The Mobius Man

by M. S. Karl

  That night I dreamed I was in a cavern far below ground and two men in khaki uniforms were taking turns beating me, and when they were tired of that, one went to the fire whose flicker made fantastic shadows on the walls, and came back with a glowing iron. The first man laughed and I suddenly realized I was naked and that my legs were tied in a spread-eagle position. The second mand lowered the poker and brought it closer and closer until I could feel its heat on my groin. I screamed, but there was no noise, and finally the heat stopped as the poker touched my flesh and I felt no sensation there at all. Instead, I watched my torturers’ faces with clinical detachment and watched them shake their heads finally in consternation as they realized that I was not feeling anything at all.

  Chapter Eleven

  The next morning there was a note under my door. “I’ve decided to stay on the coast a few days. Don’t come after me. Pedro will pick you up on time.” Not even a signature.

  I checked out and had a cab drive me to the field. Two hours later I was on Cozumel and by mid-afternoon I was back in Tabasco. Total accomplished: one year of psychotherapy undone.

  I wondered where Laurie was now, if she had gone out to find the first man who could rebuild her self-confidence. There were lots along the beaches in the hippie colonies.

  The Landrover was still in the airport lot, waiting, as I passed in the cab on the way to my hotel. Once there, I took out the negatives, satisfied myself that they matched the positives, and then burned them all in the sink and flushed the ashes down the commode. But the burning left an odor in the air, and I did not want to stay in the room so I went out onto the street.

  I walked for a very long time, oblivious of the direction. The faces of the people I passed were not real. The only thing real was the buzzard circling overhead against the hot sky, as if it had seen me and was waiting its chance. It had not all been for nothing, of course. I had recovered the negatives. I had proved, at least to my own satisfaction, that the dead agent was really a fraud who collected people as well as things, out of some perverted sense of proprietorship, and kept the evidence of his greed to admire. But in the end, I had failed. And now it was too late. I had run out of possibilities. I had come full circle.

  A bus passed, huffing toward a stop at the next corner, and I got on, letting my coin rattle through the box. The vehicle made a long circuit through streets that seemed vaguely familiar. We came to a plaza and now I remembered: Far down the street leading away from the plaza was a house, and in the house was a woman waiting for a man who would not return.

  I stayed on until the bus finished its circuit, and then I put in another coin and made the circuit again. The streets were dimmer now and dusk was falling, settling like a fine dust over the city, lightening the air so that sounds traveled farther and perspectives seemed to lengthen. It was five o’clock when the bus came to the little plaza the third time, and this time I got off. I started walking away from the plaza, down the street of adobe houses and walls, and when I came to the gate I pressed the button and waited. The buzzard had somehow followed me, riding lazily on the hot air, sure that it was only a matter of time before I collapsed and became his food. It was a cycle with which he was familiar: first the Indian cultures of Aztec and Maya that had clashed here in the lowland swamps; later the remnants of a Spanish army, headed for Honduras under Cortez; and four hundred years later, in the waning phase of a revolution, the rags and tags of a once powerful priesthood chased down by a madman’s pistoleros. The buzzard had seen it all: He knew the outcome. There was no hurry.

  But I cheated him because the little grille in the door opened, and then the main door itself, and I was inside facing the woman who looked out of the shadows at me, the wisdom of a thousand generations in this land in her eyes.

  I looked for words, failed, and she seemed to understand, closing the heavy door and letting me go ahead of her into the house. I heard her bare feet behind me on the tiles, and when I turned she was looking at me with her oriental eyes. A smell of earth drifted in from the outside and with it came the slightly pungent odor of the rubber tree, and the mud of the river that always seemed to hang in the air. I thought, Soon he will be a part of it all. And I will be a part of it all. We will all be apart of it—the river, air, and above all, the rich earth. And I realized then that she was already a part of it, and had always been, and suddenly it seemed useless to struggle any further. Perhaps it would not be so terrible to rest.

  “I tried,” I told her. “You must believe me.”

  She nodded. “Muy bien.”

  “I did all I could. I want you to know that.”

  “You are very kind.” Her face was impassive, and I could not tell whether she was on the verge of tears or whether she, too, was simply tired.

  “I do not know what kind of man he is,” she said simply. “But he was very kind to me. No one else would take me in. He did. He asked me no questions and he demanded nothing. That is worth something.” She turned away from me and stared out the back door at the jungle landscape.

  I touched her shoulder and felt the dark, shining hair brush my hand. “I’m sorry.”

  She turned back to face me. “So. There is nothing more to be done. We must accept the will of God. Perhaps it is his destiny, his suerte. If it is his destiny to return, I shall be happy and give thanks. But if it is not, one must accept the will of God.”

  “He won’t return.”

  “No. For a little time I thought that perhaps it was your destiny to help him. But it was not. So, señor, we must accept.”

  Yes, accept, I thought, and smelled the good smells.

  “You must be very tired,” she said. “I will prepare your meal.”

