Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  Callie dimly remembered that this was a friend’s boat. She didn’t like the idea that she was at sea with a stranger, with two strangers, really, for she could scarcely say that she knew Marcus. Realizing that she would have to make arrangements to be put ashore, she went to the railing to check the lower deck.

  “It’s almost dawn,” said a tall man with a distinctive little patch of hair right in the middle of his balding head. Callie had time to think that yes, you do get a different view from above, before she heard Marcus say, “We can take care of her any time now; we’re in deep enough water.”

  To Beauty

  We all worked late in those days, and many nights we wound up at a little restaurant-bar called Le Zinc. The technical staff favored a burger joint next to the Video Palace, but all the writers and “content providers” went to Le Zinc, not so much for the food, which was mediocre French, but for Morgan, raconteur extraordinare, who presided behind the bar. For us frustrated writers, Morgan was a gift. He was a small, neat man, once handsome, who had declined in early middle age to a dapper nonchalance. I never saw him fussed, not when there was a minor kitchen fire, nor when one of the waiters had a breakdown in the middle of dinner hour, nor when customers had too much to drink or else felt they hadn’t had quite enough. Morgan had seen, as he put it, “a Mexican tornado,” and he was disinclined to trouble himself for anything less.

  He did have one curious habit, which was revealed to us only after we had become regulars, entitled to linger, drinking extra cups of coffee, arguing over articles, and planning the next issue of our on-line magazine. Late at night, as Morgan cleaned up the bar, washing and drying the steins and glasses, we’d try to get him started on a story or on one of the long, funny, circuitous jokes he knew. One story remained untold, however, though we were sure that it was a good one, since it was in conjunction with his habit, late at night, of pouring himself his one drink of the evening. This was a straight up shot of old whisky, rum, or tequila and the signal that Le Zinc was about to close.

  Morgan would raise his glass, “To Beauty,” down his drink and tell us that it was time to go home. No amount of teasing or questioning secured us the story behind “Beauty.” As generous Morgan was with convoluted tales of dubious schemes, race track scams, angling babes, and small time thugs, all sprinkled with French or, I should say, Frenglish phrases in honor of Le Zinc, on the matter of Beauty he was resolutely silent.

  I’m not sure he’d have told me either, if I hadn’t hit a bad patch. Things hadn’t been going well for me at home, work was boring, and I’d decided to try my luck out west. My defection, as it was considered, left me isolated at the magazine. I wound up alone at Le Zinc the last night I was to be in town. Morgan told me the story as a going away present.

  I remember that it was a terrible night: not just snow but wind and blowing snow, not just wind and blowing snow, but sub-zero cold, and, on top of everything, ice underfoot where the slop and rain of a few days earlier had turned to glass. While I was on my soup, the lights went out, and we ate by the light of the table candles, the waiters working with flashlights tucked under their arms.

  Everyone was laughing and cheerful. The darkness, the candles, the white storm glow outside made for a giddy kind of intimacy. People called back and forth across the room, teasing and flirting. Late, with the restaurant emptied, the waiters putting on their coats and joking about getting lost in the blizzard, Morgan poured himself an extra good Scotch and toasted Beauty.

  “She must have been special,” I said.

  “She was the most beautiful woman in this world,” Morgan replied, “and my lucky angel.”

  “You mean your guardian angel,” I said, forgetting that Morgan was always precise in his language.

  “This was a lucky angel,” he said. He came around from behind the bar and sat down with the last sip of Scotch to tell me the story. “Those were the days,” he began “when I was troubled with le vice.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “I’d just graduated from high school and was working as a pizza delivery man; I had no money to speak of, no prospects, no education. I was dying of boredom, literally dying, until I discovered the track and betting, the football spread and our neighborhood bookie. My life got interesting in a hurry.”

  I said I could imagine.

  Morgan sighed. “A teenage kid lacks perspective,” he remarked. “A few thousand— well, more than a few thousand— dollars. That was the end of the world for me. My dad had bailed me out once when I was in the hole for a couple hundred, but he wasn’t up for four figure loans. Dad drove a bus; my mom worked at the school caféteria. I was supposed to be saving money for the community college. You can see the picture.”

