Charge it up, Fargo thought, to necessary expenses. He meant the two hundred dollars he had just paid the Commandant of the Colon Police.
That had not been a difficult arrangement to make. It had been necessary only to go to the Police Station and ask for an interview. The Commandant’s name was Barrientos; he was a lean, saturnine man with dark skin and a delicate air of foppery, immaculate in white uniform. Twenty minutes’ circuitous conversation in the Spanish manner of never calling a spade a spade and Fargo had him in his pocket, with the promise of a minimum payment of another hundred every other week, in return for freedom of arrest for anything short of murder—and in return for Barrientos being unable to honor any request from the American authorities to bring Fargo in or turn him over to them. “And,” Barrientos purred, “you shall be staying at the San Leon Hotel?”
“That’s right.” Fargo’s grin was crooked. “I don’t think I’m welcome at the Washington Hotel any longer.”
Barrientos laughed softly. “No. After hitting the American captain, I should think not. Very well, Senor Fargo. So long as you keep your end of the bargain, I shall keep mine. Colon is yours—so far as my department is concerned. Of course, you understand that I cannot speak for the Army.”
“Of course not,” Fargo said. “But I was planning to drop around to the barracks and see the Commandant there, too.”
Barrientos laughed again. “He will ask for more than I did. I can assure you, he will settle for exactly the same. Inquire for General Morales.”
So that was done, too. Now his flank was protected. His plans did not include being arrested by the Panamanian authorities, thrown into a Panamanian dungeon. He needed elbow room in which to operate.
The Hotel San Leon was a dump; but it was comparatively free of bedbugs and fleas. Fargo went back to it through streets barely wide enough to permit the passage of two burros; women swarmed and chattered and hung out wash on the galleries of the two-story tenements on either side; and naked children played in the gutters. It was the dry season; but the heat was stifling.
Adjoining the Hotel was the Cantina San Leon, and this was really the reason Fargo, after a careful search of the various quarters of Colon on his second day in Panama, had picked the place. It was in the very heart of a section packed with bars, cribs and brothels, not far from the terminus of the Panama Railroad, and when the construction workers swarmed in from the Canal at night, this, he had learned, was where they headed. It would, he thought, make an excellent base of operations. He had already made the appropriate arrangements with Angel Vargas, the owner of the establishment—another outlay of money—and now he was ready for business, or would be tonight, when the action started. Meanwhile, there was the long, brutally hot afternoon to kill.
It was cooler in the thick-walled cantina, but not much. At this time of day, the place was nearly deserted; Vargas, fat and perspiring, tended bar in a greasy apron. He shoved a cold beer toward Fargo. “Well, Senor, you have completed everything?”
“Everything, Angel.” It had been a stroke of luck that Vargas had turned out to be the proprietor of the very place Fargo needed as a base. There was old, if slight, acquaintance between them: years before, Vargas had been forty pounds less in weight, slim and fiery, a dedicated revolutionist. Fargo’s first mission to Panama for the Colonel had brought the two of them together in a certain amount of plotting during the almost bloodless rebellion against Colombia.
“Then we are glad to have you with us.”
“Gracias.” Fargo leaned against the bar and sipped the beer. Yesterday had been hectic. After he’d created the scene in the Washington Hotel, slugged Ward Kane, the Captain and Myra had departed immediately, to catch the train to Ancon on the other coast. In his room, Fargo had been confronted by the manager of the hotel. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fargo,” the man had said firmly. “We can’t tolerate that sort of thing here. I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
Fargo met his eyes. “I’ve paid for tonight,” he said coldly.
“Your money will be refunded.”
“No,” Fargo said. “I’m staying for the night.”
The manager blustered. “I think the police will have something to say about that.”
Fargo grinned. “Sure. Call ’em. If you really want a scene. But I’m warning you, I won’t pay for the breakage.”
The man read those cold eyes, that wicked grin. He capitulated. “All right. Tonight. But tomorrow you move out.”