  It was over, and now a sense of peace descended as I relaxed. I heard an occasional car pass in the street, and then I heard the clapping that was the breadman on his rounds and the woman went out and returned with two loaves of french bread. Out of interest that I could not explain, I followed her into the little kitchen where a gas stove functioned from a tank outside. The woman took a dish full of fresh yellow corn, and, as I watched, kneeled on the floor to begin grinding it on an ancient stone. I walked back into the living room and sat down in the rocking chair. Much later she brought the meal, a thin gruel that tasted like hominy. Beside it she placed a bowl of black beans with bits of pork in it, and she stood on the other side of the table and watched as I ate, hands at her sides, lips slightly parted.

  When I was done, she brought out an orange, sliced it, set it before me, and then went into the bedroom when the baby began to cry. Once more I saw her eyes on me as she sat down on the other side of the room and unself-consciously dropped the shoulder of her dress to bare a full breast. The baby sucked noisily and she rocked, her eyes still on me. At last I stood. It was dark outside now, and there was a slight breeze from the river.

  “I have to go now.”

  “It is a long way?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are tired.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am tired.” She rose with the baby and went into the other room, where I heard her talking to it in a low voice. A moment later she came out alone and stood silently, waiting. There was a wet spot on the front of her dress where the milk had seeped throught, but she was oblivious. And we both knew that I would stay. I reached out for her, touching tentatively, and then holding desperately to the solidness of the body under the flimsy dress, and I tasted the hotness of her breath and met her lips with my own. She let me kiss her for long minutes, and then I felt her arms creep up around me and hold on to me, and the earth and river were around me and I was apart of them and apart of her.

  We went to the bed then—his bed—and she pulled the cheap dress over her head and lay down beside me without a word, and I let my own clothes fall away and pressed my flesh against the warmth of her strong Indian body, touched the slight bulge of her belly and felt down into the fine, sparse hair where her thighs met. When I entered her, she moaned and I could not tell if it was d
esire or pain. I kissed her breasts, took the nipple of each in my hand, and sucked the warm milk of life that was in her body, and then my own life spilled into her and for a long time I lay on her and took comfort from our oneness.

  Sometime later the child cried and she got up naked to attend it, and I heard the comforting squeak of the hammock as she rocked, and her gentle hum.

  I wandered into sleep and in my dreams I saw faces and scenes that had been covered. Suddenly they were free, and my childhood and adolescence were my own again, and I was walking down once-familiar streets at college, the autumn wind strong against my back, the sound of the chimes floating out to mark the quarter hour. I saw my father, ledger book under his arm and glasses askew on his nose, sad-faced with the realization of futility, adding and reading the columns. I saw him confirming the tally on the ancient calculator, cursing it for the key that stuck. I saw the morning light pouring onto my face and sat up straight with a sense of awful realization and loss.

  It must have been what Kestering had warned me about—over-identifying. For I had not dreamed my own past but his. I had imagined the events of his childhood as if, by borrowing his own fictitious past for my own, I might partake of his future. He had a future, of course. That had come to me in a dream, too, in which I saw the face of the killer and all was revealed. But it was a dream that ran parallel to the others and took place on a different level. It was a dream whose certainty, on awakening, dissolved into an if. But an if was better than nothing. I would have to give it a try, for some reason I could not explain to myself. Because now that I had slept with his woman, I hated him all the more.

  There was no reason I could think of for wanting him free. I tried to analyze my motives. The first proposition was that the innocent must not suffer. But what concrete evidence did I have that he was innocent? Just a feeling, a gut certainty that was based on a few words with him and some sentences scribbled in a diary. There was no second proposition because I could not be sure of the first, logically. Maybe they had released me too soon. Was I letting my own turmoil over Leah enter in? I tried to analyze my possible motives. I felt trapped like him, therefore identified with his situation, and sought to escape vicariously by effecting his release. But there was just as much chance that in the previous missions I had seen in that dossier, I had learned something, and what I had learned had become so ingrained that it now revealed itself as intuition. I kept coming back to what Kestering had said: I was a good agent. And if I let an innocent man rot in jail, then I was no longer a good agent, and being a good agent right now was the only thing I had.

  I went into the other bedroom where mother and child slept in the hammock. The baby was calm, its monkey face wrinkled and its little fists closed. Its mother looked up at me, saw that I was dressed.

  “You must go?”

  “Yes.” I took out my wallet and put ten one-thousand peso notes on the bureau. “The child will need food and clothing.”

  She nodded. “I will give you what is left when you return.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  In the light of early morning the street looked tawdrier than before. I noticed where paint was peeling along the wall with the color underneath showing in patches. Vacant lots were high with weeds and the smell of garbage, and there was trash in the street. But the tawdriness was something real, and the ancient coat of paint that mottled the wall was a sign of life in the past and, hence, of life in the present and future. The smell and taste of the woman had been that way—honest and real. I felt as if I had reached a turning point and crossed it. But I did not know what it meant. I just knew that there was still a chance.

  I caught an early bus at the little plaza, and twenty minutes later I got off downtown and stood blinking in the sun. The pain in my stomach told me I was hungry. I found a café and took a table. It would not be easy and my sudden surge of hope was beginning to flicker as I thought about the odds. It was logical, it made sense, but then logical men have often been dead wrong. I had been dead wrong throughout this entire affair. Then there was the problem of managing it. Today, I remembered, was Saturday. If I went to the house …

  I returned to my hotel room, got a pencil and paper, and printed the message. Then I went downstairs, borrowed the telephone directory and asked directions to a certain street.

