The Goblin Market

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

It's 1943, and down-on-his-luck American expat Philip Stark is on the Caribbean island of Santa Teresa. The prewar destination playground is deserted now except for diplomats and oil refinery workers.

When a local correspondent dies, Stark sees a chance to make some money. Having worked for the same company in the past, he is hired to replace the dead man. But Stark doesn't think his predecessor died by accident. As he looks into the mystery, he encounters a rival correspondent, an enigmatic police officer and the mistress of the dead man - all of whom had a stake in seeing him dead.

Release date: October 14, 2013

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

SOFTLY AS HE TROD, Doña Calypso heard him. She was waiting at the foot of the stair, one hand on the newel post. What light came through windows
shaded against a Caribbean sun glanced from the sheen of her black and white eyeballs and struck sparks from Brazilian diamonds in her ears, leaving her long, sallow face and cotton laces in
shadow. Her eyes missed nothing—crumpled linen, dingy hat and shoes, bracelet of white skin, pale around his sun-tanned wrist, where he had worn his watch before he pawned it a few days
ago.

Her thin lips moved tightly, almost without separating. Had the señor forgotten that little matter of a board bill overdue for three weeks?

No, the señor had not forgotten. He would attend to the matter today. He had—expectations.

Expectations? The señora lifted skeptical brows. It seemed strange that an able-bodied man like Don Felipe Esstark could not find employment now in the armed forces of his own
country.

Stark smiled. “Perhaps I am a drug addict or an Axis agent. Who knows?”

He should not have attempted to joke with her. He could feel her glance between his shoulder blades like a knife as he stepped into the garden.

The road, cut from solid coral, was bone-white in the orange sunlight, velvety lavender in the shadow of two papaw trees, male and female. Beyond were the unbelievable waters of the
bay—jade-green in the shallows alongshore, sapphire-blue in the deep heart of the harbor. A spray of oleander thrust coral-pink blossoms against a turquoise-blue sky that seemed to tremble
with its own heat like a blue flame.

Stark looked a little out of place in that colored postcard world. His hair and eyes were the neutral shade of brown without a hint of black that appears most often in the colder climates. Even
a deep sun tan could not make him look as if he had Indian or Spanish blood. His eyes were alert, searching, and quizzical. The smile he had given Doña Calypso was gently ironic. Any South
American would have recognized him as a North American, and any other North American would have suspected he was a New Yorker, by adoption if not by birth. He didn’t look like a businessman
or a workingman, so presumably he had once practiced one of the professions. He could have been a disbarred lawyer, a doctor of medicine who had lost his license, a cashiered officer of the Army or
Navy, or even an unfrocked priest; for there was about him subtly but unmistakably an air of disintegration—a kind of reckless self-contempt, as if he despised the derelict, expatriate life
that he was leading now. Yet even this hint of the spiritually shopworn in his manner could not alter his innate friendliness and tolerance.

Across the road, steps cut in the coral rock went down to the water. A rowboat waited with an old Indian at the oars. Jaime made a precarious living ferrying people across the bay from this West
Shore of the island republic of Santa Teresa to its capital, Puerta Vieja—which now, in early 1943, was a mecca for both Spanish loyalists and rebels, and for people with shady backgrounds
from all over the world.

At the moment Stark was the only passenger. He stepped aboard lightly as a sailor without disturbing the balance of the boat and slumped down onto a seat in the stern. Sitting motionless in the
open boat on the unshaded water he could feel the sun close and intimate as a hot hand laid heavily across his shoulders. He closed his eyes against the glare, but he could not shut out the heat.
It was all around him and inside him, inescapable as the air he breathed. He had bathed only half an hour ago, but already drops of sweat were gathering on his forehead, rolling stickily down his
back under his thin linen jacket. Like living in the steam room of a Turkish bath.

Oarlocks creaked. Jaime had concluded that no one else was coming. As the prow swung toward the opposite shore, Stark opened his eyes. The splash of oars sounded cool to his Northern ears though
he knew this water was warm as blood to the touch.

Eyes, ambushed in the shadow of his hatbrim, swept the harbor. On his right a smaller island, lying between two arms of the crescent-shaped bay, guarded the channel to the open sea. On his right
also was the town of Puerta Vieja, a citadel of dirty white built by Spaniards on the site of an Indian settlement. Cruiser tourists who used to anchor there before the war in ships all white paint
and shining brass would hardly have recognized the Old Port now. Ships were still anchored along the Embarcadero, but some were plainly camouflaged and others so battle-scarred and filthy they
hardly looked as if they had been painted at all. Flags of many nations flew at their masts—American, British, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek. Even the tankers had guns mounted on their decks. The
destroyers bristled with armament like fighting animals with bared tooth and claw. Suddenly Stark’s eyes narrowed. Had his sun-dazzled eyes conjured up a mirage? Or had he really seen the
gleam of a brass rail?