“Sure,” Fargo said. “This place stinks of Army anyhow. And Army’s something I can’t stand the smell of.”
Twice more, he’d precipitated crises. The Washington Hotel was resolutely dry. Fargo had, in public, both in the dining room and on the veranda, hauled out a bottle, taken long swigs, obviously growing drunker and drunker. Once he’d made a pass at a horse-faced female guest who’d shrieked and complained to the desk clerk. Another confrontation with the manager, and this time Fargo had faced down the man before a dozen guests, using a good deal of the obscene language of which he had a vast inventory. Somehow he’d got away with it; but by the time he lurched off the grounds and took a hack to Colon to look for the kind of place he really needed, he was sure that the Hotel and that whole section of Colon was buzzing with gossip about the tough, drunken American gambler who’d hit the Army captain. He’d also made sure that everybody knew he was moving out of the Army-stinking place to the San Leon. Maybe the back streets of Colon stank, he snarled to anyone who’d listen, but not half as bad as the Corps of Engineers.
Now Fargo drained his glass, shoved it to Vargas for a refill. The bartender had just returned it to him when Fargo was aware of a change in the light that meant somebody in the doorway. He turned, and one pale brow lifted as he saw the girl.
She was perhaps nineteen; in another five years, she would be fat, but now she was at the peak of perfection, like ripened fruit. There must have been some Spanish mixed with the Indian, for her skin was olive, not coppery, and there was plenty of it showing above the dished-out neck of a loose blouse that revealed the upper slopes of a magnificent pair of full, voluptuous breasts. Blinking to adjust her eyes to the light, she came on into the cantina, and she moved with sheer, erotic poetry, a shifting of hips, that stirred Fargo as he watched her.
She was obviously one of the girls from the brothels, but she had not been at work long enough to be coarsened, used up, and though her black eyes, which were enormous above a snub nose and a ripe mouth, played over Fargo boldly enough, flaring with interest, she was off-duty now and she kept her distance from him as she asked, in a husky voice, for a glass of beer. “On Roberto’s bill,” she added in Spanish. “He’ll be here later.”
“Si.” Vargas gave her the beer, and she went to a table in the corner. When she crossed her legs, she managed to reveal a good deal of calf and a bit of sleek thigh beneath the long skirt. Fargo did not miss that. Then he turned back to Angel. “Who’s she?” he whispered.
Vargas grinned, somewhat lewdly. “A pretty piece, eh? She is named Consuelo.” Then he sobered. “But you must stay away from her, Senor Fargo. Her man, Roberto Romero, is very dangerous and very jealous. Only in the line of business must another come near her.”
“Is that so?” Fargo said, and he sipped his beer. There was a mirror behind the bar, smudged and flyspecked; and he watched her in it. She drank the beer thirstily, and at first she looked modestly elsewhere. But her eyes kept coming back to him. And by the time she’d reached the bottom of the glass, they no longer shifted at all; she was staring at Fargo.
“Give her another beer,” Fargo told Vargas.
Angel frowned. “Believe me, Senor ...”
“Dammit, take her another beer. Give me one, too.”
Vargas stared at him, then sighed resignedly. “You have not changed, have you?”
“No,” Fargo said.
Vargas drew the two beers. He took one to the girl and spoke to her. She smiled faintly, still watching Fargo. When Vargas came back to the bar, Fargo took his own schooner and walked across the room, stood over the girl and looked down at her. Close up, she was even prettier, more tempting; and what was less usual here, she seemed immaculately clean. She even wore perfume. He caught a breath of it. “Good afternoon, Senorita,” he said.
She looked up at him with eyes in which a man could lose himself. “Good afternoon, Senor.”
Without further invitation, Fargo sat down. “You’re Consuelo. I’m called Fargo.”
“Yes. But you must not sit with me long. My man will be here soon. Roberto. If he finds you with me, he will be angry.”
