Speak to Me of Immortality

Jorge O'Brian Gomez spoke softly into the telephone. It was a spidery handset, but for all its grace it was heavy. It was gold.

"Sì, sì," Gomez said. "Claro. No, nada. Finito."

He let the instrument slip through his fingers into its cradle. He walked to the door. He looked like a big clockwork toy, staring ahead, his heels driving into the soft carpet. Under the carved arch-way he turned and looked back at the room that had been the center of his world. It had cost a quarter of a million dollars to furnish this office to the taste of Jorge O'Brian Gomez. It was a shame to leave it to the barbarians from the south country, mountain men most of them, horsemen from the vast savannas, miners, scum of every kind, but it was not as if he were giving it up forever. He had gone away before, and come back, and he would again.

The infantryman on post at the map room snapped an arm across his chest in salute. Gomez wondered where the fellow would be in twenty-four hours. He was quite sure he knew where the head would be: it would decorate one of the wrought-iron posts of the fence around the Palacio. The body? Hard to say.

The map room was soundproofed, and so when the door was opened the racket came as a blow in the face: bedlam, hysteria, madness. Gomez let it slam and the shouting tailed off in a single gurgling choked-down oath. A teletype machine rattled in the sudden silence.

"Tomas," the little man said, "what is the situation?"

A colonel answered him. "It is distressing, sir," he said. "An armored column, twenty-five vehicles, has appeared just north of Casefiento. We did not even know of its existence. Here, below Mireflore, there is heavy infiltration, the first units of Jiminez' outfit; the garrison at Columbo has defected, and the rebels reached the shore, here at Nagua, over an hour ago. Further..."

Gomez waved him into silence. "You will see all this change soon," he said. "I have ordered an armored attack across the entire peninsula. Keep up your spirits. There is nothing to fear. Nothing whatever! Tomas, come with me."

Their heels banged on the marble floor; they walked quickly.

"All that information is an hour old," Gomez said. He had a hard, rasping voice. "Hopeless! They are within ten miles of the city this minute, and coming like the wind. What is worse, an underground squad hit the blue airfield fifteen minutes ago. We are nailed."

"Ah!" Tomas said. "The blue one? That happened?"

"It happened," Gomez said. "We waited twenty-four hours too long. Within ninety minutes they got the yacht, the white airfield and then the blue one. We are nailed down."

"You will go to Hadrian?" the colonel asked.

"No," Gomez said. "Two people know about Hadrian's, and that is two too many. I have a different idea." He stopped before a small door, brass and mahogany. He offered his hand to Tomas. "Best luck!" he said. He smiled and nodded and opened the door. Best luck, indeed. The man was six feet four. In a crowd he stood out like a lighthouse in a dark night. He'd be ripped into dog meat before he had made two city blocks from the Palacio. Pity.

Gomez drove his thumb into a button and cedar doors at one end of the room slid open to reveal an enormous closet. There were fifty-odd uniforms at one end, more than a hundred suits at the other. Gomez thrust himself into the clothes like a weasel down a burrow. He backed out with a package in his hand. It was dusty. He shook it open: a cheap straw hat, thong shoes, pants, white cotton shirt.

Ten minutes later, his face and hands blackened, he was on the street. Within the hour, and having walked every foot of the way, he was breathing the winy air of Haraguato. The houses were nearly all dark, squared off under the ancient, crouching trees; from the shore, a mile away, the sea wind brought the rolling boom of the surf, sifting it through the pine woods. In the city behind him he could hear bursts of small-arms fire, snapping in strings like baby firecrackers.

When he came to Delgado's house he passed it, went around the block and entered from the rear. One room was lighted. He found a door and knocked. Silence. An overhead light came on. In a narrow window, a curtain moved. Gomez took off his hat, ran a handkerchief hard across his forehead. It came away black with greasepaint. He turned in profile to the window. Then he clapped his hat on his head and gestured rudely toward the door. Within a count of twenty it had swung softly open and he was inside.

They stood in the dark, he and Tonio Delgado.

"I hardly knew you, Jorge."

"They knocked off my emergency airfields, both of them," Gomez said. "I find myself, as it were, nailed."

"No boats?"

"Would I be here?"

"Give me your hand."

They moved through the house on the cool tiles. A door closed behind them and a light snapped on.

"There is no window in this room," Delgado said. The walls were white plaster, and it was small. There were two rattan chairs, a leather couch, a rosewood cupboard.

"Brandy?" Delgado asked.

Gomez shook his head impatiently. "They'll have the city by dawn," he said. "Then the ropes will be cut. It would be idiotic to move, and I am no idiot. I made one mistake: I waited twenty-four hours too long. I will correct that mistake by waiting another month, or two months, or three. You understand me, Delgado?"

