“But you said it would be hard to find any guides, and if she’s here—”
You’re talking about Yolanda de la Rosa,” Erik said. “About her guiding us?”
“Yes,” I said, shaking my hands at him so that he’d calm down.
“Absolutely not.” He looked at me. “I thought we already talked about this.”
“You may want to listen to your promiscuous friend, Lola,” my father agreed. He searched through his desk, then picked up a piece of paper and handed it to me; I saw that it contained, among other listings, the address of a bar called The Pedro Lopez. “Though your mother doesn’t like it, I’ve been keeping my eye on Yolanda. She’s been a mess since Tomas died. She hasn’t frequented the more reputable places lately, either.” He pointed to the address of the bar. “I’ve had to bribe the bartender here just so he won’t give her too much to drink.”
“That’s just great—but it doesn’t matter. I’ll get her to come with us.” I took a long breath. “We should probably get out of here and start looking.”
“Don’t get your hopes up about Yolanda, darling,” my father said. “I don’t think she’ll come with you.”
Erik remained fairly quiet, for the moment kept his thoughts to himself.
He stood up. “Are we off?”
“Yes.”
Out we all went, into the museum proper, past the mastodon molars and the glittering skulls, and the tombs, the stelae, and the jade room. Manuel escorted us back up to the reception desk, with its display of books and mugs dealing with the Flores Stelae. He pressed some of these upon us as gifts, handing me a new second edition of my parents’ book on the stones, The Translation of the Flores Stelae. He also gave us two of the T-shirts with their color decals showing images from different panels.
“I want to give you—something,” he said to me. “I wish I could help you more.”
“Thank you for everything, Señor Alvarez,” Erik said, holding the bundle in his hands.
Manuel smiled up at him. “You’re a good man, Erik—on the inside. You’re listening to your better instincts. That’s nice. You care for my daughter, I can see this. That’s nice too. Maybe she likes you, even—but no, probably not. Yet you shouldn’t feel bad. And remember, behave yourself.”
“I—will, sir,” Erik said.
“Very good,” my father said. “Now please leave so I can say good-bye to my daughter.”
Erik looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Then he went outside, and my father and I were alone.
I put my arms around him. “Dad.”
“Dearest. Lola, my angel.”
I squeezed him harder. Since my parents hadn’t married, and I stayed with my mother, I had never lived with my father for very long. But it didn’t matter. I take after the man; I inherited from him the great gift of desiring books. And the love I harbored for him had always been so large that sometimes it felt too big to contain. This feeling, along with the fear I had for my mother, was wild enough to stagger me in front of that museum. I just clung onto him and couldn’t say anything.
Then he took a step back.
He was standing very straight, squaring his shoulders. His eyes brimmed.
“Good-bye, darling,” he said.
“Bye, Dad.”
I kissed him, picked up my luggage, and waved good-bye. I felt him watch me while I passed through the foyer, and I had to brush my sleeve against my face as I moved beyond the door of the museum and into the afternoon light.
CHAPTER 13
Walking into the pale sunshine, I squinted and looked for Erik. As soon as I appeared, he stood up from his seat at the bottom of the museum’s steps. He held his bags in his hand.
“I would very much prefer it if we didn’t contact this de la Rosa woman,” he said. “For reasons I’ve already explained. Everyone knows you can’t trust that family.”
I began tugging my hair into a neat and orderly ponytail. “I have to go looking for her anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t know the jungle well enough—not as well as my mom—and we need Yolanda. If she’ll help me.”
“I’m telling you, I can get you through the bush. I’ve done it—”
“Once or twice before.”
“Right. Twice.”
“With help.”
“With some help, yes. But I can do it, with maps—I can get us past the Rio Sacluc. You don’t want to bring a de la Rosa.”
“Erik—” I looked up at him. Both of us were hot, perspiring, already tired from the overnight trip. I put my hand on his shoulder. “I have to bring her. She’d be the best guide. Just don’t argue with me about this.”
