Handed to him on a platter. He nodded indifferently over his leap of exultation, paid, drove away.
Juarez. He was familiar enough with the city to know that out of its many motels only three or four would appeal to Mary Vaughan and friend; he was, in fact, reasonably sure which one would be at the top of the list. He wondered a little about that lapse on the dark girl’s part—but then, how anxious would Mary Vaughan have been to impart the real motive behind this trip, and the necessity for keeping her tracks well covered?
What she had done was not easily confessable.
There were a couple of essential items missing from the suitcase he had packed so providentially to avoid his sister’s solicitude, but there would be time enough to acquire those once he knew where Mary Vaughan had gone to ground.
He chose the fastest bridge. He did not get lost.
“Libros,” repeated Mary doggedly to the desk clerk. She was making the discovery that the Casa de Flores was carelessly run under its surface pomp, and that when any smallest difficulty arose the staff elected, or had been instructed, to retreat behind a language barrier. She patted the air at shoulder height. “Mi carro.”
She had already been out to the car, parked humbly between a Continental and a Cadillac, and there was no sign of the books, three hardcover and three paperback, either there or on the surrounding cobblestones. Even apart from the pressing problem of something to read, because Juarez was innocent of English-language novels, they were books she wanted back. She also had a suspicion that the clerk had a perfectly good grasp of English, and was enjoy-ably watching her make a fool of herself.
She said crisply, changing her tactics, “When we arrived this afternoon, I put some books on top of my car while we were getting other things out, and they aren’t there now.”
The clerk studied her with keen attention as she spoke, as though he were a lip-reader, and then swept an arm around his small domain. He said, deliberately approximating her own command of Spanish, “You see? No books.”
“Then would you ask the bellboy, please?”
This brought a frown of impatience, much as if Mary ought to do her reading at home and not bother the clerk with it. He glanced around the lobby, consulted his watch, pulled out a sliding board evidently containing a schedule of some kind. “I am sorry.” He had clearly lost interest in the whole business and become intrigued with someone behind Mary. “Alfredo is not now on duty.”
“Can you tell me when he will be on duty, then?” Not for anything would she glance around. “I really must have those books back.”
The clerk shrugged, implying that this was as chancy as predicting earthquakes. “Nine o’clock?” he suggested.
There was nothing to do but accept defeat for the time being. Mary asked to be informed if her books turned up before the bellboy did, and left the desk with a casual look at what had so bedazzled the clerk. He wasn’t entirely to be blamed: it was a tall dark commanding woman in a gold sari, with a small but brilliant diamond fastened in her left nostril.
Strange, she reflected, going in search of Jenny and the pool and a swim of her own, the number of people who seemed to equate arrogance with elegance. The forecourt was crowded with cars, most of them costly, and their owners could not all be experimenters like herself; the Casa de Flores had been open for several months. It was considerably more expensive than other motels here, but the front-desk attitude, which generally reflected policy, appeared to be that guests should not trouble the management; they were lucky to be here at all.
A sound of splashing at the end of a tiled corridor led Mary to the pool. It was vividly blue, not much short of Olympic size, with the usual sprinkle of umbrella-shaded tables and, for the preponderance of people who came to pools for display or tanning purposes, long recliners. There was paging as well as bar service, because as Mary emerged into sunlight a voice rendered flat and atonal by travelling across water said, “Miss Beryl Oates, please, Miss Beryl Oates.”
As always when it was clear that a page was going to be unanswered, Mary was fleetingly tempted to identify herself as Miss Beryl Oates. What exotic messages were intended for these elusive people? “Air India has confirmed your reservation to Nepal”? “The judges were unanimous in their choice of yours as the prize-winning entry”? “Bring home a can of tomato soup”?
By five-thirty the warm gold of the sun was false, the air turning faintly crisp. The only people in sight were two children splashing in the roped-off shallow end of the pool, an elderly man in dark glasses recumbent on a long chair, and, at one of the umbrella-sheltered tables, Jenny.
Oddly, she looked less startling in her one-piece claret bathing-suit than she did in conventional attire. Sitting negligently on the end of her spine, all long milky arms and legs, black hair trailing, she might have been a water nymph, naturally not of the same dimensions as mortals. On the table beside her bathing-cap was a glass of iced tea, half full. Across from it was another glass, and an empty Carta Blanca bottle.
“How’s the water?” inquired Mary, and Jenny glanced up with a visible start; she had been unaware of any approach. “Oh—nice, but on the chilly side. If you’re going in, I ought to warn you that there’s a lot of chlorine.”
Which, curiously enough, had left the whites of her eyes unaffected. I’m not going to pry about her beer-drinking companion, thought Mary, but neither am I going