"Yes," Delgado said. "Certainly. But where? Wait where?"

Gomez smiled. "Here, my friend," he said. "Here with you."

Delgado poured brandy, and the neck of the carafe jangled on the glass' edge.

"It will be no problem for you," Gomez said. "It is well known that we quarreled four years ago. It is well known that I have not seen you since. You have behaved yourself. You have been hedging your bets. You have friends in the mountains."

Delgado said nothing. He was looking into his second glass of brandy, his thin hand curled tightly around it. The belt of his white silk dressing gown had come untied, and one end of it dangled limply to the floor.

"I notice you do not say, 'But where with me?'" Gomez said. "That is good. I would think that unkind of you. Because you told me six, maybe seven years ago, and I have not forgotten. I rarely forget. You know that. I will stay in the nice little hide-out that opens off your wine cellar. You remember telling me?"

Delgado remembered. In that time, he and the general had been friends. It had been a fruitful collaboration. Delgado was still well off. Had the general not felt that his happiness required Carola to spend four days with him in Maraguey, they would still be friends; Delgado would be really a rich man, and he would now be running for his life and wondering if the mob would choose to burn his house or raze it flat. Seen in that obscure and twisted fashion, he owed Gomez something. Still he cursed himself. I need not have told him, he cried silently, I need not have told him! He had lived in the big house in Haraguato for five years and more before he had stumbled into the secret room. It had been beautifully and elaborately made: it lay behind a set of stone shelves in the wine cellar, dug out under the lawn. It measured ten feet by twelve by eight feet high. It held a toilet and a washbowl, a cot, chair, desk; an electric light hung from the low ceiling and a fan and a hand bellows ventilated it. With someone to feed him, a man could live for years behind the wine cellar.

"We are wasting time with this nonsense," Gomez said. "Let's go. Carola is in the house?"

Delgado nodded.

"You must tell her, naturally. And no one else. And this is what is important: There is to be no change in your pattern of living. You hear me? No change!"

"I'll get some blankets," Delgado said.

"Yes, and some bread, some meat," Gomez said. "We'll take wine from the cellar. Nothing else. Nothing you have to explain. Understand?"

"I understand," Delgado said.

The cell door was latched in three hidden places, one for each hand, one for a foot. The wall swung open.

Gomez stood in the doorway and peered in. "On the one hand," he said, "I am happy to see this hole. On the other, I am horrified." He turned to Delgado. "The fruit of a single error, my friend," he said, "is sometimes terrible to contemplate. You, I am sure, will make no error?"

"None," Delgado said.

"Good. Until tomorrow night, then. Is there any way to communicate with you before then?"

"No, Jorge," Delgado said. "None. That is one of the indications of intelligence in the man who planned this room. Undoubtedly he considered the circumstances that a searching party might be in the house, and just at the wrong time...for the same reason, there is no means of opening the door from within."

"Clever," Gomez said. "I bid you goodnight, and many thanks."

"Good-night," Delgado said.

He found Carola awake. "What have you been doing?" she said grumpily.

He slipped a hand under her neck. "Get up," he said. He drew the covers down and lifted her. "Come," he said. "Up." She said no more, and he steered her into the bathroom. He opened the cold-water tap in the basin.

"Splash some on your face, my dear," he said. "Wake up."

Sleepily, she did as he asked. A handsome woman, he thought, at any hour of the day or night. Her hair hung in two long plaits down her back. Her bare feet curling on the warm rough bathroom rug, her head came barely to his chest, and the fabric of her nightgown, almost light enough to float, gave her the look (continued on page 96) speak to me of immortality (continued from page 44) of a nude seen through a warm morning mist at the sea's edge. He pulled her to him and bent to her ear.

"Jorge O'B is in the cellar," he whispered. "In the hide-out. He came half an hour ago, dressed like a peon. Naturally, he was set to run, but the Serronistas moved faster than he expected. He is far too clever to try to run now, with a million people hoping for a chance to tear him limb from limb. He will wait. Here."

He moved away, to look at her. She stared at him, her eyes wide.

"How long do you think?" she said.

"No idea," Delgado said. "He will want to go as soon as he can, but remember, this is a shrewd, cold man. He will not go too soon. He wants to live to spend the money, be sure of that."

"Much?" Carola said.

Delgado laughed shortly. "Say fifty million in Switzerland, in number accounts. Say twenty-five in Spain, twenty-five in the States, and odds and ends scattered around in other places."

"That much?" she asked.

"More, maybe," he said. "He was wearing a money belt when he came in, I imagine it's full of thousand-dollar bills."

"Tonio, what can we do?"

