Flame Of Diablo

Something of what she was thinking showed in her tone as she said, ‘Perhaps we could discuss this in private. I’m able to pay for your time, if that’s what’s concerning you.’

‘It is not.’ His face was expressionless, but she had the oddest feeling he was secretly amused. ‘You are a stubborn lady, querida, and a reckless one, I think. You should not offer to pay until you know the price you might be asked.’

‘This would obviously have to be part of the discussion,’ Rachel said. ‘Please talk to me about it at least.’ She heard the almost pleading note in her voice with a sense of shock. That wasn’t what she had intended at all.

‘You imagine your powers of persuasion will be more effective when we are alone?’ he asked, and laughed as the colour rose in her face. ’muy bien,chica, we will talk if you think it will make any difference, but later.’

‘We should talk now. This is important,’ she said in a low voice.

‘To you perhaps,’ he drawled. ‘But at the moment, nothing is more important to me than my game which you have interrupted—and I have a winning hand. I will talk to you later.’

His hand came up, and his lean fingers stroked her cheek in the merest flick of a caress.

Rachel heard herself gasp, as startled as if he had struck her. Or kissed her.

She whirled round and out of the room, slamming the door behind her for emphasis, hearing the echo of laughter follow her.

The reception desk was once more deserted, but she heard a chink of glasses coming from behind a half-opened door to the right of the entrance and went and looked round it. It was a large room with tables and a bar, empty now except for the man called Ramirez who was polishing glasses behind the bar. He looked surprised to see her and she wondered waspishly if he’d known exactly the sort of reception she was going to get—had perhaps even been listening at the door.

‘Your bargain is made, señorita?’ he enquired, straight-faced.

‘Not quite,’ she said too sweetly. ‘We’re going to talk later. I’m afraid that you’re going to have to let me have that room after all.’

He gave her another long look. He was probably wondering why she wasn’t scuttling back to Bogota, her tail between her legs, she thought angrily.

‘Señor de Mendoza said he would speak with you later?’ He sounded incredulous, and she smiled kindly at him.

‘Indeed he did, after we’d got one or two points straightened out. He seemed to have some strange ideas about why I wished to hire him—and a very inflated opinion of his own attractions,’ she added for good measure. But she knew she was being unfair. Vitas de Mendoza was not the sort of man to indulge in illusions, and he could not have failed to know by now that his dark, saturnine good looks and the piratical extravagance of that eye-patch would be the realisation of a thousand women’s fantasies. She just happened to be the thousand and first, that was all.

‘He has reason,’ Ramirez said calmly. He chuckled reminiscently. ‘There was one woman—a norteamericana—she came here with her husband to see the country. Later she returned alone, and Vitas took her into the hills. They were gone a long time.’ He eyed Rachel. ‘Her hair was fair, like yours, señorita,’ he added blandly.

‘I can assure you that is the only resemblance,’ she said coldly. ‘Now can I please see this room? I did not enjoy the journey here, and I’m rather tired.’

He shrugged almost fatalistically. ’si, Señorita.’

The room he showed her was not large, but it was scrupulously clean, the narrow bed gay with Indian blankets, soft as fleece. They were selling similar blankets on the market stalls in the square below and Rachel promised herself she would buy one. But that would be later. All she wanted to do now was lie down on that bed and try to forget that foul bus journey. There was a bathroom just down the corridor with a small, rather reluctant shower, and she stripped and washed the dust and some of her aches away. It was bliss to come back to her room and put on fresh underwear from her small stock, and lock the door and close the shutters, so that the noise from the square became a muted and not intolerable hum, and then stretch out on the bed.

Yet in spite of her bone-weariness, sleep seemed oddly elusive. Strange unconnected images kept coming into her mind—trees by a river with the darkness of a mountain rising behind them—a man wearing black clothes riding a black horse so that he seemed part of it like a pagan centaur—and a fair-haired woman who stood among the trees with her arms outstretched, so that the man bent out of the saddle and lifted her up into his arms, her hair falling like a pale wound across the darkness of his sleeve. Rachel twisted uneasily, trying to banish the image from her mind, but the horse came on until it was close enough for her to see the rider’s face with a black patch set rakishly over one eye. As she watched, the blonde woman moved in his arms, lifting her hands to clasp around his neck, drawing him down to her.

Rachel put out a hand to ward them off. She didn’t want to see this. She didn’t want to know, but her gesture seemed to catch the rider’s eye and he turned to look at her, and so did the woman he was holding, and Rachel saw that the face that stared at her from beneath the curtain of blonde hair was her own.

She cried out, and suddenly the images had gone and she was sitting up on the narrow bed in the now-shadowed room, her clenched fist pressed against her thudding heart. She could see herself in the mirror across the room, the gleam of her hair, and the smooth pallor of her skin, interrupted only by the deeper white of her flimsy lace bra and briefs.

She thought, ‘So I was asleep after all.’ It was a comfort in a way to know that what she had seen had been a nightmare rather than a deliberate conjuration of her imagination. And she was thankful that she had woken when she did. She picked up her gold wristwatch from the side of the bed and studied it. To her surprise, she had been asleep for over two hours.