But of course, being Gomara, he did. He mustered all of his manly skills against me, and so sentenced himself to lose at the intergender battle we proceeded to wage in the shadow of the museum. He would lob some perfectly formed and beautifully conceived reason for avoiding all contact with Yolanda, and I would destroy it using the most powerful weapon in my arsenal, which was to simply stare at him with an implacable expression, cross my arms, and say, “No.” Or, “Because.”
He soon tired out.
Erik sat back down on the steps and clamped his mouth shut. He gazed out onto the street, and then peered up at me again.
“You know what?” he asked.
“What”
“All right—all right.” He opened his arms. “That’s it. You beat me—you—you—Sanchez.”
“Good,” I said. “That was easier than I thought.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
“My father must have scared you.”
“He had his persuasions, certainly. The giant eyes were a nice touch. The threatening was even better. He must have learned that from your mother.”
“Get up.”
He sighed and brought himself slowly to his feet.
“Besides,” I said, “Yolanda probably won’t agree to help us.”
“We can only hope,” he grumbled. “A de la Rosa.”
“And if she does—you should know that the last time I saw her, she was very beautiful.”
He crossed his arms, disgruntled. “Oh, well, then. Yes, that changes everything. And from what we just heard, she hangs out at bars. So that can’t be too bad, can it?”
I looked out onto the city, and scanned the white and yellow taxis skidding through the flooded streets.
“Actually Yolanda de la Rosa can be a lot worse than you think,” I said.
CHAPTER 14
The dusk had deepened into a thick purple nightfall when Erik and I came around to The Pedro Lopez saloon. We’d already visited it before in the afternoon, around four o’clock, and though its inebriated customers claimed to know Yolanda, she couldn’t be found sitting on the stools lining its small wood bar or at the tables strewn across its floor. Erik had not been sad to leave. Zone One, on the eastern side of the metropolis, is not much commended in most guide-books, which describe the area with vague yet spasm-causing warnings about robberies and adjectives like tawdry and seedy. I’d say that it turned out to be a more populous and confusing place than that.
We taxied, then walked, soaking wet, along the flooded cinder-colored streets as shadows fell across stores and saloons. The lights of the shopfronts brightened the evening air, so that the alleys shimmered in front of us, black and gilt and crimson. The flooding from the storm didn’t seem to have discouraged much in the way of social commerce. Women and children made their ways down the sidewalks, holding grocery bags in their arms. Homeless men in rags and bare feet loitered in alcoves; twenty-something boys kicked at the water with their boots and called out brutal fashion advice to Erik, who thanked them for their concern and kept walking. Three men thrashed around in a bout of roughhousing or an actual fistfight down one side street, one of them falling into the water, only to be jumped on by his friend or foe, I couldn’t tell. And two elderly women in indigenous dress cleared off debris from the floor of a grocery store with shovels, heaving th
e junk onto the road.
Erik and I hurried past these people, the floods, the broken glass, the drowned blocks, until we again reached The Pedro Lopez and opened its front door.
Twenty men looked up when we appeared. Some of their faces were blurred with drink; others were blank, unreadable; still others smirked or raised their eyebrows. I heard obscenities and some laughter.
“As I was telling you this afternoon,” Erik said, “I don’t think this is a place where we want to spend a lot of time.”
“We’re not here to socialize.”
“That’s good to hear. When I was younger and fancied myself a real toughie, I used to run over to this part of the city to take a look at the girls. But I didn’t make many friends. I found that I didn’t fare very popularly in establishments like this.”
“Is that so?”
“These kinds of boys and I don’t seem to get along. They always think I talk too much.”
“We all do, Erik.”
“Yes, but these sorts tend to express their critiques by bashing my head in.”
“We’ll just see if she’s here, and if not, we’ll run right back out.”
