The box, p.11
The Box, page 11
He let go of the burnoose flap with which he had covered his face, got his right arm free, and tapped the wrapped wrench on the back of the driver’s head.
It is hard to judge the right force of a blow like that, unless the purpose is murder. Quinn wanted the man out cold for perhaps half an hour. This was important, because the man should later drive his truck for the rest of the trip.
When Quinn caught the man he turned the head up and saw that the eyelids were fluttering.
From here on in, a number of things were supposed to happen like clockwork.
Quinn put the man down on the ground, slowly, leaned the man back and felt the tension. This was the natural tensing of trying to balance oneself while leaning back. Quinn hit the man again because he had not been entirely unconscious. He used his fist this time, a sharp uppercut, feeling much more certain about what he was doing now. When the man sagged in the right way Quinn was done.
Turk, by the house, was whistling.
The man with the camel got up, yelled at his beast, and tapped his stick under the animal’s chin.
Quinn dumped the driver on top of the canisters in back of the pickup, got into the cab, and maneuvered the car off the road and behind the ruined house. When he got there Turk was ready with the tools.
So far, nice and smooth. Quinn felt nervous and happy.
While Turk pushed the jack under the front axle Quinn started to undo the nuts on one wheel. By then the first camel came around the corner of the house, and then the other two, each led by a man. Quinn did not know any of them but they’re working out, he thought, maybe they’ll work out. He hardly looked at them, no time now for this, and told Turk what he wanted each of the others to do. Then he took the first wheel off. He let the air out of the tire while he took off the second wheel. He let the air out of that one too. Turk was coming back out of the house.
“Check the driver,” said Quinn.
Turk went to the back of the truck and said, “Do you want me to hit him again?”
“I said check him! I want to know if he’s still out.”
“He sleeps.”
“Make sure.”
“I did.”
Quinn did not ask how Turk had made sure. He only told him to put the driver into his cab and they should get busy with the cans on the truck. The three Arabs came out of the house, carrying the skins. One camel was lying down by itself, one stood, and one was grinding its teeth.
Then Quinn pounded the tires off the front wheels, and then he bolted the bare wheels back on the wheel-drums. After that he got the jack out and put it under the rear of the truck. There he did the same thing he had done to the front. He took the tubes and tires off the wheels and then put the bare wheels back in place. Make them think there’s a gentleman thief around. Puts the wheels back on, after the deed.
Turk and the three others were pouring alcohol into empty skins and water into empty canisters. Quinn smoked a cigarette, standing back a little. It smells like a hospital, he thought, or a brewery. I can’t decide which.
The men put the canisters full of water back on the pickup and they tied the skins full of alcohol to the packsaddles of the three camels. They were all scratching themselves and they were grinning while they stood around because none of them knew what this was all about. Quinn checked the driver again and then walked to the Arabs.
“Tell them what I say, Turk.”
He gave all of them a cigarette and they all smoked. Turk smoked and so did two of the others. The third split the paper open and ate the tobacco.
“Tell them they can sell the tires as soon as they wish. And I don’t care to whom they sell them or where.”
“The best place…”
“Shut up and listen. Make it clear that it will go badly with them, if Remal finds out who stole his tires. Tell them.”
Turk told them and they all talked at once. Then they listened again.
“Tell them that I will do nothing to them, if the tires get traced, because Remal will take care of them good and proper if they aren’t careful.”
“That will be difficult,” said Turk, “to sell the tires and Remal knows nothing about it.”
“It can be done.”
“But how?”
Quinn picked up sand from the ground and rubbed it in his hands. It took some of the grime off and then he wiped his hands on the dirty burnoose.
“I want them to figure that out by themselves. Because I can’t use them if they can’t sell stuff without getting traced. Tell them.”
Turk told them and there was much discussion while Quinn got into the truck. He leaned out and told them to move the camels out of the way, he wanted to back up. Then he said, “Do they know about the alcohol?”
“Oh yes. They are to hide it, not sell. They know.”
Quinn nodded, kicked the starter, geared into reverse. It was a clanking, hard maneuver without tires on the wheels, and gave a weird motion to the truck. Once the truck hit the highway, it sounded like a tank clattering over the pavement. Quinn stopped with the truck pointed towards town. It had been twenty minutes since the driver had gone under and Quinn was a little bit worried. He propped the man up and then got out of the cab. Behind the house the Arabs and Turk were still arguing.
“Since it might take them a while to figure a way of selling the tires,” said Quinn, “give them this as an extra.”
He handed bills over to Turk which amounted to about one dollar apiece. Then he said that the three men and the camels should go.
Quinn did not watch them leave but sat in the jeep, inside the ruined house, smoking. He said nothing when Turk came and thought, I hope I did that with a sufficient, imperial touch, stalking off that way.
“Quinn,” said Turk and started the motor, “did you like the men I picked?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll see how they’ll work out with the tires.”
