Then she laughed. It was a deliberate laugh, meant to achieve something, and he speculated what it might be.
He took a chance. “When a woman laughs like that, a guy wonders if his fly is open.”
“A woman laughs, a man wonders if his fly is open,” she said wryly. “It’s a reflex, isn’t it?”
“Didn’t you mean it to be?”
“Perhaps,” she confessed, “but not that consciously. Would you like a drink?”
He couldn’t handle a drink right now. “No, thanks.”
“Please.” She blurted it, as if she needed him to stay. “Just one drink.”
Then, incomprehensibly, her offer seemed to have been withdrawn—she didn’t give a damn whether he had one or not—and she laughed again.
“You’re not going to tell me what you’re laughing about, are you?”
“Oh, yes,” she said quickly. “My husband.”
He waited, for minutes it seemed to him.
“Suppose you do kidnap my son. What good will he be to my husband?”
“That’s between you and him,” he said carefully.
She studied it. “You were just hired to collect the boy?”
“That’s right,” he answered.
“And when you deliver him you get paid?”
“Exactly.”
“All right,” she said. “Collect him.”
He couldn’t have heard her right. “You give your permission?”
“Yes, collect him!” She was having trouble with her temper. “If you want to kidnap my son, you don’t have to go sneaking in the back door. Just collect him.”
“That’s all I have to do?”
“Just one thing more. Sign a receipt for him!”
“I’ll be glad to—when I receive him.”
“First you have to find him.”
“Why—where is he?” he asked.
“Ask the police.”
He was certain she was misleading him, he didn’t know where. “You mean he’s in jail?”
“He will be—if the police ever catch him.”
“Eleven years old . . . ?”
She pointed to the snapshot of the well-dressed child. “You’re picturing a sweet little, dear little boy, aren’t you? Goes to a polite school, wears clean clothes, speaks respectfully to his elders. A darling little Mexican child—fine family—sings old Spanish songs with a quaint Castilian lisp!” She made a sound less elegant than a hiss, less vulgar than a spit. “My son Rafo is a monster!”
The rage was too intense, there must be heartbreak under it. Yet, bewilderingly, she revealed no such vulnerability, only murderousness.
“Where can I find him?” Mike asked.
“In a gutter,” she said.
“Any particular gutter?”
“Alleyways, gambling places. One of my friends saw him running errands in the El Picador Bar. Twice he was nearly caught stealing—at the jai alai game and at the Merced.”
She was vulnerable after all. The drink in her hand shook—she had to set it down. But: “I don’t know where he is,” she said. “You won’t find him. Give up.”
He asked, not unkindly, “When did you give him up?”
“Not soon enough,” Lexa said. “Two or three years ago. Too late.”
“When he was eight or nine? You couldn’t have done it much sooner.”
“Oh, yes—the day he was born!”
Her unhappiness was naked, she began to quake. He felt a pang of pity and was about to touch her commiseratingly. But he stopped himself.
The smart thing, he decided, would be to depart right now; she would do nothing to detain him. There would be no call to the police. He went to the table to collect his property. He put the cards and the boy’s picture back in the billfold and shoved it into his pocket. Then, with a little embarrassment, the pliers, pocketknife, flashlight, screwdriver, handkerchief. All that was left was the little can of 3-IN-ONE Oil and the roll of electrical tape. He couldn’t without outraging his own sensibilities, pick the objects off the table. He left them there and started for the door.
As he was about to go he heard the soft entreaty in her voice. “Please have a drink.”
It was a plea for something, for everything, for anything. Stay and merely have a drink, it said; or stay and talk; or comfort me and keep me sane; or sleep with me. All or little.
“Another time,” he said, with gentleness. “Perhaps.”
He departed.
As he shut the door behind him and turned into the wide and beautiful corridor, there was Pacas waiting for him—lying in wait. The Indian looked at him with stony, suspicious eyes.
“I will go with you to the gates,” he said in English that was better than Mike expected it to be. “If I do not, the dogs . . .”
Mike thought: I’ll bet you just love those dogs. I’ll bet you’ve taught them a cute trick or two.
All the way down the superb staircase and out into the dawn that lighted the sweep of greensward and driveway, Mike could feel the emanations of violence from Lexa’s man. For he was her man, no question about it, sleeping with her. But she wasn’t his woman probably, and Pacas might be very glad to mutilate any contender who had a surer claim to her. There could be many, Mike guessed.
As he got into the truck and drove back toward the hotel, he worried a question. Why hadn’t he ended the night with her? She was beautiful, she was lush, she had a mask of sexuality, and she wanted him. Moreover, there was an excitement about her, exotic, bizarre—possibly something a bit too unstable to handle, but tantalizing. Then why hadn’t he? The question made him uneasy; he didn’t want to face it. To rid his mind of it, he told himself he hadn’t stayed because of his physical condition; he had been fighting something—some damn vertigo—something. And if he slept with a woman while in this weakened physical state, he was uncertain he could make it. But it was temporary, that’s all, nothing to worry him.
