Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

“No!” she repeated. “You’re crazy. I did not.”

I crossed to the gallery and walked toward them, keeping in its shadow.

“I’m not the one who is crazy,” the man was saying. “We know who’s crazy, sweetheart.”

“Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.”

I knew the woman’s voice. It belonged to Isobel Graff. I couldn’t place the man’s. He was saying: “You bitch. You dirty bitch. Why did you do it? What did he do to you?”

“I didn’t. Leave me alone, you filth.” She called him other names which reflected on his ancestry and her vocabulary.

He answered her in a low, blurred voice I didn’t catch. There were Lower East Side marbles in his mouth. I was close enough to recognize him now. Carl Stern.

He let out a feline sound, a mewling growl, and slapped her face, twice, very hard. She reached for his face with hooked fingers. He caught her by the wrists. Her mink coat slid from her shoulders and lay on the concrete like a large blue animal without a head. I started to run on my toes.

Stern flung her away from him. She thudded against the door of a cabaña and sat down in front of it. He stood over her, dapper and broad in his dark raincoat. The greenish light from the pool lent his head a cruel bronze patina.

“Why did you kill him?”

She opened her mouth and closed it and opened it, but no sound came. Her upturned face was like a cratered moon. He leaned over her in silent fury, so intent on her that he didn’t know I was there until I hit him.

I hit him with my shoulder, pinned his arms, palmed his flanks for a gun. He was clean, in that respect. He bucked and snorted like a horse, trying to shake me off. He was almost as strong as a horse. His muscles cracked in my grip. He kicked at my shins and stamped my toes and tried to bite my arm.

I released him and, when he turned, chopped at the side of his jaw with my right fist. I didn’t like men who bit. He spun and went down with his back to me. His hand dove up under his trouser-leg. He rose and turned in a single movement. His eyes were black nailheads on which his face hung haggard. A white line surrounded his mouth and marked the edges of his black nostrils, which glared at me like secondary eyes. Protruding from the fist he held at the center of his body was the four-inch blade of the knife he carried on his leg.

“Put it away, Stem.”

“I’ll carve your guts.” His voice was high and rasping, like the sound of metal being machined.

I didn’t wait for him to move. I threw a sneak right hand which crashed into his face and rocked him hard. His jaw turned to meet the left hook that completed the combination and finished Stern. He swayed on his feet for a few seconds, then collapsed on himself. The knife clattered and flashed on the concrete. I picked it up and closed it.

Footsteps came trotting along the gallery. It was Clarence Bassett, breathing rapidly under his boiled shirt. “What on earth?”

“Cat fight. Nothing serious.”

He helped Mrs. Graff to her feet. She leaned on the wall and straightened her twisted stockings. He picked up her coat, brushing it carefully with his hands, as though the mink and the woman were equally important.

Carl Stern got up groggily. He gave me a dull-eyed look of hatred. “Who are you?”

“The name is Archer.”

“You’re the eye, uh?”

“I’m the eye who doesn’t think that women should be hit.”

“Chivalrous, eh? You’re going to hate yourself for this, Archer.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I think so. I got a lot of friends. I got connections. You’re through in L.A., you know that? All finished.”

“Put it in writing, will you? I’ve been wanting to get out of the smog.”

“Speaking of connections,” Bassett said quietly to Stern, “you’re not a member of this club.”

“I’m a guest of a member. And you’re going to get crucified, too.”

“Oh, my, yes. What fun. Whose guest would you happen to be?”

“Simon Graff’s. I want to see him. Where is he?”

“We won’t bother Mr. Graff just now. And may I make a suggestion? It’s getting latish, more for some than for others. Don’t you think you’d better leave?”

“I don’t take orders from servants.”

“Don’t you indeed?” Bassett’s smile was a toothy mask which left his eyes sad. He turned to me.

I said: “You want to be hit again, Stern? It would be a pleasure.”

Stern glared at me for a long moment, red lights dancing on his shallow eyes. The lights went out. He said: “All right. I’ll leave. Give me back my knife.”

“If you promise to cut your throat with it.”

He tried to go into another fury, but lacked the energy. He looked sick. I tossed him the closed knife. He caught it and put it in the pocket of his coat, turned and walked away toward the entrance. He stumbled several times. Bassett marched behind him, at a distance, like a watchful policeman.

Mrs. Graff was fumbling with a key at the door of the cabaña . Her hands were shaking, out of control. I turned the key for her and switched on the light. It was indirect, and shone from four sides on a bellying brown fishnet ceiling. The room was done in primitive Pacific style, with split-bamboo screens at the windows, grass matting on the floor, rattan armchairs and chaise longues. Even the bar in one corner was rattan. Beside it, at the rear of the room, two louvered doors opened into the dressing-rooms. The walls were hung with taps cloths and Douanier Rousseau reproductions, bamboo-framed.

The only discordant note was a Matisse travel poster lithographed in brilliant colors and advertising Nice. Mrs. Graff paused in front of it, and said to no one in particular: “We have a villa near Nice. Father gave it to us as a wedding present. Simon was all for it in those days. All for me, and all for one.” She laughed, for no good reason. “He won’t even take me to Europe with him any more. “He says I always make trouble for him when we go away together, any more. It isn’t true, I’m as quiet as a quilt. He flies away on his trans-polar flights and leaves me here to rot in the heat and cold.”

She clasped her head with both hands, tightly, for a long moment. Her hair stuck up between her fingers like black, tidy feathers. The silent pain she was fighting to control was louder than a scream.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Graff?”

I touched her blue mink back. She sidestepped away from my touch, whirled the coat off, and flung it on a studio bed. Her back and shoulders were dazzling, and her breast overflowed the front of her strapless dress like whipped cream. She held her body with a kind of awkward pride mixed with shame, like a young girl suddenly conscious of her flesh.

“Do you like my dress? It isn’t new. I haven’t been to a party for years and years and years. Simon doesn’t take me any more.”

“Nasty old Simon,” I said. “Are you all right, Mrs. Graff?”

She answered me with a bright actress’s smile which didn’t go with the stiffness of the upper part of her face, the despair in her eyes: “I’m wonderful. Wonderful.”

She did a brief dance-step to prove it, snapping her fingers at the end of rigid arms. Bruises were coming out on her white forearms, the size and color of Concord grapes. Her dancing was mechanical. She stumbled and lost a gold slipper. Instead of putting it on again, she kicked off the other slipper. She sat on one of the bar stools, wriggling her stockinged feet, clasping and rubbing them together. They looked like blind, flesh-colored animals making furtive love under the hem of her skirt: “Incidentally,” she said, “and accidentally, I haven’t thanked you. I thank you.”

“What for?”

“For saving me from a fate worse than life. That wretched little drug-peddler might have killed me. He’s terribly strong, isn’t he?” She added resentfully: “They’re not supposed to be strong.”