by Richard Ford
“I’m sorry, then. What’s a good question?” she said.
“Whether it makes any difference to me if I am lonely,” he said.
“That’s what scares me most,” she said. “Because it doesn’t, does it?”
“I’m trying to think it does,” he said. She lay beside him on the bed, and he could feel her heart beating throughout the room. “I’m trying real hard right now to think it does.”
“Then maybe that’s a good sign,” she said. “I shouldn’t ask for a lot more.”
19
MOST OF THE STREETS leading into the Centro had been barricaded. Garrison troops in orange helmets patrolled the coils of concertina wire separating the open streets, their small eyes glowering at the sweeping headlights. Something was on now. The town seemed safer, as if a lock of certainty had been put on public life. Bernhardt drove carefully. He took the narrow streets beyond the Juárez Market, and through the section where the overland trucks were repaired. Lights in the crowded bays were blue and phosphorescent, and men’s legs hung off the open hoods. Acetylene smacked in the thick air and made the night appealing.
Bernhardt was weaving toward the carretera, staying near the curbs and making his turns elaborately. At an intersection the zócalo appeared suddenly back down the inky streets, the cathedral kliegs at the end gaseous and silver and imprecise. Soldiers stood in the middle ground, their rifles picketing the light, and the shrill sound of whistles came out of the dark. It was like Mardi gras, looking up Orleans toward Jackson Park at 4:00 A.M., the odd insulated feeling of time being lost.
“Where’re we going?” Quinn said.
“The country,” Bernhardt replied expansively. “Don’t worry about the soldiers.”
“What’re they doing?” Rae said from the back seat.
“Searching for paintings, or what they can find. Terrorism is faulty, it exposes unexpected things. Other people’s business sometimes.”
“Like yours?” Quinn said.
“No,” Bernhardt said and shook his head smiling. “My business is in the daylight only.”
“I don’t see why they close the main streets and leave the dark ones open,” Rae said. Her voice was flat and expressionless, like the soldiers’ eyes. She was staring at the dark buildings that slid by the edge of the headlights. She had on the lavaliere with the dancing man. The polished silver lit up the shadows.
“Some streets are secured so they may be used to different purposes,” Bernhardt said, engaged. “In the dark if you are not the army maybe you are a criminal. And if there is a mistake it must be hidden.” Bernhardt had on a shiny white camisola, embroidered like the one the deputy of penitentiaries had worn the day before, though more elegant and expensive. It made him seem more Mexican than before, as if he had shucked something self-conscious in his character that had never fit.
“What about us?” Rae said. “Are we mistakes?”
“No, no,” Bernhardt said, watching the street. “We are different.”
The car passed a street where troop trucks were stopped midway up the block, their headlights framing the wall of a building. Soldiers were moving in the light, but what was happening was unclear. Figures were passing too quickly. It was a police action. Quinn faced forward. You couldn’t tell what was happening without getting up close.
“What happens if they blow up our hotel?” Rae said calmly.
“Don’t think of that,” Bernhardt said.
“I’m not afraid of it,” she said. “It was just a thought.”
“Guerrillas have bad timing,” Bernhardt said apropos of nothing. “They are like children. Tomorrow will be safe. They forget.” He smiled. More fast pocking sounds commenced someplace nearby, and Quinn began to phase it gently out of the flow of thought.
Bernhardt took the highway north, the direction of no lights. Quinn let the air flood in, cool and without odor, no sage or the smell of corn being burned. It could’ve been anywhere, Michigan or Louisiana or California. No-place air. There were phantom cars on the road, coming high speed, Americans scared of stalling on the highway. Men with machetes wandering out of the agave fields to lie by the road. Everybody’d heard the stories.
The road edged the mountain terminus, then down again, and below toward the west was the migrant camp, unexpected, sprawled onto the tableland like a lake of subsurface lights, night smokes strung up feebly in the dark. It surprised Quinn the camp was here and not someplace else. In his mind it had been inside the mountains, and he wasn’t sure it was the same camp as in the afternoon.
