A sliver of moon appears over the sierra to the west of the lake and mist rolls across the water as autumn begins to chill the air on a night like this. An earthen causeway carries the driveway over a bog to a metal gate in the high walls that circle the former island. Ariana’s approach has not gone unnoticed. She is looking here and there for a bell or buzzer when the gate begins to swing open jerkily and a guard steps out of the shadows. With the tip of his assault rifle he gestures for her to lower the car window.
“Siga a la derecha, (Stay to the right)” he says, making a circular motion with his arm to indicate the corkscrew route to the top of the cold volcano. He mentions something about a parking space and Ariana nods, not quite understanding. As she pulls forward, she hears the gate grind shut. Another guard intercepts her at the point where the twisting cobbled drive finally levels off in front of the main house. He points toward a graveled turnout wide enough for her to pull in next to Margaret’s white Land Rover. The driveway continues around to the back of the house, to garages and barns, Ariana supposes, but it is blocked by a thick chain strung between low stone bollards.
Margaret opens the door as Ariana walks toward it, a brace of Dobermans at her side. “Wonderful of you to come all the way out here, Ariana. I could have met you somewhere in town.”
But besides wanting the conversation to be discreet, Ariana has a yen to see more of Villa Mujica than is allowed on the occasions, charity fundraisers mostly, when Margaret hires a pianist, engages a caterer and opens one or two hallways to general traffic. Attendants posted at staircases and passageways silently discourage the curious from turning a trip to the bathroom into a furtive tour of adjacent wings and upper floors.
“Schuyler would so love to have joined us.” Ariana updates the sick-sister-in-Connecticut story to say that his visit has been extended. “He tells me I’m in for a treat if you’ll show me around. Would you mind?” Margaret does not mind. The house itself — the architecture — requires no commentary beyond a date or two for the addition of this wing or that. The scale and detailing speak for themselves and for an earlier Mexico, an almost medieval Mexico that has survived the serial efforts to reduce an ancient republic to rubble and build something more modern and egalitarian in its place. Cardenas, the great and famously amorous president from the 1930s also kept a seasonal home at Patzcuaro, overlooking the lake, a place worthy of royalty that was the lair of a fire-breathing socialist, the man who nationalized Mexico’s petroleum industry. You can see the Cardenas house from Margaret’s tower. (In recent years, it has been turned into a retreat center where school teachers come for “continuing education” sessions during the summer.)
By contrast with the house itself, which is carefully maintained, Margaret’s furniture — heroic in scale, as it must be just to fill the rooms — is worn and strewn about indifferently, exactly as in snapshots from Schuyler’s youth at Bairnwood. Margaret seems to delight in odd particulars and the stories behind them: the desk, with its stack of art books, belonged to a forbear who grew rich in partnership with Chicago’s McCormick family. The canopied bed was the one in which her paternal great grandmother conceived and birthed her several children and in which she died.
“The bed was on Beacon Hill for many years,” Margaret says. “I rescued it when I left Boston after my first marriage ended. My sister had arranged for Goodwill to haul it off.
They circle back downstairs and into a cozy room off a much larger hallway. A small cart with a bottle of mezcal, a bucket of ice, and small carafes of white and red wine has been set out. A woman pops her head in the door and asks if anything else will be needed. Margaret says no, and tells Carmen, that she can retire now. For a late supper, she will be eating leftovers, Margaret says, adding that she prefers to serve herself.
Margaret waves her visitor toward a club chair and settles herself on a small matching sofa angled toward it. “That’s a fib,” Margaret adds, as her servant disappears. “Carmen is brilliant with leftovers and I hate to cook. But I work her hard. She has earned the night off.”
Ariana finds her hostess completely captivating, this elegant vestige from a world Schuyler once knew well enough to think of as his own. Margaret sits on one end of the sofa, with her forearm propped up on a cushion, her head tilted against it. The rest of her languishes on a diagonal that extends in an almost straight line from her tousled, silver-blonde hair to her feet, crossed at the ankles and resting on the oriental carpet.