As the rowboat swung inshore, his angle of vision was swinging with it. It seemed as if the ships at anchor were moving instead of the rowboat—advancing, receding, converging, and
diverging like flats and flies manipulated by invisible scene-shifters. There was a brass rail on that tanker. It winked in the sun like a tiny heliograph. There was even white paint on her
superstructure. Red and yellow colors fluttered from her mast, repeated in the still, painted flag on her long, low side. She stood among the other ships like a fashionable whore flaunting rouge
and diamonds in a company of dowdy housewives—the first uncamouflaged ship Stark had seen in Puerta Vieja.

He spoke in Spanish. “The white ship was not in port yesterday.”

“No, señor. She arrived last night.”

“You know her name?”

“The Arragona out of Cadiz. She is a tanker.”

“So I observed.”

Jaime’s eyelids dropped. His wrinkled copper face was expressionless as he went on: “She is a Spanish ship.”

“I observed that also.”

Jaime twirled one oar. The rowboat spun in a half circle. A rusty Dutch tanker blotted out their view of the gay Spanish ship. The rowboat grated against another water step. Stark took three
coins from his pocket and weighed them on the palm of his hand—a copper from San Salvador, a nickel from Venezuela, and a silver coin acquired here in Santa Teresa.

“All the money I have in the world, Jaime!”

The ferryman, making change, smiled. “The señor is pleased to jest.” It was the Spanish equivalent of No kidding! All citizens of the United States were rich. Every
Santa Teresano knew that.

Stark tossed the Venezuelan nickel in the air. Heads he would go back to Halloran. Tails he would try Mitchell. Halloran of the Occidental News Service he knew and disliked. Mitchell of the
Co-ordinated Press was an unknown quantity, except for the nickname “Mitch” overheard in bars frequented by North Americans.

The coin spun and settled. Heads. Halloran. . . .

Stark mounted the steps to a plaza that might have been anywhere in Spain or Italy or even Southern France. The bronze statue of a general on a rocking horse made a jagged patch of shadow at the
heart of the sunbaked white pavement like a shadow cast by the upright of an enormous sundial. Since losing his watch, Stark had found he could guess time quite accurately by observing the diurnal
movement of General Estrelito’s shadow. It was now about eleven o’clock.

On the general’s right an old church slept in the sun. On his left stood a cream-white building, first floor recessed, second floor projecting over the sidewalk, supported by arches. Under
the arcade were souvenir shops and offices—a steamship line, a tourist agency, a cable company. Also a café with tables on the sidewalk.

Stark sat at one of the tables and ordered a frugal breakfast—coffee and cigarettes. Someone had left a crumpled newspaper on the next chair. He smoothed out the creases—a copy of
this morning’s Prensa de Puerta Vieja. Russians were pushing into the Ukraine. Americans had captured a village in Tunisia. British had raided Nuremberg. In Puerta Vieja, the
alcalde’s wife had given a reception, a thief had been caught trying to sell a stolen donkey, and a telegraph boy had been killed by a car on the Paseo de Santa Cristina.

A familiar name caught Stark’s eye.

TRAGIC EVENT—SUDDEN DEMISE OF AN AMERICAN OF THE NORTH

Puerta Vieja, Jan. 4, 1943.—The rest is silence.

In these poignant words the most sympathetic of Anglo-Saxon poets has expressed, with a proud simplicity worthy of the Spanish-speaking peoples, the mute eloquence of
sudden death—

Santa Teresano rewrite men were not standardized products from the assembly lines of schools of journalism. No one had ever told them to cram all the meat they could into the first word, into
the first sentence, and into the first paragraph of a news story. Their idea of a “lead” was an essay in polished Castilian prose running to half a column, touching lightly on life and
death, literature and philosophy. Every news story was a “think-piece.”

Stark skimmed over quotations from Calderón and Cervantes, Montaigne and Goethe, until he came to the point where a North American would have begun his story.

In short, my dear readers, here are the facts.

Yesterday evening at nine o’clock Sergeant of Municipal Police Tomas Fernandez y Mazatlan was patrolling his district at the cautious pace enforced by the
obscurity of the blackout when his foot encountered an obstruction at the junction of the Avenida del Sol and the Calle de las Ciruelas.

At first the gallant sergeant assumed that someone had left a pile of old papers or other rubbish on the pavement since the obstruction, though of a certain solidity,
was not impenetrably unyielding. But when he turned on his flashlight he was horrified to discover the body of a man lying face down in the gutter.

It was the work of a moment to turn the defunct over and establish that life was extinct. At that point the worthy sergeant received a deeper and more personal shock for
he recognized the deceased as Señor Don Pedro Halloran, popular and distinguished representative in Santa Teresa of the great North American news agency known as Occidental News
Service.