An inspection sat at the point the highway quit descending and flattened into the agave plats. Soldiers on the north side were standing under a lighted plywood shelter. They were drinking mescal from Coke bottles and moving into and out of the light with extreme deliberation. A corporal came to the window, and two soldiers pointed their rifles woozily at the car and frowned. Quinn tried but couldn’t feel the danger, and smelled instead the thick boredom of the station. The soldiers were unnecessary to the frame of his intentions. It was part of the safety the town exuded. The soldiers were here to protect the citizens from the camp out in the fields. Bernhardt showed a card, spoke authoritatively to the soldier, then eased back into the darkness, and Quinn became soothed again by the night, protected and low, and ahead of him above the headlights the sky emerged night blue, encroaching by inches over the moon.
Bernhardt removed the Llama from under his shirt and put it under the dash. “People, guerrillas,” he said distractedly, “sometimes they will shoot a car in town.” He pulled gently on the pistol to test the ease of drawing it. “Now there is no danger.” He glanced in the mirror at Rae.
“You want to tell us where we’re going?” Quinn said.
“You must see Luis Zago,” Bernhardt said.
“Is he your big shot?”
“Sí,” Bernhardt said. He produced a Coke bottle of mescal from the floor. He unscrewed the top, took a drink, and offered it. The mescal had a nauseous citrus smell, a smell you couldn’t drink, and Quinn handed it back. He wanted his stomach controlled, no panics. “He is an important man,” Bernhardt continued. “He has no fixed ideas.” He smiled.
“Like you?” Quinn said.
Bernhardt screwed the cap back on the bottle and set both hands on the steering wheel. He seemed to like the question. “Yes,” he said. “But I am a lawyer, and even then it is not always convenient. Your business is not so convenient.” He looked at Quinn purposefully as if he meant something he hadn’t said.
Rae touched his neck softly. “Wouldn’t it be nice to leave here at night,” she said in a filmy whisper. “It’d be like putting things behind us, just losing them in the dark. That’d be wonderful.”
“When we leave,” Quinn said.
“Of course,” she said. “When we leave. I meant that. I didn’t mean tonight.”
What he could see of the house from the highway was like the running lights of a ship miles out, a giant hulk in the night moving at a distance impossible to gauge, on a horizon impossible to locate.
“Are we going there?” Quinn said. The sight impressed him into silence.
“Sí,” Bernhardt said.
“My goodness,” Rae said, her face up to the seat back, watching.
“It is la casa de Señor Zago,” Bernhardt said. “And I only want to say,” he continued patiently, “that if you have a pistol, now you should not have it.”
“Why do you think I have one?” Quinn said. He tried to imagine how Bernhardt knew he had the gun.
“It will only cause you trouble,” Bernhardt said over the steering wheel, watching the dirt road carefully. “We do not want trouble now.”
He thought about the gun and the stupidity of not having it the moment he needed it, of the chance of seeing Deats and not having a gun then. The idea seemed funny, like the same stoned Ojibwas turning up again and again in the moonlight as if he’d come out but never been able to arrest them. He took the .38 out from between his skin and his bel
t band, put it in the glove box, and closed the plate. “Qué bueno,” Bernhardt said and grinned. “It will be there when we return.”
“What about me?” Quinn said. “Am I going to be here?”
“You too,” Bernhardt said. “My word is on it.”
Zago’s house was a long, flat-roofed arrangement of stucco and glass cubes. With bright lights on inside, all the rooms visible from the road appeared empty. The most intense light came from a high middle casino with a cantilevered roof that opened to the sky and oversaw the valley south to the foot of the mountains. The night stranded the house against the inching clouds, and there was no way to tell what was around it or how it was distinguishable in daylight.
Bernhardt drove to the back of the villa where the approach became brick paved and opened into a floodlit court and garage. “Is muy elegant house,” he said and smiled respectfully at Rae in the back seat.
“It looks like a convalescent home,” Rae said, but Bernhardt wasn’t listening.