"Nothing. Nothing. We must pretend to ourselves that he is not there, that there is nobody in the cellar. That's our only hope. They will not come here to look for him for a long time, if ever. If we keep our heads, we are safe enough, for now!" He spun the faucet shut and led his wife back to bed. They lay quietly in the cool darkness. He found himself straining to hear a sound from the cellar. Idiot! he told himself. The man could beat a drum and scream like a tiger down there, and not a sound would be heard. Carola turned to him.

"Tonio, I am very frightened," she said.

"So am I, pigeon," he said. "So am I."

"I keep thinking he will hear us," she said.

"He can hear nothing," Delgado said.

"Ah, I know, I know," she said.

The search for Jorge O'Brian Gomez had no precedent in the tumultuous history of the country. Since the rebels were certain that his presence in Havana or Miami or New York or Paris could not have escaped notice, and since they had seized his means of escape, they were convinced he had gone underground. To think that they might lay hands upon him excited them; his mere existence was a danger, and a reward of twenty-five thousand dollars gold had been posted. The search was unremitting and vigorous.

Serrano himself shouted to the crowds, "We will find The Monster no matter what the cost – in time, in money, in blood. We will find him! We will hang him in chains! He will rot!"

Gomistas who were known to have been close to the general fared poorly during that first month. A good many of them died under the urgent curiosity of the rebels, and many more recorded, at the tops of their voices – those of them who had voices left – their wish to do so, and promptly. Delgado told Gomez some of this, every night when he opened the door at twelve o'clock.

"They killed Pedro Marti yesterday," he said. "They had tortured him for thirty-seven hours straight. Grinde shot himself: they made him watch while his daughter was raped and then turned him loose to think it over. So far, we know of over fifty they have killed in the belief they knew where you were."

Gomez shrugged. "An omelet requires broken eggs. As for you, relax. Have you noticed anything? Are you being followed, or anything like that?"

"No, I'm sure not," Delgado said. He watched Gomez trot up and down the cellar, exercising himself. He was white as a mushroom. He had lost ten or fifteen pounds. He was edgy, but he was in command of himself. The obsessive attention to detail that had marked him all his life was fully evident. He thought of everything. There was the matter of the shower, for example. Every other night he bathed. The ritual was precise. Every door and window in the house was locked and curtained. Carola was posted at a window to watch. Then Gomez and Delgado, both undressed, went to the bathroom, Gomez to bathe, Delgado to stand guard at the door.

"Of course you must undress when I do," Gomez had said impatiently. "Where are your brains? Supposing a search party comes when I'm in the shower? Very well, I run for my hole. But how do you explain the wet shower if you are not undressed? Tell me that, idiot?"

In the fifth week he said it would be better if Delgado watched, and Carola stood guard.

"It would not do," Delgado said. "I have no night vision. I can't see around the corner at night. I never even drive a car after sunset."

Gomez grinned at him. "That's better," he said. "You can think fast when you have to, can't you?" He padded downstairs, chuckling to himself.

The next night he stated the matter more clearly.

"I am managing this very well," he said. "I am even reasonably content. But one thing is beginning to bother me: I want a woman. Since I was fifteen, I have not gone this long without a woman."

"I thought of the same thing," Delgado said. "I have an idea: we could have a small party. Among the guests would be ..."

"Stop right there," Gomez said. "Any plan you have thought of has a fatal flaw: it involves letting someone outside know where I am. So? Save your breath. I am not interested."

Delgado was silent.

"Tomorrow night let me have Carola for a couple of hours," Gomez said.

"Jorge," Delgado said. "You are in my house. We are risking our lives to keep you here. It is enough."

"No, my friend," Gomez said. "It is not enough. I want a woman, and of all the women in the world – think of that – of all the women in the world only one is available to me: Carola. Therefore I will have Carola. Tomorrow."

"No."

"Tonio, listen to me. I will some day leave this house. Then, I can reward you or I can punish you as I please. You have no alternative. You don't believe that? You can turn me in? How will you explain that I am as pale as a shark's belly, eh? As for me, I will be forced to tell them you have held me prisoner here hoping for a bigger reward. They will cut you into very thin slices, my friend! And if not their people, mine. Those who know where I am."

"I should kill you," Delgado said "Now."

"Of course you should," Gomez said. "But, alas, you cannot." He smiled his little smile. "So, you will do the other thing." He walked into the hole. "Lock my door, like a nice man," he said. "And tomorrow night, have Carola at the bathroom door. I will take a chance on your night vision! I'm a brave man. I will take that little chance."

"I will not do it," Delgado said.

"You will," Gomez said. "And, goddamn you, stop acting as if you were giving me your life. After all, what is another slice off a cut loaf? I have had the girl before, you know. When I took her to Maraguey you lived through it, didn't you? You can live through this, too. Now lock me up, and go away. You act like a wet-nosed boy."

Delgado locked the door and went upstairs.

Carola was asleep. She woke quickly.