The Pedro Lopez was a large crowded box of a saloon. The floor was damp and muddy, littered with sawdust, peanut shells, smashed glass, and cigarette ash. The bar was carved of wood, with a backsplash mirror, which revealed a row of drinkers’ faces hovering within a vapor of blue cigarette smoke. A line of men sat on oak stools avoiding their reflections and passing one-liners to each other out of the sides of their mouths. One of them was an old grandfather with a face like a walnut and stray puffs of white hair that floated over his great planet of a head like tiny clouds. He took sips from his beer, tasting it with a connoisseur’s manner while humming a tune to himself. The old man’s song wasn’t easy to hear over the low grumbling voices that filled the air, which were in turn interrupted by the bellowing of the younger men sitting at the tables and the laughter of their lady friends. Most of the drinkers were civilians dressed in work shirts and jeans, and I saw, with some delight, that many of these men qualified as muscular firefighter types. Standing out, at the center of the saloon, were two men in army uniforms, drinking steins of beer at a large table that might have seated six.
The older of the uniformed men was a soldier in his sixties, and of high rank, as he displayed several enameled rectangular pins and stars on his green uniform. His silver-and-black hair swept back from his chiseled features. A neat black mustache sparkled above his white teeth. He had small sloping shoulders and delicate hands, one of which held a cigar that danced in the air when he gestured. His companion, however, was less prepossessing. This other soldier, perhaps in his middle to late forties, was large, tall, very brawny, his square face disfigured by a scar that extended from the left eyebrow down across the nose and toward the right cheek. His lower eyelids drooped slightly and formed tears in the corners, but this did not soften his appearance. His cheeks were flushed, and his upper lip drew back over his square teeth.
The two soldiers talked to someone in a cowboy hat who sat at a smaller table nearby. Tall and lanky, this person sipped a Coke and shielded their face with a wide-brimmed black Stetson. The hand that cupped the can was brown, slender, and tough. Under the hat hung a long black ponytail.
As Erik and I slipped through the crowd, I saw the younger soldier reach out, take hold of the cowboy’s shoulder, and shake it violently so that the ponytail shuddered.
“Get out of here!”one of the bar patrons yelled at the soldiers. A few others joined along. But none of these people got up to help.
“Well,” Erik said. “At least we tried to find her—time to go back to the hotel.”
“We found her,” I said.
I began to walk toward the soldiers. Some of the lady patrons, who were mostly very beautiful and garbed in astonishing low-cut dresses, lit up at the sight of Erik as he followed along. One woman with ebony hair and another with large green eyes shimmied their shoulders in tandem when they saw him, and this motion triggered startling repercussions within their blouses. He sauntered by them, laughing, until the younger soldier pushed the cowboy to the ground. I couldn’t yet see the face under the Stetson’s brim. But I still went running.
“What are you doing?” Erik yelled after me.
“I know I’ve seen you before somewhere,” I could hear the older soldier say to the figure on the floor. “I have a wonderful memory for faces, and yours is not one I’d likely forget.”
The figure replied with something I couldn’t quite make out. The older soldier smiled with one half of his mouth, so that the precise curve of his mustache tilted. He glanced back at his companion.
“Are you going to do anything about this?” he asked.
“One more drink, and I just might,” the younger soldier said. His drooping and watering eyes moved over to the Stetson, stayed on the face beneath its brim, and then shifted back again.
“I can tell you remember this little creature from somewhere,” the older soldier said to his companion.
“Back off,” the other one grunted.
“I’m not going to back off, and you’re going to do what I say, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” the soldier replied, after letting out a breath.
“You know, my friend here would have been perfectly useless in the world if it hadn’t been for me,” the older soldier said to their victim. “Can you imagine giving a person that kind of gift—a purpose in life? Though I expect you never had that problem, did you? You had some purpose, I’m sure. I’m positive I once saw you working the wrong side of the war.”
“Leave the kid alone,” one of the men sitting at the bar called out.