  I could. “What did you do?”

  “I took the shopper’s trolley to Tijuana and didn’t come back. Crazy, huh?” Morgan shook his head. “I had adventures, let me tell you, mostly connected with little Mexican tracks and razor-eyed Mexican gamblers. Pretty soon I was in worse shape than I’d been back home, though at the time it didn’t seem so bad, since my losses were all in pesos.”

  I agreed that the peso is not the dollar.

  Morgan made a rueful face. “Enrico didn’t see it that way. I owed him a few hundred thousand the night he knocked on the door of my room with a pair of Aztec executioners. My man Enrico threatened to kill me first, pounded me around second, and then, as if this was a real favor, proposed I work off the debt with his cousin Vincente.

  “I wasn’t keen on the arrangement, even considering the alternatives and my physical state of the moment. But Enrico had already purloined my passport and California driver’s license, both of which he intended to sell. I pleaded for the passport, at least, and pointed out that I had a job bussing dishes at one of the local hotels, a ptomaine palace which he knew only too well.

  “I remember how he pursed his mouth and shook his head. Have I mentioned that he had a noble head, fit for an old coin or a corrupt bench? What I required, Enrico said, was a high wage job, a professional position, and he knew just the thing. He made me pack my clothes, and with an Aztec on either side of me, we departed in Enrico’s black Lincoln Continental. We were off to visit his cousin, where I traded le vice for le crime, because, to save a long story, Vincente was a professional thief, pickpocket, and purse snatcher.”

  I must have looked surprised.

  “Don’t do him an injustice. Vincente was un artiste, a man of great skill and considerable strategy, though slovenly and unprepossessing. He looked like a small timer fresh from central casting, which was one of the reasons he required an assistant, or rather, two, for we were three in the gang: Vincente, moi, his apprentice of the moment, and Magdalena.”

  I guessed that she was Beauty, but Morgan shook his head. “Though any man would say that Magdalena was attractive, sexy, really, and, unlike Vincente, she was always presentable. Her role was to process stolen credit cards.”

  Here Morgan allowed himself a nostalgic sigh. He had an appreciation for all the skilled trades, a genuine admiration which enabled him to keep good waiters and cooks long after they had outgrown the modest ambitions of Le Zinc. “Magdalena knew to the dime how much she could charge, and to the minute how long to run a card. She could size up a fence as well as Vincente, and she had a very good eye for items of value.”

  “Even the patron, who did not pass out compliments lightly, considered her first rate, and to watch her work a store with a stolen credit card . . .” Morgan shook his head. “It was a shopping master class, I can tell you.”

  I expressed surprise that this pair needed any assistance.

  “Risks must be taken in any profession,” Morgan said sagely, “and those at the bottom, like those at the top, prefer to have some expendables. Besides, I was neat and tidy and becoming bilingual. I could look like a tourist; I suspect that I looked innocent. Hell, in that company, I really was innocent.

  “My job varied. I might scout a hotel lobby or distract a mark. It was
my job to ask a prospect the time in order to see what sort of watch he was wearing, or to bump someone on the street and keep apologizing until Vincente got the wallet or opened the purse. After I got a bit of skill, we sometimes reversed roles. Vincente would distract a tourist, while I grabbed the goods. He wanted me implicated, you see.”

  “He sounds like someone out of Dickens.”

  “Very like, and with a Dickensonian twist, which Magdelana let slip once by accident. She and I became quite friendly,” Morgan added with a sly, satisfied expression. “One night she told me that my dexterous patron was also a police informer, who betrayed his apprentices in order to keep on the good side of the law.”

  “You were in real danger.”

  “You bet! Mexican jails are the stuff of nightmares. So even though Vincente rarely left me alone and never allowed me any cash, I began looking to get away. Then, just when I had devised a tentative, desperate, and almost sure to fail scheme, everything changed. Vincente rolled up one morning with a green Ford Fairlaine: we were headed for Guadalajara to work the crowds coming in for a big Copa de Libertadores match.

