes fixed across the shoulder of her companion on one of the disquieting frescoes. “Obviously, Grandfather found those four emeralds while he was on the sketching trip down here,” she said dreamily. “They were all he left when he died—besides the pictures nobody would buy. And then on one of the sketches my—my brother and I found a title,
‘El Cañon de las Esmeraldas’
!”

“The canyon of the emeralds, eh?”

“It was just a sort of smeary study of a rocky gorge with a few pine trees at the top, but in the background there was a mountain with snow on it.”

“Not much to go by,” Fitz pointed out. “Mexico has dozens.”

“Yes, but this mountain had a wisp of smoke coming out of it! There aren’t many volcanoes, are there? Anyway, my brother Bob thought he might be lucky enough to discover the place. He came down here—and when I’d sold all the emeralds but this little one”—Dulcie’s eyes dropped to the clear green oblong set in the clip on her shoulder—“I decided to come down and look for him.”

“You’re afraid he didn’t have any luck and couldn’t face—”

“Oh no,” she said. “I’m afraid he did find the canyon—and stayed. You see, Bobsie isn’t to be trusted when there are women around. And that,” concluded Dulcie Prothero, “is why I need help.”

In spite of its white softness, Fitz’s hand was surprisingly firm as he gripped hers across the table. “Count on me, all the way.”

Dulcie noticed that he didn’t let go of her hand, and that he was frowning a little, staring toward the entrance. “Someone I don’t want you to meet,” he explained quickly. “Couple of fourflushers I used to know. You can’t trust all your countrymen down here, you know.” He leaned farther into the booth and bent over Dulcie in an attitude indicative of deep absorption.

But she shook her head, and her lips noiselessly formed the word “Jiggers!”

Fitz turned and saw that two men had come up to the booth and were standing motionless. One was tall and gaunt and blue-chinned, the other was short and bulging beneath a big black Stetson. It was wonderful to see the expression of amazed and delighted surprise which came over the face of Mr. Michael Fitz. “Well, I’ll be a horned toad!” he cried, waving hospitably toward the opposite seat. “Sit down, sit down! We’ll drink to this. Meet a charming compatriot. The more the merrier, I always say.”

There was a silence. “We’ve already met on the train,” Dulcie said. “Mr. Hansen and Mr. Lighten, isn’t it?”

They both said hello. “We’ve been looking for you, Mike,” Hansen continued.

“In the Papillon and Mac’s and the Cucaracha,” Lighten added hoarsely.

“We’re not drinking,” Hansen said. He motioned.

Mike Fitz nodded. “Excuse me a
momentito,”
he asked Dulcie. “I’ll be back in a second or two.” He rose, slipped his hands companionably through the elbows of the two men, and they all walked back through the bar toward the
excusado,
disappearing around a corner.

Dulcie Prothero took out a powder puff, dabbed at the faint brown-gold specks along her nose. Then a shadow loomed beside her, a soft voice spoke in her ear.

“Am I protruding?”

It was no less than
Señor
Julio Mendez, sporting a malacca stick. He insinuated himself into the opposite seat, grinned amiably.

“Are you going to buy me a drink?” Dulcie demanded.

Julio edged toward her around the circular seat. Then he stopped suddenly. “I am not,” said he. “Because you’ve been ditching ’em behind this cushion,” he accused her. “It’s all damp. And with cocktails at four
pesos
is that a nice kind of trick to play on an old friend of the family?”

“Mr. Fitz is not an old friend of the family!” Dulcie said.

Julio looked surprised. “I thought that that
caballero
is always an old friend of the family, any family.”

“And if I want to ditch my drinks—”

“It’s hokey-doke on me,” he assured her. “Anyway, I have find you. Last night you slip away from the train without giving me your address in Mexico City.”

Dulcie’s smile denoted innocence. “It seemed to me that it was you who slipped away, about the time the police came on the train!”

“Well …” he began. Then suddenly, “How about ditching this Mr. Fitz and going places with me?”

“I—I can’t. He’s a very important man in the city, and he’s going to help me. Maybe he’ll give me a job to carry me until—until I can go back.”

Julio Mendez almost choked.

“Well, he is! A very nice person, and he owns a brewery and a plantation and a gold mine! And he’s got a beautiful apartment in the ritzy Principe building on the Paseo that he wants to show me!”