What impressed Quinn outside was the absoluteness of the sky. It seemed to funnel light out of the courtyard and extinguish it like a blot over the rest of the world. There were no stars, and the moon had fallen below the roof of the villa and showed nothing. It made him feel precisely at the center of things, as though whatever was here had wicked the light out of the sky and focused it directly on him. Even with no gun, he felt competent and completely in control.
“Through the garage,” Bernhardt said.
A door opened in the back of the garage, and Quinn went toward it. A mustachioed man in a white shirt and white shoes stepped half into the doorway, then stood back for him to enter. “Left inside,” Bernhardt said softly from behind.
Inside the door was a narrow, half-lit corridor ending in another door thirty feet ahead. The air was oversweet, like a cheap men’s room. It was an attractive smell, a smell you always thought you knew. The mustachioed man led them twenty feet down the corridor, then stopped and turned, pointing a long nickel-plated .45 at Quinn’s mouth.
“No pistolas,” Bernhardt said breathlessly. The air around Quinn’s face felt suddenly congealed.
“Turn your back,” the man said softly. He flicked the gun muzzle up.
It wasn’t, Quinn thought, a threatening gesture. It was a businesslike gesture. The man didn’t seem to care. Quinn turned and put his hands over his head. Rae stared at him, her chin up, as though she expected him to say something funny. The Mexican laid the pistol below his hairline and frisked his pockets, then moved the gun to the small of his back and patted to his socks.
“If you had a gun he would shoot you now,” Bernhardt said from behind Rae.
Quinn could feel his heart slowing. He had the purest urge to lean on the gun, to come as close to it as he could.
The Mexican suddenly shoved the barrel hard against his spine. “La mujer,” he said.
Rae’s face changed oddly as if someone had stepped on her foot. She took off her glasses and pushed her hand back through her hair. “Why not?” she said and stepped past Quinn toward the Mexican and put her arms up.
The Mexican breathed audibly. He put the gun against Rae’s neck and snaked his hand under her arms and down her front, over her breasts, her stomach, in her crotch and out quickly. Quinn watched for the little hand to linger, to choose a place it liked best, but it moved too fast and treated all the parts it touched the same, as if what it was after lay in an altogether different geography from Rae’s.
The Mexican stepped to the side and pointed the gun at the door. “Ándale,” he said.
“Just like high school,” Rae said and turned toward the door.
The companionway opened directly into the high casino, which was large and elongated and sunk below the rest of the house, which led off into two softly lit corridors. The room had bright lights and a high cantilevered lucarne with opening machinery, and there were, Quinn noticed as he entered, long, heavy abstract paintings on all the walls. The paintings were bright acrylic and repeated one basic facial pattern in harsher and harsher distortions. The faces were female and ugly and static, like a design from another painter reproduced by a drugstore in sizes and colors to decorate anybody’s home.
A small blond woman in a purple dress was lying on a sofa with a night mask over her eyes. She seemed to be sleeping. The Mexican brought them down into the bright room, and the woman awoke startled and pushed up the mask, squinting in the light.
She was American. Quinn had seen her in the Portal, drinking gaseosas with street boys. He had heard her speak in English, and there was something about her he didn’t like. She was pretty and in her thirties and smiled too animatedly for the street boys, as if she liked thrilling them. Her features were small and delicate without makeup, and she seemed out of place with street boys.
“This is Señor Quinn,” Bernhardt said politely, distracted momentarily by the Mexican, who disappeared into the far corridor.
The woman blinked in the bright lights. She stared at Rae as if Rae’s presence in the room was something she didn’t expect.
“They are Americans,” Bernhardt said formally.
The blond woman reached for a cigarette in a glass bowl, and lit it. “What are you doing here?” she said. She examined the skirt of her purple dress, smoothed it, and blew smoke on it.
“It is business,” Bernhardt said briskly, then addressed Rae. “Señora Zago is an artista.” He gestured obligingly at the walls. “She is an expresionista. Correct?” he said.
Zago’s wife stared at Bernhardt and took a drag off her cigarette. “Close enough,” she said.
“Do you paint here?” Rae said. He knew Rae saw the woman had already singled her out, and was trying not to mind.