  “He was in high spirits. Everything would be mucho grande; the tourists would be like fleas on a coyote with Atalante supporters in from Mexico City and all the visitors up from South America. I’d see Magdelana strut her stuff in the swank malls of Guadalajara, and he, Vincente, would demonstrate unimagined feats of skill and genius. I might have caught the fever, myself, but for Magdelana’s warning. As it was, I was alert to the dangers of getting deeper into Mexico without what Vincente would have called ‘a prudent exit strategy.’

  “The patron noticed my lack of enthusiasm. ‘Money for us all,’ he said. ‘Perhaps enough to pay off your debt.’ ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘All things are possible,’ Vincente replied, laying a paternal hand on my shoulder and making me think of the long arm of the law.

  “There was no alternative: I had to go. And I certainly brightened up when I saw the city, big, handsome, and bustling, brimming with new possibilities. Vincente had perhaps anticipated my reaction, for in the days before the match, he kept us busy reconnoitering the four star hotels and practicing our trade among the clients of the fancy goods and antique shops in the artisan villages.

  “Then the crowds arrived for the match, the teams, the journalists, the commentators, the fans, and we prepared for action. I was delegated to brush Vincente’s one decent suit and press his shirt, while Magdalena trimmed his hair and touched up his shave. I put on my dark trousers and jacket. As spruce as can be, Vincente and I were dropped off at one of the best hotels, while Magdalena, looking elegant and tense, pulled away in the Ford. We had ten minutes before she returned.

  “We breezed though the lobby and right into the restaurant at the front. Vincente paused a moment by the little podium with the menus, his small, sharp eyes scanning the room. Then he asked the hostess to seat us toward the side and gave me an impatient poke in the back. He’d spotted our target; I was oblivious: I’d seen the Beauty.

  “She was sitting in the center of the restaurant, a very young and shapely woman with golden brown skin, long, slim legs, and nearly waist length blond hair. She had dark eyes, so brown they looked black, and smooth, perfect features that blended the best genes of three races. I remember to this day what she wore: a pale suede skirt, a cream silk blouse, high delicate sandals and enough gold and diamond jewelry to fill a case at Tiffany’s. This goddess had come to earth with two other young and pretty women. They were leaning over the café table, laughing and talking, but the Beauty sat quietly picking at an omelet, a slight, somehow sad smile on her face, as if she loved her friends but was bored with everything in life. Oh, how I understood that feeling!

  “Will it surprise you,” Morgan asked, “to know I would have died for her on the spot? Performed wonders, risked any danger? That in some profound way I had left rational life behind? The next thing I knew, Vincente was tapping my arm and nodding in the way he did when we were set to go. And then, I noticed, what I should have noticed first thing, and would have spotted instantly if I had not been bewitched: the Beauty had left her purse under her chair.

  “I shook my head. You will think badly of me,” Morgan said, “that I did no more than hesitate. I think rather badly of myself; it’s a good illustration of how conditioning can overcome our better instincts. When he saw me frozen there, Vincente clenched his fist, rolled his eyes, strove, in short to wake me from my dreams of bliss and heroism. Then he stood up and I followed him, my heart pounding as it always did, adrenaline flowing, fear putting me outside of myself. I watched Vincente approach the table, feign surprise, and address one of the Beauty’s companions, his voice so loud and jovial as to be almost unintelligible.

  “Time slowed down. I had an unforgettable glimpse of Beauty’s rounded, golden arm, of the emerald ring on her right hand, of the meal chit already signed beside the bread plate. Surprised and puzzled, graceful as birds, the young women raised their heads toward Vincente, and I scooped up the purse and tucked it under my arm. In the seconds before the alarm was raised, I slipped past the hostess and the bell staff – a mere shadow at the corner of their eyes, or, if they noticed at all, just another bellman off on an errand or one of the dark clad waiters.

  “Vincente was right behind me. He was like an alligator, alarmingly fast despite short legs. Down the steps, under the portico, past a taxi just pulling in, around a clothes rack which one of the bellmen was loading with garment bags. Vincente hopped off the foot high curb, skipped through the traffic, and reached the other side of the street just as Magdelana pulled up. We slid into the Fairlane, ignoring the barrage of horns behind us, and she hit the accelerator before we had the doors right shut.

