This was no time to let down my guard.
Back at the Land Rover, a stocky old man dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals began unloading our bags and carrying them into the house.
“Why all the security?” I asked Shaw. “I thought you collected antiques.”
As I said it, I noticed a group of people attending to an open pit dug out of the front lawn, laying out wood and coals for a fire, while a separate group of women began preparing three enormous tables with tableclothes, plates, glasses, and silverware. Not far from where the women were working I noticed a tall pole embedded into the ground —it was like a flagpole, only shorter. Instead of a flag flying from its mast, a dozen or more colorful straps hung down from a heavy bolt screwed into the very top of the beam.
Shaw put his arm around my shoulders while we walked up the wood porch stairs.
“In Mexico a man must take care of his property, no matter what his occupation,” he said. “I am simply taking care of mine.”
Inside the dimly lit vestibule, he peeled off his leather jacket and hung it up on the rack behind the door. He picked up the mail that had been stacked for him nice and neat on the wooden table next to the coat rack. He quickly flipped through the letters, checking the return address on each until he’d gone and examined each one, then setting the entire stack back down on the table.
As the old man in the Hawaiian shirt squeezed past and headed up the long center-hall stairs, a small, middle-aged woman appeared from out of the room located at the very end of the center hall.
Shaw bent at the waist for her, while she reached up on her tiptoes, embraced each side of his face.
“This is my Aunt Angela,” he said. “She will see you to your room.”
I nodded to her.
Shaw unbuckled the belt on his leather holster and set it down on the table beside the stack of unopened mail.
I asked him again about the plan.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Patience, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “In a short while we’ll discuss everything. In the meantime, why not see your room, perhaps have a drink, take a nap and a shower. Then we’ll sit down and talk after dinner,”
He patted my back.
Angela was waiting for me on the stairs.
I was dead tired.
I started up the stairs.
“And Mr. Marconi,” Shaw said from the bottom of the staircase, “if there’s anything you need — anything at all — just give Angela the word.”
I turned. “Antiques collector, huh?” I said to Angela.
She turned to me while taking the stairs.
“No comprendo” she said.
“That’s what they all say,” I said.
Fully clothed, I lay back on the heavy mattress. The late-afternoon breeze blew in through the open double-hung windows. Warm wind. The walls of the bedroom were
painted dark green. Hanging on the wall to my left, a gold gilt-framed mirror reflected the red, setting sun in its glass.
I lay as still as possible, listening to the soft foreign voices that mixed with the wind. Gentle voices. You just couldn’t get any further away from Stormville or Albany than this place. I tried closing my eyes, to allow the sleep to settle in, to avoid the little thoughts that had begun to tap against my brain like the little rodents that live inside the walls. But sleep never settled in quite the way I wanted it to. Or when I wanted it to, for that matter.
I stared up at the ceiling and the Casablanca fan that revolved slowly, steadily—you guessed it—hypnotically. Five spinning blades slicing through the hot air.
After a time, I saw Tony’s face. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was hiding something from me. Some crucial bit of information that might give some sense of order and meaning to this entire mission. To this entire week! I couldn’t help but think that maybe this so-called rescue might actually be a diversion for something else. But for what and for whom? I knew what the hell I had been hired for, knew why Tony had chosen me for the job.
So why the persistent questions?
No concrete reason, other than a feeling—an intuition that went against the grain of all I’d ever known about Tony. All I’d ever come to believe of him as an honest friend. This is what bothered me (aside from the fact that he felt it necessary to make me dead): He had kept the news of the Buick from me.
Maybe, in the end, he was trying to protect me.
As my lawyer and friend, maybe he was attempting to keep me out of harm’s way. To protect me not only from some person or persons who wanted to see me hurt, but also from myself. Because he knew what I was capable of if I actually found the Bald Man. But all this did not change the fact that he had deceived me. That in itself was a letdown.
On the other hand, maybe I was looking too deeply into too shallow a pool of water. Maybe the job had no other meaning than getting Renata out of that prison, alive. Get her safely across the border and back up to New York, collect my money. Then, and only then, would I attempt to find out exactly what Renata knew about the Bald Man. If there was a real connection between her family and the son of a bitch who killed my wife.
In the dream I feel the cold air. March in upstate New York. Not bright and pleasant with a blanket of freshly fallen snow covering the foothills. But cold and gray and damp with patches of filthy snow and mud. I walk the paved road that leads through the gates of the Albany Rural Cemetery. Move without effort past the nameless gray markers and the leafless trees tipped with melting icicles. As I walk, I feel the damp cold seep into my skin, into my bones. I feel the wet cold scrape the back of my throat.
Up ahead, the figure of a woman.
She is standing at the foot of a gray marker, dressed entirely in black.
Black shawl, black veil, black gown.
The fear burns in my stomach like a flame. I try to pull back, but it’s impossible.
The closer I come to the woman, the more I can make out her face. Fran’s face. I don’t have to see it to know it. It is a face I feel more than I see.
A car pulls up beside me. A battered black Buick. The car takes off again, blows past me. The car runs Fran down, drags her body across the road, until it settles on a dirty snowbank.