The woman slumped backward on the couch and held her cigarette out between her thin fingers. “The light’s no good here.” She looked disparagingly at her paintings. The face was her face. “Mexican light’s too flat.” She took another drag on her cigarette. “You don’t look like you’ve been enjoying yourself too much in Mexico,” she said.
“Señor Quinn has an amigo in the jail.” Bernhardt made jail sound like yell. “Don Luis perhaps can help them.”
“Why would he do that?” she said, staring at Rae again.
“Because he is generoso,” Bernhardt said confidently. A door closed down the corridor, and the Mexican’s rubber soles came squeaking on the tiles. Bernhardt glanced quickly at the entrance of the corridor. “He is generoso, no?” he said, looking back at Zago’s wife.
“Very generoso,” she said, and looked at Quinn for the first time. She seemed amused. “What did your friend do?” she said.
“That’s not really the point anymore,” Quinn said.
The woman smiled ironically. “Of course not,” she said. “But you’re ready to pay big for whatever the point is. Is that it?”
The Mexican in white shoes appeared at the head of the corridor and spoke something to Bernhardt. “Not that big,” Quinn said. He looked at Bernhardt. He wanted to get to whatever they were here for.
“He must have something you want,” Zago’s wife said coolly.
“Nothing,” Quinn said. “It’s charity.”
“Of course it is,” Zago’s wife said and leaned back into the cushion of the couch, still smiling. Her skirt had come halfway up her thighs.
“Perhaps you would wait with Señora Zago,” Bernhardt whispered softly to Rae.
“But there’s always a big price, isn’t there, Carlos?” Zago’s wife said. “I’ll entertain your wife, Mr. Quinn.” She blew smoke up toward the dark skylights. “We’ll talk about you.”
Rae glanced at Zago’s wife, then uneasily at Quinn standing in the bright spots. She seemed anxious not to stay. “How long will this take?” she said.
“A moment, only,” Bernhardt said encouragingly.
“We don’t want to talk about you too long, Harry,” Rae said.
“It will be no time, believe me,” Bernhardt said. He looked at Zago’s wif
e and touched Quinn’s arm.
He walked between the Mexican and Bernhardt down the corridor toward a door half-open at the end. When they reached it the Mexican pushed gently into the room where the lights were off, and the green TV flicker made the air swim as if there was deep water inside. The room was tiny with no windows and no things on the walls. The air had the same sweetish men’s room odor as the garage corridor had. Zago sat on a plastic folding chair by the TV, his elbows on his knees, watching a soccer game televised from high up in a stadium. Quinn felt the small muscles in his stomach coming taut. He had the feeling someone was going to hit him. The bodyguard shut the door and the sound of the Mexican announcer yelling into his microphone grew louder until Zago leaned slowly forward and switched off the sound. Zago had a kraut’s face and dense yellow hair parted on the side like a schoolboy’s. He was a thick, big man and wore a businessman’s starched shirt and tie with suspenders that stretched his trousers up over his stomach. He was seventy and looked like a grocer. He had a kraut grocer’s well-being and a kraut’s fat body, but there was something in his slow formality that made Quinn certain he was Mexican.
“Do you like this game?” Zago said, still engaged by the screen.
“Not much,” Quinn said. It made him uneasy to have Bernhardt behind him, and the air was too thick.
Zago looked up at him with an annoyed look. His eyes moved less quickly than his face. “Baseball?” he mumbled. “You appreciate that game?”
“Sure,” Quinn said.
Zago set his hands on his knees. “Una pasatiempo, nada más,” he said and shook his head. “It is not a sport,” he said. He looked up at Bernhardt as if he was disappointed.
“That’s if you don’t like it. I like it,” Quinn said.
“I don’t like it,” Zago said. His cheeks twitched. “Why do you want to have someone killed, señor?” he said.
Quinn glanced quickly at Bernhardt. Bernhardt was expressionless. “That’s not what I want,” he said. He looked at Zago again. “I want to get a guy out of the prisión. That’s it.”