“That was very clever of you, Quinn, and they too thought you are very clever. And generous.” Turk drove out of the building and crossed the highway.
“They’ll make more, if they stick.”
“Yes, but they thought you very generous. They know how much you got for the cans which you sold to Whitfield and that you have no other money.”
Quinn did not care to show that this irritated him and said nothing. When the jeep was on the other side of the road Quinn looked back, worrying about the driver in the pick-up truck. The man sat in the cab as if he were asleep.
“And they want to stick with you,” Turk was saying, “because they believe you will do great things.”
“That’s very devoted of them, I’m sure.”
“They know how little money you have and they are sure your greed will make all of us rich.”
The jeep bumped and leaped and made so much noise on the rough terrain that Turk could not hear how Quinn was cursing.
Chapter 13
Quinn got some of his humor back when he stood on the pier and heard the noise come from the distance. It was a clattering metal noise which nobody could place.
“How come you’re still here?” said Quinn. “Isn’t it siesta time for you?”
Whitfield looked up from his clipboard and said, “I never saw you smoke before. When did you pick up that habit? I’ll be damned, Quinn, if that doesn’t sound like a tank.”
“It does sound like a tank. A sort of tinny tank.”
“Odd,” and Whitfield did checks and crosses on the forms he held.
“How come you’re still here, Whitfield, and not home in bed?”
“I take a bath, for siesta.”
“How could I forget! Yes.”
“Some damn transport is late. Wait till I talk to that man.”
Quinn thought about this and grinned. Then he said “I think the tank is coming this way, by the sound of it.”
“He’s on the cobbles. All along the piers we have cobbles, you know.”
“I’m going around the building,” said Quinn, “to see what the cobbles are doing to the tank.”
“To the driver. Can you imagine that driver?” said Whitfield.
Quinn said no, he could hardly imagine such a thing, and the two men walked from the pier through the warehouse and out on the cobbles.
“Oh, sainted heart!” said Whitfield.
The wheels of the pick-up were still round, but this had no visible effect upon the truck as a whole. Each spring-there were four-worked like a pogo stick, and no pogo stick would have anything to do with any of the other pogo sticks. Inside the cab a man was fighting to keep from flying into the roof. What kept the canisters in back from rocketing away was the thick tarp that had been tied across the bed of the pick-up, and this tarp was ripping through at one end. When the pick-up stopped by the warehouse there was a silence of exhaustion.
“Quinn,” Whitfield said quietly. “We are both seeing the same thing, aren’t we? Say yes.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Quinn, have you ever seen anything like it before? Don’t lie to me, Quinn.”
“I won’t lie. I’ve only seen this once before.”
“Thank you, Quinn. I now need my siesta, but first,” Whitfield cleared his throat, “first I must speak to the sainted driver.”
The sainted driver had not yet come out of the cab. He was sitting behind the wheel, gripping the wheel, as if uncertain that the ride was over.
“You can come out now,” said Whitfield. “You’ve made it.”
The driver did not move.
“You can let go of the wheel,” said Whitfield, “and nothing will happen, really.”
The driver moaned, and then got out of the cab. He moved with care and disbelief. Then he closed the cab door carefully and sat down on the running board. Seen from the top, there was a visible lump on his head.
“Will you look at that,” said Whitfield. “Must have struck his head against the roof for some reason or other. Now then, Ali. I say, Ali?”
The man looked up carefully. This showed a bruise under his chin.
“Must have struck his chin on the wheel, repeatedly,” said Whitfield. “Ali, can you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have no tires on these wheels, Ali.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will you tell me where they are?”
“They took them.”
“Who?”
“The two who took them.”
Whitfield breathed deeply. Quinn said, “Must have struck his head against the roof repeatedly.”
“Don’t confuse matters, Quinn. Ali?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did anything happen that you can explain to me?”
“The camel wouldn’t get out of the way and then he hit me.”
Whitfield nodded. Then he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. “Naturally,” he said. “It would be a he. A female camel would never beat a man over the head. Now then. Ali.”
“That’s all I know, sir. Everything.”
“Well,” said Whitfield, and slapped the clipboard against his thigh, “it is now clear to me that somebody stole the sainted tires.”
And then he thought of something else and went quickly to the back of the pick-up. He unlashed the tarp, pulled it back, and sighed when he saw the canisters. He reached over and lifted two of them at random and sighed again.
“Thank you, sainted heart,” he said.
“Didn’t touch the cargo, is that it?” said Quinn.
“Thank God.”
“What is it, liquid gold?”
“No, but it’s convertible. Ali, drive that stuff into the warehouse. Do you realize you’re two hours late?”
“Please sir, please-” said the man on the running board.
“I think he doesn’t want to drive any more,” said Quinn.
Quinn drove the truck into the warehouse. It is, he thought to himself, only poetic justice that I should do this. What with the jumping and the rattling, all of which was transmitted directly into his skull, it took him all of the fifteen yards which he had to cover before he had formulated the whole thought.