  “Vincente swiveled around to watch for any sign of pursuit, while simultaneously shouting directions and instructions at Magdelana. She had never been in Guadalajara before, and she was always more comfortable as a shopper than a chauffeur. Vincente had her switching lanes and swerving this way and that until, in panicky exasperation, she pulled into a side street, jumped from the driver’s side and hopped in back beside me.

  “I mention all this,” Morgan said, “to explain how it was that we noticed nothing amiss. Vincente, who might have known— and would, at the very least, have understood the ramifications instantly— was occupied with the traffic. Magdalena took inventory of the credit cards, while I counted the cash and attempted to palm some hundred peso bills for my own use. Our haul included a foreign passport, some store credit cards and, in a little red envelop, a key.

  “I held it up for Vincente’s inspection. ‘Not like a hotel key,’ I said. He glanced back in the mirror. ‘That’s a safe deposit box key; we can’t do anything with that,’ he said. I smiled because it had been the Beauty’s. I put the precious souvenir, how precious none of us guessed, in my pocket.

  “Vincente broke out a cigar in celebration. It was only much later in the day, when we’d already made two more successful forays, and Magdalena had filled the trunk of the Fairlane with watches, gold jewelry, leather goods and electronics, that Vincente recognized disaster.

  “We were back relaxing in our hotel when Vincente’s cell phone rang. It was his brother Enrico, and Enrico was very, very upset, along with every gambler and bookie in the country: the big game was threatened. ‘Why, why?’ Vincente asked. He listened to the answer in a silence which Magdelana and I recognized as increasingly ominous. Then he swore long and creatively, denying, so far as I could tell that we were even resident in Guadalajara, never mind gainfully employed there. When he hung up, his face had turned to lead.

  “He cleared his throat and, with an attempt at casualness, asked Magdalena what name had been on the Beauty’s credit card. Then he asked what I had done with the key. My heart sank at the thought of losing this token, but before I could invent some excuse Vincente grabbed my throat and threatened to have my gizzard – he habitually employed colorful phrases. When I produced the key, he smiled and wiped h
is mouth. ‘And the purse?’ he asked. This was such a silly question that I was momentarily silent. ‘The purse!’ he screamed. I told him that we’d thrown it away, of course, for this was absolutely standard operating procedure.

  “’You threw it away,’ Vincente corrected. ‘You threw it away. Do you realize we will all be crow’s meat if that game isn’t played?’ He mentioned a name that meant nothing to me, then threw up his hands and slapped his forehead theatrically. He would never again employ a gringo. ‘El Gigante, you fool! The great and temperamental striker! The greatest player in the hemisphere. Maybe in the world! This is terrible. His club is owned by the drogas. This is worse. And worst of all, worse beyond imagining, the pretty lady with the purse is his chicha, and the key, the key my stupid young friend, must unlock something of exceptional value!’

  “I had been in such a waking dream since seeing the Beauty that this revelation came as a dreadful disillusionment. I can’t exactly say what I’d hoped for, but my heart froze at the mention of drogas and football stars. Indifferent to Vincente’s anger and Magdalena’s alarm, I asked bitterly, ‘What if we find the bank?’

  “Vincente slapped me. ‘It’s got to go back,’ he screamed. ‘Otherwise El Gigante doesn’t take the field. If he’s not on the field, all bets are off. If all bets are off, we’ll be on the run from every gambler in Mexico. The great man wants everything back. Everything, key, money, cards. And the purse! We should have saved the purse as well’!

  “He was quite distraught about the purse, but in the end Magdalena convinced him that the actual bag could not be as important as the contents, not even to the unreasonable El Gigante. Vincente sat on the bed and fixed me with an evil stare. ‘You snatched it; you return it,’ he said. I pointed out that I’d probably been seen, that the bellstaff would all be on the alert, that my imperfect Spanish would scarcely allow me to talk my way out of trouble.