"I have been in the cellar," he said.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"Everything. What I've been expecting. He wants a woman."

A little puff of breath whistled through her lips. "Ah, ah," she said. He lay staring at the ceiling, ice blue in the moonlight. The curtains rustled sadly, and the harsh cry of a tolero bird floated in on the night wind.

"The thing to do," he said, "is run. Pull out. Run for the States."

"Run for the rest of our lives, you mean," Carola said. "If, if we could run at all. How can we get out of the country? Impossible now, you know that."

"I told him we could bring him a girl, somehow," Tonio said. "And we could! It could be done. But he won't hear of it."

"It could only be someone we know and trust," Carola said. "It could only be a good friend. We have no right to burden anybody with that, with knowing where he is. It's out of the question."

"So is the alternative," Tonio said. "My God, I can't even think of it! That blood-soaked son of a bitch."

Carola sat up. "Look, Tonio," she said, "that, that time before, the other time, if we had said no, he'd have killed you. Wouldn't he?"

Delgado nodded dumbly.

"This time," she went on, "he will kill you too. Only later. Then, he would have done it the next day. Now, in six months, in a year, who knows? And after you, me. No." She threw the covers back. "For me, I can stand it. I am only sorry for you. Please don't hate me, that's all. Just don't hate me."

"I cannot even kill myself," Tonio said. "I can't even do that."

"It is not a lifetime," she said. "In another month surely he will want to go." She leaned over and kissed him. She got out of bed.

"Tomorrow night, he said," Tonio told her. "Not tonight! Tomorrow!"

She shook her head. "Dreading it is worse," she said. "I'll go down now. Go tell him. "I'll be down in a minute."

When he had put a pot of coffee on the back of the stove and laid a place on the table, Delgado led his wife down the stairs. He swung the stone door open. Gomez stood there, smiling. "You are very kind people," he said. "And very sensible. Come in, my dear, come in." He held out his hand. "You may open the door at three, Delgado," he said. "Just at three."

"Ah, my friend," Gomez said when he saw Delgado the next night. "You have lived through it, as I thought you would! It was not so bad, eh? Anything is bearable, isn't that true?" He began his interminable jog across the cellar, and his voice rose and fell as he ran away and came back. "I am very grateful to you; never mind that I had to force you to do it, I am grateful anyway. What a dear girl, Carola! I had forgotten how lovely she was, to my shame. And another thing—she might have been bitter, she might have been cold and resisting, but she was not, she was not!" He trotted toward Delgado, his little brown eyes glistening in the halflight. "But I am being indelicate now. I must not offend you. You are my host, after all. Isn't that right?"

"Yes," Delgado said. "I am your host, all right. The complete host, that's me."

"Exactly." Gomez was puffing a little.

"Exactly. And when I get out... and get my hands on some serious money... you, my friend, are a millionaire!"

"Big of you," Delgado said.

"Be as bitter as you like... I don't care about that... I'll give it to you anyway. I can spare it! As soon as I get out of here."

"And when will that be?"

"In another month, I think." He jerked himself to a halt in the middle of the room. "These pigs have killed a lot of people, but they have not killed the ones I need. The ones I need they have never thought of: like you. Hah! They make me laugh. They will never get near me. I'm an immortal. I will live forever. And I will be remembered when Serrano is not even a footnote."

"You still have to get away safely," Delgado said.

"Simple," Gomez said. "In a little while now you'll mail a letter for me, one letter. Two weeks after that I'll be in New York. With warm and happy memories, thanks to you and dear little Carola." He stretched himself. "Well, back into the cave," he said. "By the way, I didn't tell Carola. You tell her. Tomorrow night. I look forward to it. Believe me, I do."

Delgado stared at him and the blood pounded in his head. Gomez lifted one hand.

"Please," he said. "You aren't going to start another silly argument, are you? We have discussed this matter, remember? Tomorrow night, I said."

It is possible, I suppose, Delgado told himself, for a man to get used to anything. He sat on a three-legged stool in the wine cellar and drank brandy. Every fifteen or twenty minutes he went upstairs to look around. At three he opened the door and took his wife upstairs. He ran a bath for her. He waited for her to come to bed, waited for her to go to sleep. After the first two or three times she was never awake for long, and usually by the time full dawn lay softly bright in the room he was asleep too. The alternate nights were somehow worse. He had felt at first that he should take her in his arms, somehow to show her that they were still one, that nothing could happen that would part them, but after the first week she would not accept him.

"I can't," she said. "I just can't. I cannot go from him to you and from you to him, I can't and I won't!" She rolled away from him, and huddled on the other side of the bed, her knees under her chin.

He reached out for her. "Carola," he said. "Let me go down and shoot him. Anything is better than this. My God, the man is destroying us, he's tearing us to pieces."