I try to scream.
No words will come.
The face of the Bald Man. I see it staring out at me, from the open drivers-side window on the Buick. He smiles at me, winks, just as he throws the car in drive, speeds out of the cemetery.
Now I am kneeling over the body. The body lies face first in the melting snow, the long hair matted with blood until the red coloring is almost black and I am floating up above my own body, watching myself watch my wife.
I reach out for her, roll her over.
Her head is gone.
Sitting up, getting out of bed, catching my breath.
Sweat dripping from my forehead, into my eyes, down the ridge line of my nose.
The taste of salt on my lips. My salt.
I looked at my watch face. Two solid hours of uninterrupted sleep. Not bad. Even for me.
Out the open window, the afternoon sun had settled deep into the desert horizon. The ranch was lit up with the firelight that came from the dozens of stake-mounted torches dug into the perimeter of the front lawn.
I saw the women and the men attending to the picnic tables with plates of food covered in tin foil and large plastic tubs full of ice and bottled beer. I smelled the fresh meat that roasted on a skewer in the open pit. I knew I couldn’t stay in the room all night. There was a job to do, plans had to be made.
Shaw.
I needed a little face-time with Shaw.
A drink would be nice too.
Chapter 24
She is down on her knees, hands cuffed behind her back, face hanging over the edge of the pit. Over the dead bodies, the stench of the rotting flesh infiltrating her nasal passages like the gas in a gas chamber.
The night is dark and windy.
The cool air is already settling in.
Behind her stands the mustached man. He is holding a pistol on her, pressing the barrel to a soft spot she never knew existed just behind her left earlobe.
“Who sent you here?” he demands. It’s the third or fourth time he’s asked. She’s not sure. She’s lost count. Just like she’s lost count of the bodies stacked three and four high in the pit.
“Jesus Christ sent me here,” she says.
He grabs a fist of hair, jerks her head back violently.
“Once more. Why are you spying?”
Her eyes are tearing. The pain of her hair ripping away from her scalp.
“I.…told.…you. I’m…a…writer.”
He lets go of her hair. With his free hand, he caresses her cheek suddenly, wipes away a tear.
He pulls the pistol away. “Perhaps,” he says, “I am being too harsh. Perhaps I am not handling this the correct way, señorita. Perhaps I’m not asking the right questions.”
She feels his rough hand on her skin. It is like an insect. A wasp she has no way of shaking off.
“Did Richard send you here? Does Richard Barnes no longer trust his partners?”
His fingertips, now brushing up against her full moist lips. The wasp about to sting.
That is, unless she can sting first.
She opens her mouth wide, catches his finger in her mouth, bites down on it with all the strength she has left.
He screams in agony, drops his pistol into the pit.
The soldiers cock their weapons, aim them at her.
“No, No, No!” screams the mustached man. “We need her alive!”
There’s blood all over her lips, on her tongue. She can taste it.
He falls back. “Oh my God. Oh my sweet Jesus.”
He holds up his right hand. The tip of his middle finger is gone. From the third joint up.
“Look what you did,” he cries. “Look what you did. Look what you fucking did.”
Real tears pour down his cheeks, soaking his mustache.
The soldiers stand around, looking at one another, like, What the hell do we do now?
“You bitch,” the mustached man says. “You horrible bitch. You’ll pay for this.”
That’s when Renata smiles, opens her mouth, just slightly, spits the tip of his middle finger onto the sand. “I’m rich, asshole,” she says. “l can afford it.”
Chapter 25
Torches lit up the open-air party, along with countless red and green lanterns that hung from the porch rafters. A roasting pig revolved on a metal skewer over a pit filled with fire. The brown baked skin on the pig glistened with the drippings the old Mexican cook had used for basting between stirs of the black-bean chili. The chili bubbled in a heavy black kettle that had been placed on a charcoal-filled, fifty-gallon drum cut down the middle and supported horizontally with sawhorses.
By seven I was standing back on the porch of the main house, a cold bottle of Corona in my hands. I soaked in the warm but breezy night in my Levi’s jeans, Tony Lama boots, and denim work shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. There was the sound of Latin music and all the nameless people who passed by me in pairs or one by one. Older, heavyset women in loose flowery dresses and long hair, some with fresh carnations pinned just above their right ear, their lively dark eyes lit up all the more by the firelight and the colorful lanterns. And men —most of them from Hudson’s little private army—who had set their automatic rifles aside but who would not give up their sidearms.
But soon came an odd collection of men whose faces I did not recognize from my initial visit to the compound just a few short hours before. Big men, dressed in suits and wing-tipped shoes, a couple of them wearing sunglasses in the night, as if to block out the moonlight, or their identity, which was probably more the case. One of them sported a thick, Pancho Villa mustache. A thin, angry-looking man dressed in a charcoal suit. The thing that made him stand out above all the others was the thick white bandage wrapped around his right hand, the very tip of which showed traces of blood. He was drinking tequila from a quart bottle. Not to get drunk, I imagined. More likely to kill the pain in his hand.