She slid off the bed, and put on the beige linen trousers she had worn earlier, with a shirt of chocolate brown silk under the loose hip-length jacket. Her hair was wrong, she thought, waving loosely on to her shoulders. She unearthed a tortoiseshell clip from her case and swept the honey-coloured waves severely back from her face into a French pleat, anchoring it with the clip. It made her look older, she decided, and more businesslike.

She swung her dark brown leather shoulder bag over her arm, and went downstairs. It was very quiet—too quiet, she thought. She went to the room where the card game had been in progress and opened the door. It was deserted, and the table had been cleared, the chairs put back against the wall.

Rachel said furiously, ‘Well, I’m damned!’

She supposed he thought he’d been very clever, waiting until she was out of the way in her room to do his vanishing trick. It was his way of saying ‘No’ without further argument.

She bit her lip until she tasted blood. Well, to hell with him! He might be the best, but he couldn’t be the only guide in Asuncion. She wouldn’t let this one setback defeat her, and if Vitas de Mendoza was going to feature so prominently in her dreams on such short acquaintance, she told herself defiantly that she was glad to see the back of him.

She turned on her heel, and went out into the evening sunshine. The market appeared to be still going strong, and a group of musicians had even started up in one corner of the square, attracting a small but laughing crowd.

She began to wander round the stalls. As well as the handwoven blankets and ruanas, there were also piles of the round-crowned hats the Indians seemed to wear. She would need a hat herself for the trip ahead, she supposed vaguely, but something with a wider brim and shallower crown than those on offer here. There were fruit and vegetable stalls too, where flies swarmed busily, and Rachel averted her gaze with a faint shudder. There was little point in feeling squeamish, she told herself firmly. Conditions would be even more primitive on the way to Diablo.

She was hungry too. Presumably the hotel served meals, but Señor Ramirez had said nothing about their times, which further underlined the fact that he was not expecting her to stay. She could smell cooking somewhere, or was it just her optimistic imagination? A few moments later she had her answer. One corner of the market seemed entirely given over to a gigantic open-air kitchen. Open fires had been kindled and great cooking pots of meat and vegetables suspended over them, while nearby chickens turned slowly on spits.

It all looked appallingly unhygienic, and it smelt mouthwatering. Rachel could resist no longer. She continued her stroll nibbling at a chicken leg. Every second person she met seemed to be doing the same, and surely they couldn’t all be going to die of salmonella poisoning, she comforted herself.

She had paused by a stall selling ponchos and was examining a beauty in a wild zigzag pattern of grey and black and red, when a voice behind her said urgently, ‘Señorita!’

She turned and saw a small man dressed in a tight-fitting white suit. He had a sallow face and a drooping black moustache, and he was mopping furiously at his forehead with a violently coloured handkerchief.

He said, ‘The señorita needs a guide, yes? I am a good guide. I will take the señorita anywhere she wishes to go.’

Rachel stared at him in bewilderment. For an answer to a prayer, he was not particularly prepossessing, she thought. He was plump and rather shiny and a greater contrast to Vitas de Mendoza could not be visualised.

She said slowly, ‘I do need a guide, yes, but how did you know?’

The man made an awkward gesture. ‘The Señor Ramirez at the hotel, señorita. He said so and …’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Rachel, although actually she didn’t. She seemed to have done the disapproving Señor Ramirez an injustice. Or perhaps he just wanted to get her off the premises, she thought cheerfully. ‘I want to go to a place called Diablo,’ she went on, watching him closely through her lashes for signs of dismay and censure. But there were none.

He merely said, ’si, Señorita. As the señorita wishes. And when does she desire to set out?’

‘I’d hoped tomorrow,’ she said, frankly taken aback.

He nodded. ‘I will arrange everything. The señorita can ride a horse?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I thought I could probably hire a Land Rover and….’

He interrupted, shaking his head. ‘A Land Rover no good, señorita. The tracks are bad, and sometimes there are no tracks. Horses are better. I, Carlos Arnaldez, tell you this.’

‘Very well, Carlos.’ She wasn’t going to argue with him. He knew the terrain better than she did. She was glad she had included some denim jeans in the luggage she had brought with her. And she had seen some soft leather boots on a stall which would be ideal for riding.

She was well pleased when she returned to the hotel an hour later, her new boots tucked under her arm. Carlos’ appearance might not be in his favour, but she had to admit that he was efficient. He had taken her to one of the local store-cum-cafés, where they had agreed on his fee for the trip, and also how much he was to spend on the hire of the horses and other equipment. She had been a little suspicious at the mention of money, wondering if he thought she was naïve enough to simply hand over a handful of pesos and watch him vanish with it, never to be seen again. But he had no such intention, it seemed. He would buy everything necessary, he assured her, and obtain receipts for his purchases, and the señorita could reimburse him before they set off, if that was satisfactory.

Then he had drunk her health and to the success of the trip in aguardiente, while Rachel had responded more decorously in Coca-Cola.

She had not told him the purpose of her journey. Let him think she was just a foolhardy tourist, she thought. There would be plenty of time for the truth once they were on their way, and she knew she could trust him.

The reception desk was deserted again when she entered the hotel, and although she banged on the counter and called, no one came.

‘The perfect host,’ she muttered, ducking under the counter flap to retrieve her key from the board at the back.