"Be sensible," she said. "What would be the point of that? His friends would kill us both, in good time. Besides, don't you see, if you killed him now, the whole thing would be pointless? Everything I have done I would have one for nothing! The time to kill him was before, if at all. Now, it makes no sense." She pulled the covers to her chin. "I'm going to sleep," she said.

Two or three times a week, in the first month or so, there had been police raids in Haraguato, once only two houses away, but no one knocked on Tonio Delgado's door. He went to the city every day, to his office, and while there was little work for a lawyer during the reorganization of the courts, still no one molested him. In the evening Carola and Tonio would have dinner and watch the television, and wait until it was time for him to go to the cellar, or for both of them to go to the cellar. The pattern was so unvarying that he became absurdly sensitive to its rhythm. The only ungoverned factor lay with the servants, the housekeeper, the maid, the cook, and the gardeners, but Carola watched them carefully.

"Are you sure none of the servants was in the wine cellar today?" Delgado said one night.

She looked up slowly. "Yes, I'm sure," she said. "Why?"

"Look," he said. "Listen to me. This is very important. Tonight, when I went down, a wine bottle had been moved."

Carola laughed. "One wine bottle in all those hundreds?" she said. "How could you know? You're getting jumpy. You imagined it."

"Nothing of the sort!" he said. "It wasn't just one bottle out of hundreds, it was the one next to the right-hand latch, a dusty one. I've always been careful not to touch it, so that it would look as if it had never been moved. Tonight, it was a good inch away from where I'd left it. Somebody had touched it, I tell you!"

"But who?" Carola said. "The wine cellar is locked and I never let anyone unlock it, you know that."

"It's very strange," Tonio said. "Maybe I did imagine it, but I don't think so."

"I marvel we haven't both been seeing things under the bed," she said. "After all, darling, this is the ninth week he's been here, do you know that?"

"Yes," he said. "I know that. It's the ninth week, the fourth day, and, exactly, the twentieth hour."

"They haven't even mentioned his name on a television program for a week now," she said.

"Oh, it's cooling off," he said. "I'm sure he'll go soon."

"And you'll be a millionaire," she said gayly.

He stared at her. "How do you know that?" he asked.

"Oh, Jorge told me what he'd promised you," she said.

"When did he tell you that?" Delgado asked.

"Night before last," she said. "That or the time before, I forget. He mentioned it casually."

"You like the idea?" Tonio said.

"I don't hate it," she said slowly.

"Well, I hate it," he said. "I won't take a thin peso from that son of a bitch, and neither will you. We'll get him the hell out of here and we'll forget him, we'll never mention the bastard's name again, never, never, goddamn it, never!"

"Don't lose'your temper, pet," Carola said. "A million dollars is after all a lot of money. If you don't want it, perhaps I do."

Delgado stood up. The brandy glass was shaking in his hand. Rage flowed over him, he was sick with hatred of Gomez, hatred of himself, most of all himself. He fought to hold his tongue, while the words were screaming in his brain – "Why shouldn't you want it? You have after all earned it!" – but he stood, his eyes bulging in their sockets, until he felt the cold wetness of the brandy on his hand. He mopped at himself with a handkerchief, he walked across the room and dropped into a chair.

An old French clock worked away busily on the mantel, chopping up the hours into minutes.

"I had better get undressed," Carola said. "It's five of twelve." She walked past him, trailed her hand across his shoulder. "Give yourself another drink, Tonio," she said.

When he closed the stone door at two that morning Delgado quickly sprinkled a pinch of dust on the left-hand latch and laid a sliver of dirty gray wood firmly in a crack against the door itself. Then he followed Carola upstairs and drew her bath. They went to sleep without speaking.

Once before dinner, the next night, and once afterward he started for the cellar. Both times he stopped himself. He waited until the stroke of midnight.

The dust was streaked through, the little peg of wood lay on the floor two feet from the door. The door had been opened during the day.

He held Carola's arm carefully the next night as they went down the cellar stairs. He unlocked the wine-cellar door, moved the three latches of the other one and swung it wide.

"Ah, you are so punctual," Gomez said. "Come in, my dear Carola, come in." Delgado watched his wife move quickly through the doorway, and as he closed the wall he saw her shrug easily out of her robe. He checked the latches. He turned out the light and locked the wine cellar.

He drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen. He half filled the cup again and poured brandy in it. He carried the cup through the house, from room to room and back again. He went upstairs and sat for a long time in the bedroom. He waited. He listened. There was not a sound from the cellar.

At five o'clock, just before dawn, he turned the key in the Cadillac. A big engine is a good thing, he told himself, as exhaust smoke began to fill the garage. For everything, a big engine is best. He listened to it, running smoothly at a fast idle. A headache comes first, he told himself. I know that. I expect that. He waited.