“That,” Fargo said, “will be too bad for Roberto.”
Consuelo’s eyes moved slowly, insolently, and with tantalizing invitation over Fargo’s lean, hard body and scarred face. “I like Americans,” she said. “But you do not understand. Roberto is a very dangerous man with a knife, and it is something Americans do not understand. Americans are afraid of knives.”
“Are they?” Fargo said. His hand went to his hip pocket; then it made a blur, and he laid the opened Batangas knife on the table and covered it with his hand.
The girl looked at its hard, shining length of blade, and she smiled slowly. A pink tongue moistened full lips. She shifted her buttocks on the chair, as if the very sight of the knife aroused her. “We shall see,” she murmured.
“Yes,” said Fargo. “Because the afternoon is a very long one, and I have nothing to do anyway.” He put away the knife.
All at once the girl’s eyes flickered away from him, over his shoulder, toward the door. “I think it shall not be so long,” she said, and there was sudden fear on her face. “Roberto—he comes.”
Fargo turned in his chair. The man who stood in the doorway was young, in his twenties. He was lean, with wide shoulders and a narrow waist, and his face was cruel, hawk like, and almost pure Indian. He wore a satin shirt open to the waist; a pair of tight white pants that hugged crotch, thighs, calves; and soft leather boots. Fargo saw the hilt of the knife protruding from the sash around his middle.
He came quietly, swiftly into the room, his motions as fluid as those of a cat. Consuelo half-rose from her chair. Before she could do more than that, he was over her; his hand flicked out, slapped her face hard. “She-dog!” he snapped. “You drink with another man? And a stinking American at that!” He whirled on Fargo. “You! Whoever you are, if you want to live, you go away—now!”
Fargo gave him a faint, insolent grin. “No,” he said. He felt a fluttering excitement within himself that was as good as alcohol. He had been cooped up too long, on train, on ship; he needed action. It was as necessary for him, action and risk, as food or drink. Besides, he disliked this strutting rooster on sight.
Then it began. Roberto’s hand flicked to the hilt of the knife. Fargo was on his feet in a half-second and kicked the chair in which he sat. It came up hard, high, caught Roberto in the belly, knocked him slightly off balance. By the time he recovered, Fargo had the Batangas knife out, flipped it so the handles swung back, and was bent in a belly-protective crouch, his left hand out for balance, his right holding the blade forward, parallel to the ground.
Roberto stared at him, reading instantly the bearing of the man experienced with cold steel. His lip lifted away from white teeth in a feral grin. His own blade, narrow, double-edged, just as long as Fargo’s, glittered in his hand. “So, Yanqui! You challenge me, eh?” He laughed happily. “First, I will cut off all that makes you want women to begin with. Then I will slit your gut. After that, I shall cut your throat.”
“Sure,” Fargo said. “Talk’s cheap.”
But, for the moment, there was no more talk. They circled each other on the dirt floor of the cantina, in the space between tables, each sizing up the other’s stance and balance, strengths and weaknesses. Then Roberto made a hissing sound, lunged in.
His hand was quick, darting like a snake’s tongue. Fargo caught the blade on his own, turned it aside, thrust. Roberto dodged, and Fargo’s thrust missed. No blood drawn: again they circled. Fargo saw grudging respect now, mingled with the supreme confidence in Roberto’s eyes.
Then Roberto came again. This time he came in earnest, like a boxer stepping in to slug, ready to get it over with quickly. The shining blade lanced at Fargo’s loins, then changed direction, plunged for Fargo’s belly. Fargo stepped aside nimbly and the cutting edge missed him by a fraction of an inch. He slashed at Roberto, drew blood from the man’s arm, as Roberto recovered, came back with another jab. This one ripped Fargo’s jacket, but it did not touch the skin, and while Roberto was off balance, Fargo almost playfully touched Roberto’s wrist with the knife again and more blood flowed. Playfully because he had no intention of killing the man; his plans were different.