A true friend of our beautiful Santa Teresa and a tireless advocate of the good neighbor policy, Señor Halloran will be deeply mourned by social, political, and
journalistic circles in Puerta Vieja as well as by the North American colony. The Prensa de Puerta Vieja has the honor to extend its most profound condolences to Don Pedro’s family in North
America, who have lost a charming and amiable kinsman, and to our colleagues of Occidental News Service, who have been deprived of a brilliant and capable collaborator.

The bronze general and his plunging horse still cast a jagged shadow across the Plaza and the old church still slept in the sun, but to Stark the whole world had changed.

Halloran was dead.

There are several customary ways of reacting to sudden death—shock, grief, compassion, or even malicious satisfaction. Stark showed none of these feelings. His expression was one of
quickened alertness.

His coffee grew cold in the cup. His fingers drummed on the marble-topped table. Unconsciously he was tapping code: . . . . . — . — . . . — . . —
— — . — . — — . Halloran.

He left a coin on the table and rose.

Dusty Venetian blinds filtered sunlight into the stifling heat of the cable office. Stark asked for a form and printed his message so that a Spanish-speaking telegraphist with little English at
his command would have no excuse for making a mistake:

OCCINEWS NEWYORK

CAN REPLACE HALLORAN SAME SALARY PLEASE REPLY CARE

HIS OFFICE HERE PHILIP STARK

The last of the change received from Jaime, the ferryman, covered the cost of the cable. That left him with the San Salvadoran copper and the Venezuelan nickel. They wouldn’t pass currency
here. They were too small to be exchanged at any bank.

Outside, under the arcade, reaction set in. Had he gambled his last precious pennies on a too-forlorn hope? Perhaps Occidental’s New York office would not remember that Philip Stark had
worked for them in Manila.

Everything that usually made a letter of application persuasive had to be left out of a cable. The art that gave the most boastful list of “qualifications” a gloss of modesty. The
bland elision of periods of unemployment and their causes. The carefully edited account of training and experience that must be good enough to make the applicant desirable, yet not so good that the
prospective employer would wonder why on earth such a dazzling genius should seek such a wretched little job.

Still—even the most elaborate letter could not palliate the brutally damaging fact that the applicant wanted a job. Perhaps the very bluntness of his cable would turn the trick. In a cable
so many embarrassing questions could be left unanswered.

Leaning against a plaster arch, Stark reread the Prensa’s account of Halloran’s death. Were all news stories as false as this? Señor Don Pedro Halloran
sounded muy caballero—sympathetic—amiable—distinguished— Pete Halloran had been none of these things. But yesterday afternoon at six o’clock he had, at least,
been alive—very much alive and, apparently, as healthy as a weed.

“I can’t do anything for you, Stark. This is a one-man bureau operating on a tight budget. It’s all I can do to squeeze my own cut out of the Old Man with a little chicken feed
for Vicente on the side. . . . I’ll have to ask you to get out. Can’t you see I’m busy? I can’t stand interruptions!”

Now all that was left of that surly temper was an inert thing that a policeman mistook for a heap of rubbish in the dark. Would Halloran have behaved a shade more decently, a shade less
brusquely, could he have known that in only three little hours his business would be interrupted by death?

Stark tried to shrug off a sense of depression. Still the reaction from his impetuous cable? Or delayed shock over Halloran’s sudden death? That was absurd. Halloran was nothing to Stark.
He had only met the fellow once. That one meeting had been anything but cordial. Halloran’s death was Stark’s good fortune. Yesterday Stark had faced failure and worse. Today, thanks to
the accident of Halloran’s death.

Accident?

It was only then that Stark began to wonder how Halloran had died.

Curious the Prensa should have been so reticent on that point.

Very curious.

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Stark turned his steps toward the Occidental office. At a crossing his glance fell on a street sign he had not noticed when
he visited Halloran yesterday: Avenida del Sol—Calle de las Ciruelas. He paused. This was the place where the police sergeant had found Halloran’s body.

Royal palms shaded the avenue on this side, screening the sidewalk from the broad roadway that ran along the edge of the bluff overlooking the water front. A flight of seven steps led down to
the cross street, an empty lane winding between high walls that guarded the grounds of old Spanish houses, with here and there a tall, iron gate shaded by the feathery green fringe of a pepper tree
or the papery fanlike leaves of a palm. There was no scuff or scar or stain in the white dust to indicate the actual spot where Halloran had died. There was no policeman on guard, no little knot of
sensation-seekers loitering near by as there would have been in New York. There was nothing in that windless, sunlit silence to account for Stark’s rising sense of uneasiness—unless it
were the utter absence of anything to suggest that this was the spot where a man had died less than twenty-four hours ago.