  The closer I drew, as I drove through the neat, middle-class neighborhoods, the more foolish it all seemed. And, too, what I was about to do was a crime.

  Later on, you find excuses for what you have done. You were tired, sick, or any of a hundred other excuses. In this case, I was desperate. But that wasn’t the excuse I used then. Then, I thought it just might work.

  I drove past the house twice to make sure I had it down. There was a car in the driveway, so no one had left yet. It was the day to sleep late. I went around the block, looking for a place to park and found one, not too near, but in eyesight. Then I got out, feeling exposed in the daylight, and went down the sidwalk, past the green lawns and the doorways. I came to the house and gave a glance around me. Some children were playing up the block, but they were not watching. I took four quick strides to the car, put the paper on the front seat, and made my way back to the sidewalk. It was done. No turning back now. I circled the block, found my car again, and sat down to wait.

  I hoped the paper would work. Because he was the only one left: Dr. Alfredo Peón, whose wife had been violated and blackmailed by a pervert. The paper I had put in his car did not spell it all out, of course. It just said, in carefully printed Spanish, that the truth was known about the death of LaCour.

  The rest was for him to do.

  Chapter Twelve

  It grew warmer in the car as I waited. One hour. Two. I looked at my watch. It was nearly noon now and the only sign of life in the house was the maid who came out and went down the sidewalk toward the neighborhood store. A few minutes later two children came out, and for a terrible moment they hovered near the car. I hadn’t thought of that: Suppose the children found it first. Then what?

  But they went on across the street and found a playmate, and I breathed relief. Twelve-thirty. Suppose he wasn’t there.

  But he was. At quarter to one he came out, debonair in his white slacks and guayabera, and dark glasses, and he went to the car and got in.

  I could not see him reading the note, but there was an interval of three or four minutes. Then I heard the car start, and it began to back slowly out of the driveway.

  If I followed him long enough, if he was the one, if…

  The car, a red Mustang this time, found a boulevard, and we went along for two miles, making an oblique across the city. He drove fast, and I had to edge up to ninety kilometers an hour to keep up with him. We came to a traffic circle with a fountain in its center, and his car cut across the traffic and then angled out of sight. I was there ten seconds later and found myself in a battle for space. I gritted my teeth and edged out a Ford. Now where had he gone?

  He was far down the avenue, growing smaller as I watched. I jammed my foot on the brakes and heard tires squeal behind me. I swung the wheel and hoped the Dart was good enough to do what I wanted. Two acres of traffic slammed on brakes as I made a diagonal across them. A collision now and there would be no hope at all. A Volkswagen bus missed me by a foot, and its driver pounded his horn furiously as I found safety in the side street. I depressed the gas pedal and waited. Suddenly, I realized that the car I was following was gone. Goddammit. Not now! A truck loaded with tanks of LP gas started from a side street and was halfway out before its driver saw me. I banged my horn and took to the neutral ground, leaving him with his mouth open.

  The street rose ahead and now I saw what the problem was—a railroad track, which lay along an embankment. I braked quickly, taking the upgrade like a skier about to lift off, and hoped I wouldn’t bottom out. Something hit under the car but it kept going. And I caught a glimpse of the Mustang, making a turn.

  The street he had chosen was an alley with po
tholes and children. It had slowed him, too, but now it was my turn, and I had to watch him speeding away as I wound my way through the obstacles. We had entered a barrio with tar-paper-covered roofs and collapsing shacks. Where would it end?

  Then I saw a white glimmer ahead, a bright pillar shining in the noon sun. Halfway there I recognized it: The monument I had passed on the way in from the airport on the first day. We had cut across the city and emerged on the other side.

  The cold stone eyes of the politician watched us as we wheeled by him, taking the airport road. But we did not go to the airport. The Mustang turned off to the left toward the green hills. But he was not going to the hills, either. Now I knew where he was going.

  It was a country estate, and I had been there before. Once more tires crunched gravel. Once more I walked across the immaculately clipped lawn. Once more I saw cars before the front door and heard voices from the patio. Once more a servant guided me to where the others were.

  I stood by the corner of the house and watched Alexandra Whitcomb greeting him, this time in faded slacks, a bandana on her head. They kissed, and she asked about his wife and he told her that Gloria was still in bed, but would be out in a matter of days. She was glad to hear it; if there was anything she could do … She guided him toward the bar, and the crowd closed around them.

  Nothing. Surely he had seen it. Surely it had disturbed him. Surely he had come here for a purpose other than lunch with the elite. If so, he gave no evidence of it. I turned my back so he wouldn’t see me and took a drink from the tray as the waiter passed, and I heard his voice behind me. He was talking about the training of doctors in Mexico. He, of course, had done his residency in the U.S. At one time he had considered becoming a psychiatrist … I let go of his words and drank from my glass. It was a double martini, strong, but I gulped down half of it.