But he’d scared Roberto, and when they broke apart now, that confidence was gone from the Indian’s eyes. In its place was something Fargo imagined more than one ancient conquistador had seen in the gaze of Roberto’s ancestors. It was said that the Spaniards had used Indians as slave laborers in their gold mines; and, rebelling, once Indians had given their masters all the gold they wanted, had poured it molten down their throats. All that sort of hatred, that ancient grudge, and that cruelty was focused on Fargo as Roberto prepared for a new attack.
Then it came. Now Roberto jumped in and locked blades with Fargo and wrestled Fargo with his other hand, and his blade slipped loose and thrust at Fargo’s chest and Fargo twisted so it went between arm and body. He felt the whisper of it as, once more, it slashed fabric. Then he wrenched his left hand away from Roberto’s grappling left and, with a smooth shifting motion threw the knife from right to left, and his right went out and caught Roberto’s knife-hand, even as his left came over wielding the blade.
The change in hands, the change in balance, caught Roberto totally unprepared. Fargo slit, quickly, expertly, and Roberto screamed. The knife dropped from his hand and blood poured down his right arm. Then Fargo stepped back, kicking the knife away. Roberto stood there screaming, not so much with pain as with the realization of what Fargo had done to him, his right hand dangling at his side, the fingers hanging loosely, uselessly.
Like a surgeon, Fargo had severed the tendons of Roberto’s right forearm without cutting the artery. Roberto would live; but unless he learned to use his left hand, he would never fight with a knife again.
The Indian knew that; and it was the realization that threw him into panic. It was as if Fargo had cut away his manhood. He stared at Fargo for a long moment with eyes that were no longer fierce, only horrified. Then he made an inarticulate sound in his throat. Wheeling, blood streaming from his arm, he ran out the door, as Fargo stepped after to watch him go, and disappeared up the narrow street.
Then Fargo turned back into the cantina, where the woman waited.
She sat there at the table, hand on her breasts, which rose and fell beneath the blouse. Her eyes were fixed on Fargo, lambent with admiration and desire. If she felt any grief, any regret, for what he had done to Roberto, she did not show it.
Fargo smiled down at her. “Now,” he said. “Now, the afternoon is ours.”
Slowly, a little unsteadily, her eyes still not leaving his, Consuelo got to her feet. “Yes.”
Fargo said, without turning: “Bring me a bottle of the bourbon, Vargas.”
They went through the side door of the cantina into the hotel and climbed the dingy stairs. Fargo’s room, bathed in sunlight from a barred window, was hot. A veteran of the tropics, he accepted the heat, did not feel it. He closed the door behind them and looked at Consuelo. “You’re my woman now,” he said.
She nodded. “For as long as I’m in Colon,” Fargo added.
“Yes,” Consuelo whispered. Then she pulled the blouse over her head.
She wore nothing beneath it. Her breasts were lush, the same olive color as her face, and they were big of nipple, their points standing out hard and erect. She put her hands under them in a seductive gesture, lifted them as if offering them to Fargo. Fargo uncorked the bottle and took a drink, watching as she went through her routine, the one she used to entice customers. She did that with her breasts, ran her hands over them as if caressing them herself; then her hands slipped down her smooth, dimpled belly, untied the skirt. There was nothing under that, either, and she stood there naked, with the short legs of the Indian, rounded, curving woman hips, and a sultry challenge in her eyes. Fargo took another drink from the bottle, went to her, and pulled her tightly against him. He lowered his mouth to hers, and she received him with a great hunger, lips opening wide, eagerly. She rubbed herself against him.
Fargo held her for a while. Then he stripped off his own clothes. Consuelo’s eyes ran curiously and with that same ferocious hunger over his lean, hard-muscled frame. She saw the scars. “You have been in many fights,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Fargo said; and he kissed her again and bore her down to the sagging, ironstead bed, which creaked noisily under their combined weight. Then there was no more talking for a long time ...