Now she looks over at her visitor more directly and completely knocks the wind out of her:
“Forgive me for rattling on like this. You had something you wanted to talk about. Shouldn’t we be talking about it — Schuyler? The kidnapping? The ransom?”
Ariana is flabbergasted. “You know about this?”
“I guessed something was wrong, Ariana, and then I was told directly. You’re a nervous wreck, dear, which makes you an unconvincing liar. But I didn’t have to guess. I’d long since have met the same fate as Schuyler if I didn’t keep an ear to the ground.”
An ear to the ground? In that instant it seems entirely possible that Margaret Aldrich’s “ear to the ground” is a much deeper entanglement in the thorough corruption of Mexican life. To save her own skin, Ariana wonders, is this woman complicit by default in the whole racket of shakedowns and bribery?
“Don’t be naïve, darling. Do you really think I could get away with this,” — she waves her hand vaguely toward the great hall and the sweep of the main staircase — “if I hadn’t worked something out with the powers that be? A modus vivendi? An accommodation?
Ariana brings the dowager up to speed on what has happened: the meeting with men claiming to have Schuyler, their refusal to specify a ransom amount. But she needs to know more from Margaret:
“How did you find out? I hope not from anything I’ve done or said … “
“No, dear. You’ve been the picture of discretion, a model victim of cartel extortion. But I have my sources. My security staff? The boys at the gate? I honestly couldn’t tell you with complete conviction whether they work for me or for the Caballeros. It really doesn’t make much of a difference. I suspect they have to pass along fully half their salaries to the cartel honchos, but they can afford the kickback because I pay them twice what they’d make anywhere else. They know that. They’re lucky to be working for me; they know that. In exchange they make sure I know what I need to know.
And in exchange you keep them up to date on the gringo community? Who has money? Who doesn’t? Who might make a fat target for extortion? Ariana doesn’t say that, but she can’t help thinking it, and the thought sets loose a flash of anger toward Margaret that verges on hatred — of the privileges money gives her and that she so much takes for granted. She masters her rage by bearing in mind that Margaret can also be a resource, maybe even an ally.
“So what am I supposed to do? Can your men be of any use to me? Do they know where Schuyler is being held.”
Margaret: “They wouldn’t tell me that if they knew. They have no incentive to tell me things that might get me into trouble. I’ll find out what I can from them, but let me tell you this much: you’re going to have to play ball with these guys, whether they’re Caballeros or just second-tier gangsters — street goats — trying to impress the big boys. This has got to be a big deal for them. Picking up an American is a step way past shaking down some sad sack selling bootleg DVDs in the mercado. You can be sure there were arguments over this in the high echelons of the sicario leadership. (No, dear, I wasn’t privy to the discussion; I’ll forgive you for thinking I might have been.) But you need to assume that hotheads prevailed over more cautious colleagues. That’s always the way these things go down. And now that faction needs to prove itself, prove that what they have done was worth the trouble, the risk, prove that they haven’t made an enormously stupid mistake. They’re not going to fold their tents and go home. Egos are in play. That’s when it can get messy. Take them seriously, dear. Schuyler’s life depends on
it. Maybe yours, too. It’s about money. Try to keep it from being about anybody’s manly honor. You’re going to have to pony up.
The revelation that Margaret has been in on her secret all along is disorienting, to say the least. Ariana is strongly compelled to get the hell out of there; courtesy requires that she at least finish her drink.
And Margaret does rather enjoy the sound of her own voice. With nothing more to say about Schuyler’s situation, they get around to the question that always comes up among expats: Why Patzcuaro? How did you find your way here?
“Patzcuaro was really a wedding gift to me,” Margaret begins.
She serves up the back story: She married twice, first in the spring of her senior year at Radcliffe, “mainly to piss off my mother.” Husband No. 1 was, by Margaret’s account, a “stinker” named Ogden (Oggie) Phipps — a well-to-do bohemian “in the Harry Crosby mode,” as she put it. “Everyone was reading Black Sun that year. I decided it wasn’t enough to read about Harry, I had to marry him.”