Julio was silent for a moment. “I would take you to Xochimilco,” he said softly. “We’ll ride in boats on the canal through the floating gardens of flowers, with
mariachis
following us playing old tunes. It is very, very romantic.”

“I didn’t come down here for—Sometimes I
hate
romance!” she said. Then she softened a little. “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she hinted. “And if you wanted to pick me up at the Hotel Milano and take me to the bullfights …”

Mike Fitz walked past them, obliviously. He went to the door with the newspaperman and Hansen. He nodded very many times as the departing Hansen said “Tomorrow night, then—at the latest!”

Julio hadn’t answered. Dulcie looked hurt. “But why the
Toreo?”
he finally asked. “There is so much of my country that is beautiful—the villages, and the road that runs to the craters of the Nevada de Toluca, and the
charros
in their gay costumes on fine Arab horses, and—”

“I think that bullfighting must be the most beautiful and thrilling spectacle in the world, and if you won’t take me I’m sure Mr. Fitz will be glad to!”

“He certainly will!” cried that gentleman, as he came back into the booth. His glance at Julio was not especially warm.

“An old friend from the train,” Dulcie said. After introductions there were perfunctory invitations to have a last drink and refusals of the same. Julio rose, yawned politely.

“One o’clock—
siesta
time,” he observed. “See you some more.”

Fitz and the girl moved after him, walking more slowly. The door closed behind them, and then suddenly it opened and they were back. The spinster in the next booth, having put aside the Spanish-Made-Easy with which she had been struggling, was about to leave. Her curiosity, however, got the better of her as she saw the girl and man pawing among the red-leather cushions of their booth, looking under the table …

“Lose something?” inquired Miss Hildegarde Withers. “Anything valuable?”

“Only an emerald pin!” cried Michael Fitz, red-faced from groping on hands and knees. “That’s all!”

The lobby of the Hotel Georges is decorated in the prevailing fashion of the
ciudad
of Mexico, which denotes furniture of extreme geometrical angles, with much glass and metal. In the midst of this somewhat unreal grandeur sat Oscar Piper, his nose buried in a four-day-old copy of the New York
Times.
A small brown man was shining his shoes, in a fury of noise and effort.

“Getting prettied up, Oscar?” inquired Miss Hildegarde Withers as she approached from the dripping outdoors.

“Third time today,” he confessed. “No sales resistance, and I don’t know the Spanish for ‘scram.’ How’s tricks with you?”

“Well, I—”

“Knew you wouldn’t get anywhere dashing off after that taxi,” he jeered. They both looked up as someone approached—a birdlike little old man closely followed by a birdlike little old lady.

“Oh, Inspector!”

Piper tried to stand up, to the discomfiture of the shoeshine expert. He introduced Miss Withers to Mr. and Mrs. Ippwing. “Of Peoria.”

“Great place to come from,” said Ippwing with a twinkle.

“And a great place to go back to,” his wife added loyally.

“We were just at the desk, to mail a letter,” Ippwing went on. “Had to write our invalid daughter back home all about the excitement on the train. We had a
murder
on the train!” he confided to Miss Withers.

The schoolteacher said fervently that she wished she had been there. “And it’s not over and done with yet, if you ask me!” Mrs. Ippwing went on. “Because our room is near the Mabies’ suite, and we heard them having a nice family argument over something. And just now—”

“Just now at the desk we heard the girl at the switchboard—lovely girl, speaks English just as good as you or me—and she was asking about plane reservations for Mr. and Mrs. Mabie!” Ippwing added.

“Running away!” was the little old lady’s parting shot. And they went blithely out into the inevitable rain of a summer afternoon in Mexico.

“Looks like the Mabies are taking your advice,” Piper said to the schoolteacher. She was playing an imaginary tune on the edge of the table.

“Oscar,” she demanded, “what sort of a man is Alderman Mabie?”

“Francis?” Piper blinked. “Age about forty-five, fond of thick steaks and thin wheat cakes, a good district leader, but not any ball of fire. Thought he’d help himself by marrying money, but hurt himself because the boys think he’s playing society. Plays a fair game of poker but overbets his hand and always stays in no matter what he is dealt.”

“His mind, his emotions?”

“Reads Eddie Guest. Cheers when the band plays ‘Dixie.’ Wears a carnation on Mother’s Day.”

“Women?” pressed the schoolma’am.

“Not especially. Why should he? Married to a good-looking, not too smart woman with a million or so?” Piper shrugged. “He would inherit, of course, if anything happened. But he was frank about it.”