He dreamed, woke, dreamed again. He tried to put himself into the hole with Gomez and Carola. At first, he supposed, they would console each other; then they would concert on attempts to spring the latches, or to burrow through the granite walls; inevitably, finally, they would quarrel, and hate each other. He thought of Gomez' friends, their chieftain dead and no one left on whom to cry vengeance. How funny! I am spitting on you, Jorge, he said. He wondered who they might have been, these friends. Whom might Jorge have told? What had he said, about the girl, when he had been so angry? "It involves letting someone outside know where I am." An odd thing to say, if someone outside already knew where he was. Or had he meant, someone outside his circle, outside his group of confidants? No, it would not have been that. It had been a slip of the tongue. No one had known where he was: naturally not! Better than most people, Jorge O'B knew that what one man called a secret another man could make him tell. There was no one! Gomez would have trusted no one with his life unnecessarily. He had trusted only Delgado, Delgado's stupidity, he had trusted that he could bluff Delgado, surely that was it, there had been no one at all. Delgado felt a savage, sickening shock run slowly through his body. There had been no one! He could have shot The Monster when he pleased, with impunity. He could not hear the engine now, but he could hear the sound of the sea, roaring and crashing, very near. He was sobbing. He could see Gomez' white and foxlike face, laughing, laughing. He reached for the ignition key, he knew where it was, he could see it if he tried, tried as hard as a man pulling himself drowning from the sea, he could almost touch it, almost... he did touch it, his fingers would not obey him, he seized it in his whole fist and turned it. He fell out of the car, he crawled on his belly to the door, he butted it open and sucked in the good air, wet with the dew on the grass, tasting of the grass and the earth. When he could stand he went into the house. He went to bed but did not sleep.

The housekeeper, the first of the three servants to come, found him in the kitchen, sitting over strong coffee and stale croissants.

"The Senora," he told her, "left at six for Persouave. It's her aunt. Dying, I'm afraid."

The housekeeper made the sign of the cross.

"The Senora took almost nothing with her," he said. "No time. If you would be so good as to pack her suitcase, then I will have it sent to her this morning."

"Think of it as done," the good woman told him.

A week later he dismissed her. The Senora's aunt was so desperately ill, he said, that her return would be indefinitely delayed; he felt it his duty to join her in Persouave. He would close the house. He made a generous settlement on her, and upon the others, and bade them farewell. He told a few of Carola's friends the same story.

On the morning of the twenty-first day he entered the hide-out. It was bad, but not as bad as he had thought it might be. He could not guess how long it had been since Jorge O'B and Carola had died, but clearly they had not died the day before. They were on opposite sides of the room, as he had expected them to be. The money belt came quickly to hand: Jorge O'B had tossed it to a shelf. The letter was harder to find. It was interesting.

It was addressed to Paul Guivarra, an enormously wealthy plantation-owner who had spent years building a reputation as a raving anti-Gomista. Reading it, Delgado marveled at The Monster's cunning. "My dear Paul, I am tucked up in a perfectly safe place. Two people and only two, a man and a woman, know where I am, and both are safe: the man in fear (he thinks my friends have their eyes on him), the woman out of love. So. Time enough has passed, and I am ready. Go to your safe and take out the envelope I gave you in May. Open it. You will find the entire plan, and I think you will agree that it is flawless, or as nearly flawless as these things can be. (One modification: I shall not be alone. I am bringing the woman with me.) When you are ready, place the little advertisement in La Tribuna. Two days later you will know where I am, you will send the truck, and away we go. In the meantime, enjoy yourself. I see you had Serrano to dinner last week. Good. And very funny. I hope you have already begun to bleed him..."

There were fifty American thousand-dollar bills in The Monster's money belt, with sixty-eight tissue-wrapped stones, diamonds for the most part. One was a good inch and a quarter in diameter. The others were smaller, of sizes handier for conversion into cash. There were ten fifty-peso gold pieces, five thousand in paper pesos and five thousand dollars in small bills. O'B had thought of all this as nothing, of course, mere getaway money. Delgado went through the soft chamois belt very carefully. Within one of the pockets there was another and it held a sheet of tissue paper: a list of banks and account numbers, banks in Miami, New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Zurich and Berne. The paper rattled in Delgado's hand as he read. The American and the British banks, the French, the Spanish – never mind those. But the Swiss! With these now, with their anonymous numbers, and a little ingenuity, a little audacity ... the important thing would be not to take too much. Five million, perhaps, or ten. That would be quite enough, more than enough.