Ariana knows the book, Black Sun, a biography of the decadent heir and poetaster who drifted through Europe in the 1920s and then, just ahead of the 1929 crash (but not because he saw it coming), committed suicide with a preppy paramour in a borrowed apartment at the Hotel des Artistes, leaving his uncle, J.P. Morgan, to wonder why Harry was late for tea.
“Oggie didn’t have the balls for suicide, but he did know how to throw great parties,” Margaret said. Her second husband was “the love of her life” — improbably so, her friends told her. Broward Stone was bearded, the better to conceal a rather recessive chin, an anthropologist, a Jew, a scholar less interested in Margaret’s money than in the social and commercial hierarchies of Mexico’s pre-Columbian Olmec empire. “Let me rephrase that,” Margaret said: “He was interested in the Olmecs to about the same degree that he was interested in old Boston money and folkways, not more, not less. But that’s OK. The money was one of the few interesting things about us Brahmins, that and the intense squeamishness about sex and the human body.” Broward introduced her to Patzcuaro. When he was diagnosed, they were spending more and more time here. He was researching late 19th-century land ownership patterns among the indigenous pueblos around the lake. He was dead within two years, mercifully fast for ALS.
Now, quite abruptly, Margaret pulls herself upright and lights a cigarette — a vice she claims to control by smoking only at night.
“But I have a confession to make, Ariana.” She exhales luxuriously. “Much as I loved Broward, I rather like this business of being a widow, of being single again.”
day fourteen
Ariana was on a flight to New York the next morning, propelled by a confluence of two motives. One, an excuse really, is that the gravity of the ransom demand might seem to require a face-to-face with the Schermerhorn family’s financial consultants; the more powerful impetus is her desire to just get the fuck out of Patzcuaro, suddenly a nerve-wracking place for her to be. The first of two flights, to Houston, leaves at an ungodly hour, 5 a.m. — crack-of-dawn feeder flights to major air hubs being the curse of a small regional airport like Morelia’s.
Ever the saint, Jorge has agreed to drive her to the airport, an hour away. They leave at 3 a.m., which is cutting it close for an international flight. Even at this hour, traffic bunches behind lumbering 18-wheelers, eases out and around them on straightaways, snarls again like the knots Incan couriers tied in hanks of rawhide to track their progress along the Andean ridge.
So it is natural to see a particular vehicle more than once, first in the rear-view mirror, then in the passing lane — where there is one — and then again in the rearview mirror: a nondescript Toyota Corolla. It is gray, with state of Guerrero license tags. But wait. Just to be sure, Jorge pulls into a Pemex station with an all-night Oxxo convenience store built into its flank. They watch as the car speeds past. Ariana picks up a coffee-to-go and leans against the rear fender for a few minutes to drink it down an inch or two. Several miles further along the highway, she sees the Corolla paused on the margin of a highway turnout. Within another mile, it has again pulled in behind them. She reaches New York a little after four that afternoon.
The door swings shut behind her. She drops her suitcase and shoulder bag to the floor and stands there for a moment, savoring, as she always has, the feeling of refuge that comes over her in the dusty quiet of an empty Manhattan apartment on a workday afternoon. The faint bustle of taxis and buses makes Broadway sound a mile away, not two blocks. She scoops up her bag and briefcase and sets them down in Jenny McGorman’s guest bedroom.
They went back a good long time, Jenny and Ariana, to their earliest days just starting out in New York. Both were from humdrum families — blue-collar in Jenny’s case — two young women hellbent to scale the city’s tall peaks.
