Puzzle for Pilgrims Read Online Free

It’s just plain, ornery vindictiveness.”
    That was too much for her. She stood in front of me, quite still, crying. Large, bright tears wet her lashes and slid down her cheeks.
    The futile unhappiness of it all—for me, for her—moved me. I put my arm around her and stroked her hair. I felt then that maybe I was the one with the strength, after all.
    “Don’t worry, baby,” I said softly. “It’ll all pan out. And, believe it or not, I’ll probably live.”
    Martin left Sally. She let him go with a quietness which should have aroused their suspicions. Iris left too. I helped her pack and drove her to the airport. When she boarded it, she asked me in a tight voice not to start divorce proceedings until she gave me the word. We didn’t kiss. We shook hands stiffly. I caught a glimpse of her white, obsessed face in the window as the plane roared away.
    After that, life had been smooth for them for a few days in Acapulco. That, of course, was just because Sally had been preparing her attack. Then the attack came. I heard about it from Iris. One evening her voice came through thinly on the long-distance wire from the coast.
    “Peter, please don’t be angry. I’ve got to talk. There’s nobody but you.”
    Sally had arrived that afternoon and thrown a scene. First she had attacked Iris, calling her every gutter name outside of the dictionary. Then she had turned on Martin. She told Iris that he was wanted by the English police for embezzlement and could never go back there. She said he had consorted with the lowest types in Taxco and that he was a drunk. But those had only been preliminaries, getting her tongue in. She came to the point in her own good time. She was never going to give a divorce; she would die before she gave him a divorce. And not only that. For the three years of the marriage, Martin had been penniless; she had given him large sums of money and on each occasion she had made him sign an IOU. If he didn’t go back to her, she would sue him for the return of every cent.
    “She means it, Peter. It’s all lies about Martin. I know. But she can twist things.” Iris added forlornly, “Peter, what are we going to do?”
    That was what showed me the real extent of my defeat. The thing between us was so dead for her that she was asking my advice as if I were a godfather or an old friend of the family. I wasn’t comforting. I growled something about her taking the rough with the smooth and hung up.
    Then I went out and got drunk. That’s really all Mexico City had to offer me. I couldn’t leave, because I had to wait for word from Iris to start divorce proceedings. I had nothing to do. Occasionally, I’d make a halfhearted tourist trip, but Aztec pyramids and Catholic churches aren’t much balm. Mostly I hung around bars—not the chromium bars where American businessmen borrow Mexican hats from the orchestra while their wives kick their shoes off under the bars and let their make-up run, but Mexican bars where they play dominoes and shoot dice and sometimes, because it’s sissy not to, hit their best friends in the face.
    Two weeks before the bullfight I was in a bar, a few days after Iris called, when I met Marietta Haven. In New York it would have been a wild coincidence, my meeting Martin’s sister, but in Mexico everyone runs into everyone sooner or later. She was sitting at the bar of La Cucaracha in front of a Martini. We started to talk, not knowing each other. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
    Even now, when I know her as well as the lines on my own palm, I find it difficult to describe Marietta. She was tall and dark as her brother was slight and fair. She was slender, too, like a spray of pussy willow, and there was a quality of spring about her, fresh, with clean, dark hair and the sort of flawless country skin which made the French pedant write that God, when he created the perfect woman, gave her an English complexion. But that wasn’t the essence of