He had surprisingly little trouble getting an exit permit. He had valid business in Miami. He was not searched when he left, and the American customs people were easy. His business took him three days, as he had said it would, and then he returned. He waited a week and applied for another permit. It came through promptly. He packed his little bag, he strapped The Monster's money belt under his shirt, and he left for good. Within twenty-four hours he was in New York, a rich and happy man. He made the necessary inquiries, he paid the necessary monies, he visited a consulate and swore perfunctory allegiance to another country, the representatives of which rewarded him with a crisp new passport. It was all simple and businesslike.

He lived in Paris for some time, and then moved to Zurich. He stayed a year and two months in Zurich. He liked Switzerland, but the people bored him. He made little trips about Europe. Italy appealed to him for a time. He tried Sweden. But he liked the Côte d'Azur best, and he settled on a little piece of land above Nice. He had the house torn down and a new one built to his taste. It was small but pretty, full of conveniences and comforts. He found that he liked living alone. He did not want to marry again. Sometimes he told himself that he still loved Carola, and must be faithful to her memory. Sometimes he felt that he could never again trust any woman. In any case, he was an attractive man in the early autumn of his life, he was a millionaire and it was not necessary to marry anyone. He was content. He was satisfied with his life. As time passed, he began to take pride in the skill with which he conceived that he had extricated himself from hideous treachery and grave danger. Really, how neatly it had been done. It had been the perfect crime, except for one thing: no one knew a crime had been committed. Still, wasn't that the essence of the perfect crime? He supposed so, but it flawed his satisfaction, nevertheless. After all, he had brought off a great act of heroism, as well as a crime. It had been more heroism than crime. To kill a faithless wife was hardly a crime. It had been he, Tonio Delgado, who had run The Monster to ground, and killed him in his burrow. He deserved the credit.

Swimming from the stony shore one bright morning, Delgado was annoyed by a little cramp in the calf of his left leg. He rolled over and reached under to rub it out, and it occurred to him that some such stupidity might kill a man. Just two days before, he recalled unhappily, his friend M. Delacourt, of the Credit Lyonnaise, had fallen dead, flat on his face, just as he reached out his hand for the first aperitif of the morning. It could happen to anyone, but if it happened to Tonio Delgado, a secret of history would go with him. It was unthinkable that this should be so. He rolled over and swam for shore, stroking vigorously but conservatively. He was bemused with the brilliance of his new idea, and he truly could not understand why he had not thought of it before.

Writing steadily for three or four hours a day, Delgado took four months at his task. He might have done it sooner, of course, had he confined himself to the events beginning with The Monster's arrival at the house in Haraguato. He thought it better to begin with his own birth and The Monster's, sketching them in parallel until the two life lines crossed for the second time at the threshold of the back door of the house in Haraguato. That, of course, was the title of the work: The House in Haraguato. Finished, it amounted to 169 pages in small script. Delgado read it over three times in as many days. Really, it read rather well, he felt. It was concise and to the point, like a legal brief, and yet it held drama and excitement, too. Most importantly, it was history. It was something that mattered, and the world had very nearly gone on without knowing about it. That would have been tragic. Delgado was happy to think that he had prevented this occurrence. He was annoyed, however, when he realized that the book would contribute to the world's recollection of The Monster. Then he laughed, thinking of the quotation he had read: "I am an immortal. I will live forever." Also, to look at it another way, Delgado had assured himself of immortality. He could not feel that it was undeserved. Had he not been, like Churchill, both an actor in the great drama of history and a recorder of it? He had had more directly to do with the death of Jorge O' Brian Gomez, Monster, than Churchill had had to do with the death of Adolf Hitler, Monster. And who was to say that Gomez, living, might not have surpassed the crimes of Hitler? It was well known that Gomez had been spending millions, before the Revolution, in an attempt to make an atomic bomb. Hitler, mark you, never had an atomic bomb. Think of that for a moment.

Delgado could only with difficulty contemplate allowing the manuscript to leave his hands, but he knew that he must, if it was to serve its purpose. He wrote a covering letter of instructions, he wrapped the manuscript carefully and set out for Monaco and his attorney's office.

He drove carefully but with enterprise. He had a gran turismo Lancia, a lithe, lively automobile. The day was a marvel of warmth, of color, of scent. He was sliding down the hills into the streets of Monaco by eleven-thirty. He parked the car and phoned Lyautey, who had no prior engagement for lunch, at least so he said, and they met at The Golden Horse. They ordered carefully and ate slowly and with gusto. With the calvados, Delgado gave his friend the package of manuscript, bright in red sealing wax.

"This is a simple matter," he said. "I just want you to keep this envelope until my death. Open it then. You will find a letter of instruction. It's a book, and I want it published."

"Very well," Lyautey said. "But why not publish it now, while you can enjoy your fame? Eh?"

Delgado laughed. "I might not enjoy it," he said. "Besides, it is going to make me happy, very happy, just to think about its being published. You have no idea."