Ariana makes herself a cup of coffee (instant) and indulges in a habit of hers: trying to read an apartment as if she were a cop looking for clues to the occupant’s identity. In this case, the identity is that of a woman whose secrets she already knows. The celebrity shots, signed and unsigned — Jenny could have papered the apartment with them — are confined to the wall behind her kitchen table: Jenny with Bill and Hillary; Jenny with Kurt Vonnegut (shot by Vonnegut’s wife and Jenny’s sometime collaborator, the photojournalist Jill Krementz); Billy Jean King, a handout shot but with an effusive inscription. (Jenny had edited WomenSport magazine for a year or two, her first New York job, before Billy Jean and Larry sold it.) And there amid the celebrity shots — a mocking comment on them — was the most poignant artifact in the whole apartment: Jenny in her mid-teens, hair teased high, black leather jacket, standing with her five siblings and the worn-out woman who bore and tried to raise them. Missing from the shot, perhaps because he took it: the stepfather who had repeatedly raped Jenny, starting when she was 10, a hell from which she did not escape until, at 16, she fled a hard-scrabble hometown, never to return.
Captivity and extortion can take many forms, Ariana thinks to herself.
Now, decades after all that, Jenny has abandoned the celebrity culture that became her refuge. A cancer scare has led her to yoga, meditation and dietary austerities that simply couldn’t be sustained in the fast-paced world she had come to know. She gave it all up to spend more and more of her time in India — gave up everything except the Riverside Drive apartment, now worth five times what she paid for it. Jenny was no fool; of course there might be a book in her quest for spiritual chemotherapy and New York was always useful when it came to launching a book.
Early in the transition to spiritualism and the repeated trips to Rajneesh, Ariana could remember asking her friend — her accomplice, as they sometimes called each other — if she wasn’t going to miss the city they both loved, the hobnobbing with glitterati, working for the celebrity magazines that had made Jenny a minor celebrity herself under the pen name Gloria Ashburnham.
“Ariana, I’ve got names enough to drop until I drop dead,” she quipped.
She would have been there to welcome Ariana, pour her drinks and catch up on all the latest. Instead, she answered Ariana’s email to say that she had left a key at the front desk, as usual, and was off on a three-month retreat at an ashram in Tibet (yoga, herbs, fasting, meditation).
The email confirming that the empty apartment was Ariana’s to use had an attachment: a snapshot of her against a staggering Himalayan massif. “You can’t be too rich or too thin,” she wrote, her way of acknowledging preemptively that, whatever shape her bank account was in, she had become appallingly gaunt. Whether from the ashram diet or recurrence of her cancer was unclear. She signed off: “Sic transit gloria mundi — or should I say Sick transit Gloria Ashburnham.”
Manhattan is a time capsule. On a map, it’s even shaped like one. Being in the city transported Ariana into her past, and being there in an emergency verging on disaster, made her time travel a review of primal moments and first principles. Where had it all begun? Might that shed any light on where it would end up?
She had moved into the city for college (CCNY) in the mid-Seventies and immediately fell in love with the place. New York was the Flying Dutchman in those days— a ghost ship drifting between worlds. With war in Vietnam, the old order had collapsed in disgrace and its replacement had yet to take shape. Bankrupt, brooding, New York was no longer the celestial city on the hill, the monument to American power and know-how. It would be revived as a very different monument, this time to money, the making and the spending of it by very ordinary people. But that was a decade or two in the offing. Meanwhile, all bets were off that the city even had a future. That left Ariana’s generation free to pursue pleasure and sharpen a fresh culture’s cutting edge in the here and now — before AIDS and other scourges (crack cocaine, amphetamine) took too many artists and designers and journalists out early.
She met Schuyler at an utterly routine professional gathering, a media event to promote a film his agency was involved with. That was in 1993. Schuyler had been married twice. Ariana was in her thirties by then, and had never been married. In other words, their views on the subject of marriage were more or less identical. Schuyler had had it with marriage and Ariana was old enough and sufficiently self-aware to be sure she wasn’t going to want or need it. Within months they might as well have been married, and then on a Saturday morning at City Hall, they were.
Schuyler used to talk flatteringly about his first look at Ariana — the real Ariana, as opposed to the virtual Ariana that had been created by television. He was a little overwhelmed. Looks were only part of it; Ariana could come on strong. People called her arrogant, without realizing that her real problem was impatience coupled with a sharp mind.
Schuyler had made plans to stay on in the city since the press party was likely to run late. Maggie was home in Scarsdale with the boys — hers and his, one each from their brief earlier marriages.”
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