“He’s guilty. He’s guilty as hell.”
“Very possible, señorita. Even very likely. But the case lacks completion. There are the loose ends to gather. In the meantime, he is secure. Believe me, the police of my country are not the children playing a man’s game. It is better that you leave these things in my hands.”
A deep breath fluttered her lips. The whisper came straight my way now, skipping Tellez. “You killed Ivan, and you’ll die for it. Tonight you stood in that hot room and stabbed him from behind because you’re a lousy little man who can’t even hang on to a wife, and if it’s the last thing I do on earth, I’ll see you as dead as he is.”
I looked at her for a moment, feeling sick, and it seemed impossible that anyone could feel like that about a harmless sort of guy who had done nothing worse than write a best-seller.
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks very much.”
Then, not looking at anyone, I turned and went out and back to my own room. I walked over to the glass doors which were open onto the balcony, and I stood there for a long time, maybe half an hour, feeling the cool air on my face and looking at the improbable stars. They were so close that it seemed I could reach up and rake them down with my fingers. I thought that it would be a satisfactory conclusion to everything if I could reach beyond them to the black velvet sky and pull the whole works down upon a world that had gone both barren and mad. I didn’t even hear Hannah come into the room behind me. I didn’t know she was there until she spoke.
“Carey,” she said.
I turned. Her eyes were no longer blind. They were filled now with a kind of general sorrow for the things that happened and the people they happened to. People like her and me and maybe Ivan.
“Did you kill him, Carey?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t kill him.”
It must have been the answer she expected, for she accepted it.
“I came to ask you that question, and one other. This is the other one: Do you believe something that seemed bigger than the world, bigger than you or anything that ever happened to you before, could end utterly and finally without warning or reason? No, don’t answer. I only want to tell you that it can. Tonight, when Ivan took me to my room, I thought I would love him forever, and there was no question in my mind, but then, all at once I didn’t love him at all. I stood there on my balcony, and I only knew that I was terribly lonely and needed someone very much, and it was you I needed. It was like waking suddenly from an impossible dream. I kept thinking about things that happened to us, little things and big things, and I knew that I would have to have you back or die. That’s the reason I went to Ivan’s room, to tell him this.”
So the world wasn’t ending, and I wasn’t dying. In that instant, with everything coming alive inside me with the wonderful organic pain of birth, I knew who had killed Ivan. The realization was almost parenthetical, a sudden aside of small recollection tucked into the principal clause of Hannah’s homecoming. I went over to her and put my arms around her, and it was as if she’d never been away.
“Ivan?” I asked. “Who the hell is Ivan?”
It was fine then, there in the room with the cool air coming through the open doors from the Mexican night, and after a while she went to sleep. I waited a little, and then I went out and back up to Eva Trent’s room. I knocked and kept knocking until she opened the door, still in the ice blue robe, and stood looking out at me. I heard her breath catch sharply in her throat.
“You’re good,” I said. “You ought to be on the stage. All that love…all that hate. But now I know you killed Ivan yourself. I know because I remember what you said, and I’d have caught it at the time if I hadn’t been stupid with alcohol. In that hot room, you said, and it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t hot because I opened the windows and let the night air in. But it was hot earlier, when I found him dead. And even earlier than that, when you killed him. Have you decided as yet whether it’s hanging or shooting?”
Then, without sound, the plump little man named Smith was behind her with a gun in his hand.
“Come in, Mr. MacCauley,” he said.
There was no sensible alternative, so I went.
“So that’s how you vanished so easily,” I said. “A simple matter of moving from one room to another.”
He chuckled pleasantly. “These things can always be arranged, just as Ivan’s death was arranged…just as yours will be.” His eyes flicked over to Eva Trent. “I hardly know why I bother, really. Such a stupid mistake, my dear. I’ll have to think of an appropriate penalty.”
I shifted weight, and the gun jerked significantly in his hand.
“You mentioned the border,” I said. “That much, I think, was real. You ought to know, because you direct the operations that run across it, whatever they are. It must be quite an organization, and Ivan wanted out. The poor guy was really gone on Hannah, and he wanted out. So you put him out, very permanently. With me around, a guy discarded, a perfect patsy, the setup was perfect. Just get me in the right area at the right time, and the whole thing took care of itself. With Eva’s help, of course.”
He shrugged. “It’s dangerous to have apostates in an organization like mine. The risk is too great. Ivan understood that. He has only himself to blame.”
It was late. For me, almost too late. Even as he spoke, my muscles were drawing tight, and I