Only one building had windows overlooking the spot. It stood on the opposite corner, its three stories plastered with scrolls and washed an improbable pink that must have been conceived by a
pastry cook rather than an architect. On the ground floor, through heavily barred windows, jewels glittered against a background of chaste gray velvet. On the mezzanine floor a signboard announced
in English: OCCIDENTAL NEWS SERVICE—Information Booth—Reading-Room.

As there was no entrance on the side street, Stark walked up the avenue past the jeweler’s and turned into an open doorway beyond. A windowless passage brought him to a wide, shallow
stair. He went up without meeting anyone else—just as he had done yesterday. On the first landing he came again to the door with the brass plate engraved: Occidental Service. He
pushed it open. The shrill squeal of its hinge was like a blow on his eardrum. If he did succeed Halloran, his first official act would be the purchase of oil for that hinge.

The reading-room was empty—a long, narrow, low-ceiled room, dark near the door, light at the other end where a row of windows overlooked the avenue and the harbor. Armchairs were ranged
about a center table covered with American newspapers and magazines, weeks old. The information booth was closed, coated with a film of fine, white dust. But to Stark the silence was loud with
ghostly echoes of the tourists of yesteryear: What does alcalde mean? How can I get from the Paseo de Santa Cristina to the Indian ruins? Is it all right to let Junior drink the milk here? Who
was this guy Bolivar anyway?

He crossed the office, footfalls muffled on thick grass matting. Another door faced him with another brass plate: Editorial Offices. He knocked. No answer. This also was like yesterday.
Had the time-machine slipped a cog and stalled? Would he open the door and hear Halloran’s voice still shouting into the telephone, “Maybe you’ll get the idea when I tell you it
has accommodation for passengers!”

He opened the door. The doll’s-house corridor within was unchanged. Again he saw the closed door of Halloran’s office and the open door of Vicente’s office. Again he heard a
man’s voice speaking on the other side of the closed door. But this was not Halloran’s voice. This voice was so low-pitched Stark could not distinguish words.

Half a dozen steps took him into Vicente’s office—a small, dark, narrow room with a big window at the far end overlooking the Calle. It was empty as it had been yesterday, and it was
unchanged—the window closed, the desk locked, the light turned off. Stark crossed the room to the communicating door and paused on the threshold of Halloran’s office with a little gasp
of astonishment.

For the place looked as if Halloran had just stepped out—as if he must return at any moment. It was parallel with Vicente’s office, like it, dark and narrow with one big window
overlooking the Calle. But Halloran’s window was open. His green-shaded lamp was burning, spotlighting his desk. On the blotter lay his Panama hat and his flashlight. His desk drawer was
pulled out, exposing a mass of papers. A quart bottle of whisky stood near the lamp uncorked, the tumbler beside it half full of whisky. A cigarette, barely burned, lay in the ash tray as if
Halloran had put it down a moment ago and it had just gone out. Even his typewriter was open, cable form and carbons on the roller. Typed words broke off short in the middle of a line.
Stark’s quick eye caught two of the words: . . . urgent . . . exclusive.

Then he saw the man standing as Halloran had stood yesterday—on the other side of the desk, telephone in hand. It was the only point of resemblance, for this man was slender, dark-eyed and
sun-browned and with the almost Arabian composure that seems to go with pure Spanish blood. Where Halloran’s first look had been hostile and suspicious, this man’s was blandly
inquiring.

He put the telephone down in its cradle. “You came to see me, señor?” It was fluent English with only a trace of Spanish in the long s that made see sound
like essee.

Stark smiled. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“Then you came to see Señor Halloran?”

Stark’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not a spiritualist medium.”

“So you know that Señor Halloran is dead?”

“I read the papers.”

A spark of hostility flared between them. Then the stranger smiled. “Shall we sit down?” He dropped into Halloran’s swivel chair. Stark sat on the low, broad window sill, his
back to the light.

“Permit me to introduce myself—Miguel Urizar. Captain of Municipal Police. And you?”

“Philip Stark.”

“Profession?”

“None—at the moment.”

“And in the past?”

“I’ve been all sorts of things—radio operator, newspaper man, beachcomber, and just plain tramp.”

“I believe I have seen you before, señor. Don’t you spend a good deal of your time along the water front?”

“All the best bars are along the water front.” Stark’s hand went to his breast pocket. “Here’s my passport if you insist on identification. Has a cable come for me
here?”

Urizar barely glanced at the American passport. “There have been no cables today. You are expecting one?”

Stark answered frankly. “I cabled Occidental’s New York office applying for Halloran’s job as soon as I saw the account of his death in the Prensa this morning and
asked them to reply in care of this office.”

“How briskly you Americans of the North conduct your affairs!” murmured Uriza. . .