Yet . . . he hadn’t gone any further in pursuing the girl in the Red Rio Bar either. True, her boy friend had turned up. But in the old days, if he had wanted to talk to her, he’d have done it, boy friend or not. What uncertainties about himself were working in him both times?
Was it all because he had lost his job, as brainlessly simple as that? Howard had said he lost the job because he lost the muscle. Did he lose the muscle because he lost the job?
Too stupid to have it happen both ways, too stupid, too pat, too cruel. An end to that. He was making one of those quick-and-easy diagnoses, straight out of the cheap little instant psychology books he was once addicted to. No more. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing. He knew damn well what he needed for the recovery of his old effectiveness: action. Do the job, make the money, start screwing all over again. Be a winner once more.
Find the boy.
6
If Mike could find him, Rafo Polk would be the ideal victim of a kidnapping. Nobody would miss him. The risk to the kidnapper, as such crimes go, would be minimal. There was only one slight problem: nobody could find him.
Certainly not his would-be kidnapper. For Mike was at a loss in the foreign city. He knew neither its geography nor its language. In the four days he had been here he hadn’t even learned to order a meal in a native restaurant. His mode of Spanish communication was a mixture of pantomime and pointing, hardly a level of intercourse designed to find the whereabouts of a renegade boy.
Not that Mike didn’t try. He set to work immediately after his meeting with Lexa. He spent his daytimes, map in hand, getting acquainted with the Distrito Federal. He didn’t waste time on churches, palaces, museums; he hadn’t a single hour to squander on ancient calendar tablets or eroded stone gods or mystical, coiled serpents. He concentrated his search on the raffish parts of the city, the alleys behind the Plaza Garibaldi and the Calle Bolivar and the Avenida EI Salvador, the ba
ck streets near the bullfighting arena, the dead-ended little vecindades, the slippery footways in the slums.
Nighttimes, he followed the sparse clues Lexa had given him. His third evening in the city he went to the Frontón, the jai alai court, in the Plaza de la República. Inside the vast stadium he realized how nonsensical it was to be searching for a boy among the thousands of people who watched the jai alai game. Especially in the tumult. As the players whipped the hard ball out of the small baskets strapped to their arms, men in red berets raced down the aisles shrieking odds, taking bets, chanting in a whine more Oriental than Spanish, making a din intelligible to natives and maniacal to Mike. And the wildest lunacy was his hope, as he threaded up and down the turbulent aisles, that he would find a small boy who five years ago matched a tiny photograph. Nearly every small boy did match it—they were all dark-eyed, dark-haired and he could have selected one at random.
The following night he went from bar to bar, drinking Coca-Cola until he was jacked up like a wild bronc. At last he found the EI Picador, the café where Rafo had reportedly been seen running errands. It was hidden away in a tiny back passage under a vinegar-smelling workshop that processed animal hair. It was called EI Picador because bullfighters of a lesser station than matador were supposed to frequent it, but Mike saw nobody healthy enough to be a torero of any degree. Nobody except the young man and woman who put on a floor show after midnight and performed a dance called La Picadora. The woman was naked except for the sheath of knives tied around her waist. Her partner was a gargantuan, handsome black man, also naked except for a black tail which swagged out of his anus, proclaiming him the bull. The girl kept stabbing knives into the bull’s skin, and the bull bled. At last she cut the bull’s tail off and beat him with it. He liked it a great deal, and so did the crowd.
But when the show was over and the lights were somewhat brighter, there was no eleven-year-old in the audience, no small boy running errands, and Mike even wondered what errands would need running in a place like this. Not giving up, however, he went to the proprietor who spoke tourist Esperanto and asked if he had anybody around who could run an errand for him. The proprietor offered the services of his fat and willing wife. There was no one else to do such chores, nor had there ever been—but, the man assured him, his chubby wife’s fleetness of foot was not to be underestimated.
The following day Mike had a glimmering of hope. He went to the Merced. The Mercado de Merced, an enormous fruit and produce market, was a revel, a lust of color. Cascades of wild oranges from the desert; avocados of every shape and hue; chilis—sweet ones, hot ones, modest cones and grand cornucopias of chili, red, green, yellow, purple even black ones. And the tricksters: a woman juggling guavas in the air, six at a time; an old man rolling on watermelons as if they were cartwheels; a boy tossing a shovel of small red peppers in the air and catching them, not losing a pod.
It was among the hawkers that Mike was certain he saw the boy. Nearly all the hawkers were children, some in their teens, some as young as five or six. Boys, girls, neatly dressed or in rags, selling garlic by the single clove, peddling empty flour sacks, mushrooms or peyote. He saw the special boy—the exact likeness of the child in the snapshot—selling lottery tickets. He had a high shrill voice and his Spanish spiel was so loud, so piercingly clear, that Mike had the illusion he understood him. The more he stared at him the closer the resemblance seemed—and the age was right too; the lottery ticket seller could easily be eleven.