The older man’s mustache twitched. “Do you have something in your eye? Don’t worry, I’ll remember your name soon. See, I know you’ve done something you shouldn’t. You used to be a troublemaker. No need to lie about it—I’m just curious, for old time’s sake.”
“Stop that,” I said. I stood in front of them and peered down to see the face of the person on the floor, but still couldn’t because of the Stetson’s brim. The soldiers flicked their eyes up at me, then back down again.
“You should go away,” is all the younger soldier said.
Erik had now reached the center of the room.
“Take another look,” the older soldier said to his partner. “Don’t get distracted by the girlishness—how tiresome, crying—look at the face and help me out. You must remember.”
The person on the floor attempted to stand up and was pushed back down by the boot of the younger soldier. I heard a vivid profanity.
“Oh, you do me too much honor,” the older one said. “And—actually—I hope this does not sound too indecorous, but you are a tad too grubby for my taste. Though perhaps not for my associate. He has a somewhat more base temper. Really, sometimes I can barely restrain him.”
From behind me, I picked up the surreal sound of the old man humming at the bar.
“I would just love to leave now,” Erik whispered into my ear. “I think these men are going to do something—bad. Come on.”
“If you don’t listen to your mate, we will give you a very stimulating evening,” the older one said to me.
I ignored him and stepped between the figure on the floor and the two soldiers.
The black brim of the Stetson lifted, and I saw her face.
I felt dizzy when I looked into the black-green eyes that I hadn’t seen since I was thirteen years old. There were now lines around her eyes and her wide lips. Her sharp cheeks looked wet and pale. She’d been crying. But her voice was as steady and edgy as always.
“Oh, God,” Yolanda said.
I crouched down and put my hand to my mouth.
“Hello, Lola,” she drawled. And then she whispered, “Don’t let them hear my name!”
I pulled her to her feet and held her. I put my face into her shoulder.
“We have to get out of here,” I said. “I have to talk to
you.”
“Let—go—of—me,” she grunted.
Simultaneously, to my left, I heard Erik talking with the soldiers.
“No, no, don’t do that,” he was saying.
And then I heard him say, too: “I’m not much of a brawling type, especially with members of the army.”
When I turned, I saw the younger soldier with a slow and dreamlike clarity. He wore a green uniform that fit precisely on his bulbous frame. He swayed toward Yolanda, his legs bowing outward, his eyes tearing, and his scar mantling with blood. She pushed me to the side but did not otherwise move. Erik, though, took a neat step sideways and wedged himself between them. The soldier halted in a great jerk. His forehead shone like a coin in the dim light of the bar as he leaned back and brought his arm forward in an imperfect gesture. His elbow stuck out, his body turned at an awkward angle. The fist cracked into Erik’s cheekbone, whose head snapped to the right. Then Erik fell down.
I screamed.
The soldier with the mustache stood back. The other one hovered above his victim. I threw myself on top of Erik, and he frowned under me as if he were contemplating a difficult mathematical problem that he would rather not have to solve. When I peered back up, the soldier with the scar looked terrible. His eyes began running with what appeared to be real tears. He seemed exhausted, and his face began to twitch.
“I used to be really good at this,” he said to me. “I’m the best there is. You’d better run.”
“Get away from us!” I shrieked. I reached up, clutched the soldier’s arms, and slapped at him so hard my hands burned. I began to randomly shake his arms until one of his legs buckled at the knees. He slipped sideward, hitting one of the chairs before he smacked hard onto the ground. Then he focused his attention on me. In my shock, I felt his right boot ram into my right leg.
“Don’t touch her,” I heard Yolanda say, in a remote, stretched-out sounding voice.
“I’m the best there is,” the soldier croaked again.
All the men in the bar stood up and began to yell.
“No need to get excitable,” the older soldier said. “My boy here lost his temper, that’s all. He had too much to drink.”
The Queen Jade Page 7