Inspector Lopez of the Caracas police force looked up from his coffee hoping against hope that some beautiful woman in trauma had just walked in, warding off the gnawing fear that it was just an orderly to tell him about some infernal kidnapping. It was neither.
"You're back," he said, putting the coffee down and quickly calculating in his head what this development could mean.
"Yes, I am," Guy Marlborough answered cheerfully, slinging his raincoat over his right arm and splattering the wall beside him. "This time, on official British business." He pulled out the papers.
A rock crashed through the bottom of Lopez' stomach; he stared at the papers as if they were alive and crawling up the detective's fingers. "I see," he answered at length. "And what are you ... back for?"
"Same case!" Marlborough was ebullient. He, in fact, was fully conscious of this. Earlier that morning he had awakened in the same room as his wife - a triumph - and declared to her passionately, "I feel ebullient!" Now he told the Inspector, "The one involving Jose Manuel Arraqui - I'm sure you must recall."
"Ah." There was more skepticism than anger in Inspector Lopez' voice now. "Good luck." He quickly fished in his mind for excuses, found one, and fled the office to replenish his coffee cup, leaving Marlborough to inquire after some form of police protection.
Luck was certainly something the British detective would need; he had, on the final voyage from Havana, organized the case mentally and then onto paper. It didn't look good. A man named Jose Manuel Arraqui had been murdered in his apartment, with ludicrous brutality. In fact, so far as Marlborough could remember only the head had been found. Arraqui had been in possession of a suspicious amount of United States currency, mint condition. He had also been, according to the American diplomat Summers, a secret agent of some sort, working for inner circles of government. There was, of course, not much further information on this, except that Arraqui was involved in foreign security and seemed to have a habit of extorting - or trying to - money from various foreign governments. Actually, shortly after he had learned this Lopez had tried to get money from Marlborough himself, he recalled.
One solid lead was the appearance of the name Heinrich Hoch in Marlborough's appointment book. But then the dandy himself had died, with significant assistance from unknown individuals who clearly had inside knowledge of Arraqui's death, to say the least. And in the end it turned out the name had been inscribed by someone else. All that Marlborough could truly ascertain further than that, though, was that agents representing at least three European nations had tailed him on his way into Caracas on this second voyage. Why were they so interested in him, anyways?
The obvious answer was that they were interested in Arraqui - the man who had been involved with foreign agents himself. And now Marlborough had been told on the boat that he was one of the very, very few people who had been permitted into Venezuela past the blockade of the European powers. Was he getting into the makings of an international war? Or was Arraqui moonlighting in another business?
There were answers somewhere. But it seemed that first he would have to go in search of the questions. Take the slinking, shadowy men who had pretended not to be on his boat. Why were they so interested in him?
(Oops, started a new page, so readers beware there's a brand new update at the bottom of the last one if you haven't seen it.)