Certain he had at last run his quarry to earth, Mike approached the boy and started to talk to him in English. The hawker didn’t understand a word. Mike bought a ticket and pointed outdoors, away from the noise of the other hucksters, where they might speak quietly. The instant he made the suggestion that the lad go away with him, Mike was surrounded. There was no question who the people were who encircled him: his mother and father from the kidney bean counter; a man who looked like a freight train, his uncle no doubt; an old witch-woman with a beard. This boy was not a derelict Rafo, he was the beloved scion of a proud and pugnacious family. Mike squeezed through the human cordon and fled.
He had made a double mistake. Not only in matching the boy to the photograph, but a mistake in logic. The lottery ticket seller didn’t understand English; the real Rafo, having lived in the United States until he was six, must surely be able to speak some of the language of norteamericanos.
Mike realized it wouldn’t be the last of his mistakes. He would make more and more of them and never find the boy; the task was impossible. He would either have to give up the search or get some sort of assistance. He would have to consult Howard.
He didn’t dare call Polk from the hotel, for the telephone charge would be listed on his bill when he checked out. So he walked to the Continental Hilton, found a phone booth and put in a collect call to Texas. In a little while he heard Howard answering the Texas operator. When she asked him if he would accept a collect call from Michael Milo, the silence at the other end was so long that Mike thought they had been disconnected.
At last he heard Howard’s voice. “Who?”
“Michael Milo,” she repeated. “Will you accept?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know the man.”
And he hung up.
As he had warned, Howard would give no recognition to the effort of the enterprise, only to the successful result of it.
Mike was stymied. Unless he could get more information from the boy’s mother.
* * *
• • •
It was twilight. Lexa was drawing the curtains against the night. When the room was darker, she rearranged the objects on the top of the elegant sideboard, put the carafe in the middle, her half-full glass to the left of it, Mike’s empty glass to the right.
He was fascinated as he watched her perform what seemed the start of a ritual. And the rite might be a celebration of himself. Having apparently put away all distresses about her son, she performed every movement with such sensual pleasure, she made every gesture an enactment of such voluptuary delight, he wondered if she were already drunk.
She didn’t speak and he sensed she didn’t want him to. Turning, she looked around the room, creating a quiet, as if she held an atomizer and was spraying soft silences into every dark corner. Then she came toward him with a drink in each hand. She gave him his. He held it without drinking it. He hated to break the silence with anything less than an incantation, but he was lousy at solemnity, it brought out the prosiest side of him. He looked at the drink and said flatly, “What is this?”
“Mescal.”
“Is it like tequila?”
“Some is. This isn’t.”
He took a slip and didn’t let on how it burned. She was watching him, every movement of his body.
“You like it?” she asked.
“I’ve used milder stuff to rub down a horse.”
It wasn’t the fragile language calculated to sustain the mood of a ritual and he could see it offended her. But she shifted the mood. “Would you like a chaser?”
“What’ve you got?”
“Some people lick a little salt . . . Or you could suck something.”
“What do you suggest?” he asked.
“A lime?” With studied innocence. She pointed to a lustrous blackware bowl that was heaped high with a bright mound of limes, oranges, chilis, avocados, mangoes. “Or would you rather have a chili?”
“It’s worth a try.”
“Sweet or hot?” she asked.
He smiled. “I wonder if I’ll ever find one that’s both.”
“Don’t give up the quest,” she said.
He took another sip of his mescal. She stared at him, letting the quiet return to do her work for her. He debated whether to say anything that would move them closer to the bedroom.
Instead: “Where do I look for him next?” he asked.
He saw the start of rage.
But she controlled it. “That’s all you came back for, isn’t it?”
“No, not all.”
A scurry of doubt crossed her face. Then, unexpectedly, “Have you been to the cockfights?”
He was puzzled by the irrelevance. “No. Have I missed something important?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “I hear he’s mixed up with the cockfights. Not the legal cockfights outside the city—oh, no, Rafo wouldn’t bother with anything legal. The crummy ones in all the meanest places . . .” She stopped herself. Under her breath, barely audible, she cursed in Spanish. She’s sorry she told me, Mike realized, and he wondered why indeed she had. Perhaps she was buying something.
“If you really know where he is . . .”
She finished the sentence. “Why don’t I go for him?”
“Yes.”
“Because . . . I don’t care.”
“That’s what you said the last time I was here. But—”
“It’s true! I don’t care what happens to him! I don’t care if he gets killed! I don’t care if he dies!”
Her hand, holding the glass, began to tremble just as it had during his first meeting with her. But this time she didn’t put the glass down, she drank the entire contents at once. Then she moved as evenly as possible back to the sideboard and poured herself another drink. She stayed there, not facing him, hiding. When she turned, she wore an impenetrable expression, like a mask of her own face, corrupted. It was something he had seen fleetingly. Now it was fixed, it could be photographed. And titled: A Derangement.
Paradoxically, her voice was well-managed. “You may go, if you like,” she said. “Now that I’ve given you a little information.”
How had she kept the words so steady when her rage was shaking her? And why wasn’t he leaving when he knew the woman could be trouble, might be dangerous? He was repelled by her, he was fascinated, he wanted to touch her. “May I finish my drink?” he said.
She didn’t answer immediately. Then: “I want you to.” She watched him, barely blinking.
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