Lyautey shrugged. "D'accord," he said. It was true. The idea did make Delgado happy. He grew out of himself, and seemed to reblossom, to take a second wind in his life. He had lived as a hedonist for years. He had made no major effort since he had taken The Monster's money from the Swiss banks. That had required thought and courage, but ever since he had drifted, purposelessly, but telling himself that his purpose was to enjoy life. It seemed a thin endeavor now.

The day after his fifty-eighth birthday, Delgado married one Therese Marbonne. She was thirty-six, a divorcee. She was kind and sincere and loving and if she was not as intelligent as Carola had been, she was a good deal prettier. She knew that life had given Tonio Delgado most of what he wanted except children. She was pregnant in the second month of their marriage, and thus a son was born to Delgado in his fifty-ninth year. A daughter came in his sixtieth. He was proud of his children, and kind to them. His gratitude toward Therese was profound, and she in turn succeeded in convincing him that no other man in the world could arouse so much as a flicker of interest in her. He lived with enormous gusto and deep serenity until he was sixty-six, when he died easily and quickly of a cerebral hemorrhage. His last conscious thought was of his manuscript, secure in Lyautey's great safe, a vision in brown paper and red wax. He knew that he was dying, and he felt a pang of conscience for allowing thought of anything but Therese and the children to occupy him, but the manuscript meant more to him in that moment, and he dwelt lovingly upon it until the dark little flood of blood, seeping over his brain, put an end to him.

Promptly at nine next morning Pierre Lyautey went to the office strongbox and broke the seals on the brown envelope. He was sad. He had been fond of Tonio Delgado. He was stunned by what he read when he came to page 117 of the manuscript. When he put it down he was horrified. He was so shaken that he locked it into the safe again and hurried out to a bar for a whiskey, and then another. Halfway through the second one, sitting at a little stone-topped table under a plane tree in the warm sun, he saw things more clearly. By the time he had finished the drink he knew what he must do. Clearly it would be an absurdity to allow an obvious crime passionel, committed in heat and fury and hatred, to sully the memory of so good a man and to embarrass a family so devoted. Quite out of the question. In this case, the weight of friendship must overbalance professional obligation. Lyautey took a long walk, from the railroad station to the gasometer, because he wanted to be sure that perfect sobriety would confirm his present judgment. After his walk he drank a large cup of coffee. Then he returned to his office and burned the manuscript in his little fireplace, complete with letter of instruction, envelope and wax. When he had seen to the burning of every sheet, he stirred the ashes into powder and turned to other concerns.

A matter of a few weeks later, in Hara-guato, a bulldozer ripped off a corner of the hide-out. In the years that had passed since Tonio and Carola Delgado had lived there. Haraguato had changed a good deal. It had run down. The well-to-do had moved out to the East, into the hills. A new road had been cut through the old pine woods and this had given the current Liberator a whim: flatten eight square blocks of Haraguato and make it a park surrounded by low-rent apartment developments. The idea was enthusiastically received by everyone consulted, and the work was put in train.

It was about two in the afternoon, of a Friday, when the big 'dozer blade bit into the stone roof of the hide-out. The man on the seat, whose name was Gavilon, thought at first he had hit another boulder. The man on the ground. Reynosa, thought so too, and gestured for Gavilon to make another pass. The second pass showed stones laid in courses. The men looked at each other and shrugged. So? An extension of the cellar, beyond doubt. Reynosa languidly waved and Gavilon's brown hands tugged at the levers again. This time, he took a four-foot slab of the roof away. Reynosa held up a warning hand and dropped to his knees in the hole. He looked up at Gavilon, then quickly around and over his shoulder, and beckoned him down. They looked together. They could see well enough.

Gavilon said, "We had better get the police."

"Do you want my advice?" Reynosa said.

"Tell me."

"Many rich used to live here," Reynosa said. "Many important ones. Some-times, when a thing like this is found, two skeletons in a hole, people think it wise to pretend it never happened. The best method is to do away with the people who have found things, do you understand me?"

"I understand you, I think," Gavilon said. "Yes, it is clear."

"We have ten minutes or so before the truck comes back for another load."

Gavilon pulled himself to the seat. The big diesel roared and the rain cap on the exhaust pipe stood straight up. Standing beside the hole, Reynosa made a stirring motion with his hand, his index finger pointed downward. Gavilon lowered the blade and hit the near wall. In five passes he had flattened everything. He ground the rubble under the caterpillar treads; he widened the hole and mixed in a ton of earth. He knew his trade and he was quick. When the truck came back he was ready to load. It was a ten-ton dumper. There was room for everything. He watched the truck roll away. He knew where the stuff was going: to the ocean front at Partila, for fill. He lighted a cigarette and looked down at Reynosa. They were relieved and happy. They laughed.