Puzzle for Pilgrims Read Online Free Page B

you. You might be able to do something. Go to her, talk to her, try and make her see it can’t help her to destroy Martin. God, hasn’t this made me a monster? Peter, I’m so sorry.
    Iris
     
    I handed the letter to Martin’s sister. She was so much a part of my life now that it seemed the natural thing to do.
    “I saw Sally at the bullfight,” I said. “She came and sat with me.”
    “Sally at the bullfight. How repulsive.” Marietta read the letter and handed it back to me without comment. “I saw her too.”
    “Where?”
    “She came to my house this morning.”
    “What did she say?”
    “A lot of unpleasant things.”
    “What unpleasant things?”
    “The sort of unpleasant things she’s so good at saying.”
    “You think it’s serious? This threat against Martin?”
    Marietta’s eyes were green, but so dark a green that sometimes they looked black. She said, “I can’t think about Sally on an empty stomach. Let’s eat.”
    We went downstairs, past the rooster and the Indian with his heaped peanuts. I was still sucker enough to feel Iris’s unhappiness almost as if it were my own. I thought of Sally with her small head, her heavy hair, her eyes bright with passion while the bull jabbed the horse. She was dangerous, all right. Maybe I should have stayed, tried to do something.
    We went to a little Mexican restaurant. Marietta liked Mexican food hot enough to take the plating off the cutlery. English palates seem to go that way in foreign countries. She sat across from me at the rickety table behind a vase of skimpy white daisies, eating the blazing food and looking as cool as her native Thames. In spite of her outer placidity, I could still feel the change in her. She didn’t say much, but it wasn’t that, because she never said much. It was something more subtle. I wondered if it had to do with Sally’s visit to her. Sally hated her, I knew. Marietta had tried to prevent the marriage. There had been a terrific clash.
    I could never anticipate Marietta’s moods. Because I had no active desire to do anything myself, I found her incalculability refreshing. Sometimes she wanted to go to the most expensive night club in town and dance, gravely and well, all night. Other times she dragged me to the lowest Mexican dives where she drank tequila straight for hours without the faintest change in her appearance or her behavior.
    That evening, after I had paid the check, she said, “Do you mind if we go to the Delta?”
    “It stinks.”
    “I know it stinks.” She gave me that blinding smile of hers which was mocking either me or herself. “We need bad smells. Bad smells and Sally go together.”
    That was unusual too. That she should mention Sally of her own accord.
    As soon as we pushed through the swing doors of the Cantina Delta, the smell came. I had never tried to define it. The ingredients, I felt, were better left unanalyzed. A few men lounged at a drab bar to the right. On the left were booths, most of which were filled with boys and men in shirt sleeves, tightly wedged together and jabbering. Unpainted stairs loomed in the center, leading to a second floor.
    Marietta always liked being upstairs. With her proud walk and her black suit, perfectly tailored at the shoulders and the narrow hips, she was preposterously out of place. But hardly an eye was raised to watch her. She was too familiar a sight by now. We went up the stairs. We took one of the tables by the grimy windows that looked down onto the activity of the Calle 16 de Septiembre. That was my doing. With the window tilted open, the smell was less marked.
    The waiter brought tequila without our asking. He brought salt and cut limes too. Marietta sprinkled salt on the base of her thumb in the Mexican fashion, sipped the tequila, and nibbled on a slice of lime. She watched me from the clear, unrevealing eyes.
    “Worried?” she asked suddenly.
    “What about?”
    “About Iris.”
    “You know me by now. That’s my theme song.”
    She put