The men stuck together in a sort of tight semicircle that shifted from one end of the front lawn to the other and back again. They passed that bottle around and they laughed at one another’s jokes and nearly fell on the sandy ground when one of them pinched the backside of an old woman as she went about placing big bowls of food on the picnic tables.
They were having one hell of a time.
All except the mustached man with the bandage. He seemed to be in a hell of a lot of pain, not all of it coming from his injured hand.
Shaw was nowhere to be found.
I knew he would show soon enough.
In the meantime, I leaned back against the porch rail and considered tracking down someone with a pack of smokes. But cigarettes were suddenly the last thing on my mind when the woman walked out onto the front porch.
She was the same woman I’d met earlier by the pool. Now she was dressed in a black, thigh-length cocktail dress and black stockings, and she was coming my way.
When she was close to me, she ran the tips of her fingers gently down the left side of my face. I stood very still and stared at the strand of white pearls that wrapped around her neck and the way they shimmered against her black dress in the soft overhead porch light. I watched the way her hair hung down over her ears, how it seemed as alive and on fire as her brown eyes.
I knew that if I gripped the bottle of Corona any tighter it might explode in my hand. I breathed and set what was left of the beer down on the rail, reached my hand out for hers. She laughed a little. She never had to say a word. She simply took my hand in hers and closed in on me. I brought my face to that special place just between her neck and shoulder and I breathed in her smell. Gently I brushed back her long black hair with my fingertips, brought my mouth to her ear, and kissed it so softly I barely touched it with my lips.
For a time we stayed close like that, our arms wrapped around each other’s waist. I smelled her sweet smell and felt her body heat and the slow, steady pace of her heart. Before I knew it, we were dancing to a slow Latin rhythm, doing these smooth turns on the porch floor, her light body in my arms.
When the music stopped, everything else seemed to stop along with it.
I kissed her.
A few seconds later, Shaw made his entrance onto the porch. He was wearing a pressed white button-down along with matching white pants and a thick black holster to support an ivory-handled six-shooter. On his feet, black snake-skin Tony Lama boots.
Judging from the smile on his narrow face, it must have pleased the hell out of him to see his guests enjoying themselves.
My new girlfriend had taken her place among the crowd. I took hold of my beer from the rail and approached Shaw.
“Considering what’s going down tomorrow,” I said, “you throw one hell of a pig roast.”
He wrapped his left arm around my shoulder while surveying the crowd from the vantage point of the porch. “My business is my pleasure,” he said. Then he slid his arm off my shoulder and jogged down the porch steps. He was making a beeline toward the group of well-dressed Mexican men who were now calling out his name, like he was their big buddy. All except the man with the bandage wrapped around his right hand. He was drinking from the tequila bottle again. And the closer Shaw came to him, the more pain he appeared to be in.
For hours we feasted on chili and freshly sliced pork from the skewer and washed it all down with Corona beer. And for a time, I forgot all about the reasons for crossing the border in the first place. I sat at the end of a very long picnic table, beside my nameless girlfriend, a full bottle of beer set beside a few empties.
Between the girl and the stars that lit up the night sky, I almost felt content, as though I never saw a battered black Buick the Saturday befo
re, as though I never missed my own wedding, as though I never had to be peeled off the beer-soaked floor of an Albany gin mill. None of it mattered. Not my relationship with Val or her son, Ben. Not the short happy life Fran and I had together, not the long happy life we got gypped out of. Not the Bald Man I never found nor the probability that I would never find him. Not Renata Barnes or her imprisonment, not her husband, Richard, or their dead kid. Not Tony and his reasons for giving me this job in the first place. Not my sleeplessness nor my memories nor the children I never had nor the children I never would have. Not my life.
It just didn’t matter anymore.
I’m not sure exactly when or how it happened or if there was a point to it at all, but after a time a group of seven men appeared. Boys and men, who sort of emerged from out of the desert. Little men —not a single man over five-feet-two or a hundred and ten pounds—dressed in white pants with little bright red bandannas wrapped around their necks.
Barefoot men with dark, rugged faces.
Like the faces of ancient Indians.
At first I thought I must be hallucinating when the smallest of the seven began to climb the flagless pole embedded into the middle of the lawn with all the ease and grace of a monkey and its favorite tree. He just scaled the vertical pole without an ounce of effort, using both his hands and bare feet to grip the smooth, narrow surface.
I thought that maybe somebody had slipped something into one of my drinks when each man followed the little boy up onto the pole, just like that. Even when I turned to my nameless girl, she had this wide-eyed look of wonder on her face, as if she was absolutely getting a kick out of the whole thing but at the same time was thoroughly perplexed.
But if drugs were available at the hacienda that night, I hadn’t seen them. Besides, the display was no hallucination. If it had been, then the entire party had to be caught up in the subliminal trance. Because by now the entire crowd had gathered around the pole, even the well-dressed men. (Except for the man with the bandage on his hand. He was up on the porch with Shaw. He seemed to be in a fit over something, waving his bandaged hand in the air as if using it to make a point. And all the time Shaw just nodding his head, as though in complete agreement).
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