When he got out of the cab he could see the driver walking slowly away from the warehouse, slow like a farewell walk, but straight and steady, as if he would never come back. Then Whitfield came around a stack of bales and brought two Arabs. They immediately began to unload the canisters and wheeled them out to the pier on little wagons.
“Tell me,” said Quinn. “Where’s Bea this time of day?”
“Hotel most likely. It’s just before her siesta.”
Quinn smiled and left the warehouse. Two days, he thought, with hardly anything to do.
Chapter 14
She was drinking something orange and oily and when she saw him coming to her table she was not sure whether she liked seeing him or not. Of course he was new. But it seemed to her there had been something else before, something she missed.
“You looked,” she said to him, “as if you were heading straight for my table.”
“I was. May I sit down?”
She nodded and watched him sit.
“You look positively like you’d had a good day at the office.”
“I did,” he said.
They did not talk while the waiter took his order, and when the waiter was gone they still had nothing to say. Bea sipped and then licked her lips, which were sticky and sweet. She concentrated on that, trying to forget the platitude she had used on him, and that he had answered it in kind. Quinn lit a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” she said.
“Now that I’m in civilization I’m taking up all kinds of civilized habits.”
She put her glass down and looked at him. “You say that without a smile and it sounds nasty. You say that with a smile and it sounds cagey.”
“Which did I do?”
“Don’t you know? You did both.”
Quinn waited till the waiter had put down the drink and left the table. He made out to himself that this was the only reason he didn’t say anything right away. Then he folded his arms on the table.
“You know what you sound like, Bea?”
“As if I disliked you.” She gave a small laugh and said, “Strange, isn’t it? I don’t know why.”
Quinn did not know what to do with that answer and looked into his glass. He drank and thought, how did I used to do it? I don’t remember ever sitting like this, not knowing what next.
“And then again,” she was saying, “if you were to ask me right now, now I don’t dislike you at all.”
This did not help him at all. He lost all touch with her and felt only suspicion.
“Look,” he said. “Naturally you don’t like me. First of all, you don’t know me from Adam. Second of all, what you do know you got from somebody else.”
“What was that?”
“You’re thick with the mayor, aren’t you? So naturally, listening to him-”
He knew he had missed as soon as he heard himself say the sentence. Bea sat up and looked at him as from a distance.
“You know something, Quinn?” She flicked one nail against her glass and made it go ping. “I just caught why I don’t like you. When I don’t like you.”
“I’m interested as all hell,” he said. The anger he felt seemed to swell his face. She went ping on the glass again and that was the worst thing about her, he thought idiotically.
“Here you sit talking to me, but not with me. Oh, no. It’s not even about me. It’s about the mayor. You have some thing with the mayor and nothing else matters, and when you get around to going to bed with me, that will probably be from spite too.”
Quinn sat hunched with his arms on the table. Then he pushed away and picked up his glass. He kept looking at her when he tipped up the glass and let the ice cubes slide down so that they hit his teeth.
“You don’t have to look at me like that,” she said.
He put the glass down and lit a cigarette. I’ll give her this silence, he thought, so she’ll be as confused as I am.
“And now I’ll tell you why I like you when I do like you,” she said, but he could not let her finish. He did not want to hear what she had to say about liking.
He exhaled and said, “Are you drunk?”
“No.” She frowned, and he thought it could have been anger. “I’m not drunk,” she said, “but I think I’m going to be.”
“You’re sweet,” he said. “Oh, are you ever a sweet female.”
“Reserve judgment, Quinn. Wait till I’m drunk.”
He now found that everything went very much easier. It was now easy to show her his anger, though he had no idea what he was angry about. He made out it was she who caused the anger and that game was fine with her. It was fine with her because now she felt animated. She was not bored. She ordered another drink for him and for herself and tried to insult him by paying for them. He let her pay for them and so insulted her back.
“For a pushover,” he said, “you sure do all the most repulsive things.” The liquor was starting to scramble his thinking and he sat wondering what he had meant by the remark.
“But I’m no pushover,” she said. “For that you’d have to ask me to go to bed and then I’d have to say yes, just because you asked. None of that has happened, you know.”
“And it won’t either.”
“You are very drunk, Quinn, very drunk,” and she looked slightly past his left ear. Then she got up. “I’m going home,” she said.
“And you’re not going to ask me if I want to come?”
“No. You’re no pushover, Quinn. You’re a hard man of principles.” Then she laughed and walked away from the table.
He watched her walk away and how her hips moved under the dress. The dress made a fold over one hip and then over the other. Quinn suddenly felt he had never seen anything more exciting in all his life.
He sat and wondered if it was the liquor making him dull and stupid, letting her walk out this way, letting her hit him in the head with her lousy insults, swapping insults back and forth like two idiots. He sat a short while longer and enjoyed disliking her. Then he left.
