“Whatever,” Gabriel said. The cigarette smoke trailed off his hand in a lazy circle. “How much do you suppose your idea can absorb?”
Farrell paused, licked his upper lip, and said: “I’m figuring with this kind of deal, over the long haul—say five years—I know this sounds crazy, but … you’d be buying land. Lots of it.”
“How much?”
“A billion.”
Gabriel’s cigarette froze in the air and suddenly his tightly pressed lips had reformed themselves into a frozen “0.”
Farrell said: “Of course, there’s no way my bank could ever operate as a funnel for that kind of money. But the potential exists for a webbed system of banks and corporations to handle the load.”
“Beyond these border properties?”
“I suppose any sort of bargain basement real estate deal we could get our hands on.”
“What’s in it for you?” Gabriel asked.
Farrell thought of the expanding figure of his accounts. “Profit,” he said. “And as you’ve said, there’s nothing so blazing as the unpredictable.”
Gabriel closed his eyes. His lips held the cigarette stiff and he sucked and blew until it was wasted. “America’s slumlords. There’s something poetic in that.”
“Actually, I was thinking of properties in the midprice range, nothing fancy, nothing showy. Just meat-and-potato stuff.”
“I was kidding about the slums,” Gabriel said. His slender fingers began to stroke the desk top as if it were a piano keyboard. “I think it’s an admirable plan, simple, yet elegant. But I have to talk this over with some other people. To be frank, I don’t know if you are capable of something so audacious.”
“I was audacious enough to come up with the idea,” Farrell said coolly.
“You did, indeed,” Gabriel said. He came around the desk and led Farrell to the door. “Why don’t you keep Maria company while I make some calls. It will take me an hour.”
Farrell nodded and tried to shut the door. The heavy piece of oak entered the jamb, stuck for a moment, and squeeked before closing. Outside a storm blustered. The branches of the hyacinth bushes scraped across the windows. In the distance came the muffled pounding of the surf.
Maria lay on the tooled leather sofa, reading Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz. She had drawn her hair back tight against her temples and woven its length into an ebony braid that hung across her left shoulder and rested on the breast of the yellow cotton shift she wore. Cazador was curled at her feet. The Brittany growled when Farrell entered the room.
“Big meeting over at last?” She shifted her body to face him.
“I don’t know about big,” Farrell said. “The word doesn’t seem to be part of my job description.”
She sat up, curling her bare feet under her. She lifted a glass from the dark parotta wood coffee table to jiggle the melting ice cubes inside.
“A rum perhaps?” she asked.
“Why not?” Farrell crossed to the glass doors which opened onto the veranda. “Gabriel says the boat is down. No throwing ourselves into the sea today.”
“Or tomorrow, I’m afraid,” she said from behind the bar. “The mechanic said he blew the engine. The peacocks and peahens were terrified when he came chugging in the other day. It made a terrible rasping sound. They all took to roost in the thickest part of the eucalyptus trees.”
“They screamed A-hole,” Farrell said.
“Yes,” she said, coming around the bar with his drink. “It’s all an A-hole.”
Farrell tried to cheer her by asking about her work. She was a part-time assistant in the archeology department at a university in Mexico City. She worked for an old man named Miguel, an expert in Mayan and Aztec cultures, whose greatest find was a perfectly intact clay dog, almost 1,000 years old. The dog had made Miguel’s reputation: he had uncovered it in a pit in Mexico City where construction workers were about to lay down a cement foundation. Because of Miguel, archaeologists were now allowed into all new construction sites in Mexico.
“One day last week, I went to the laboratory late because I had forgotten a book I wanted to read,” she said. “There was sweet old Miguel, sitting in the corner with the clay dog in his lap. He was petting it and talking to it about the awful places it had been relieving itself. He’s terribly lonely, but romantic at the same time.”
Farrell told her how Cazador’s pup, Punta, now raced to jump the sea wall every night after work. And then in a fit of guilt—and a need to find out how much Maria understood—he told her briefly of Lena’s job in the nursery.
“How sad,” she said when he’d finished. “Poor babies. We are working on a clinic for a village up in the hills. There the children still suffer from polio and last year an outbreak of meningitis. I think it is awful, but in many ways it is the role of children to suffer.”
All this was said with no outward reaction to indicate she understood the dark side of Gabriel’s business. Perhaps it was that she knew and was beyond caring.
Maria said, “There are lines about your face that weren’t there the last time I saw you, so flushed from throwing yourself off the boat.”
“Are there?” Involuntarily, he touched his cheek.
“Deep, too, the kind that won’t go away easily. You and my husband both seem tired these days. You work too hard and I think you neglect your women. Another drink?”
“Still working on this one.” Farrell was now acutely aware that she was drinking very fast and had probably worked her way through more than one rum during his meeting with Gabriel. Behind him at the bar, ice cubes clinked.
“Clouds over the ocean like that—purple with an approaching rain—put me in the mood to drink,” she said as she walked back toward the couch. She raised her left hand to the horizon and trailed her right hand across his shoulder, her fingers electric in a way Farrell had forgotten. Swirling in the wake of her yellow cotton shift was the suggestion of an exotic perfume, like the tinge of the spice markets of Africa. He watched her stand at the glass door—the setting sun highlighting her body under the thin dress, and at once horrified and transfixed, Farrell knew he was drawn by that which was forbidden, by that which was Gabriel’s.
The ice cubes in his glass seemed to swirl on their own. He slowly took the base of the tumbler in his right hand and grabbed the top with the left to still the motion. He drank the rum to the bottom. “Maybe I will have another.”
Maria glanced down the hallway that led to Gabriel’s office and grinned. “I hoped you would,” she said. “It’s so boring and destructive to drink alone.”
She crossed the room to take the glass and Farrell held it too long, so that she had to tug it from his fingers. Farrell stared into her eyes, then let the glass slip away. She walked back to the bar, a little less sure of herself. “You are a dangerous man, Jack.”
“Am I?” Farrell asked, craning back over his shoulder.
“I think you try things just to see if you can get away with them.”
“That’s dangerous?”
“Passionate men have the tendency to become fanatics. You can predict where their zealotry will surface. Men like you, who dabble, your waters are unpredictable.”
She set his drink on the table. “What shall we drink to?” Now she sat stiffer on the couch. Her attention darted about the room and she paused only briefly on Farrell before moving away. Cazador nosed his head under her hand and she rubbed it while she drank.
“I don’t know,” Farrell said. “To Mexico?”
“Why Mexico?”
“Because of the mystery.”
“Is that what attracts you to my country, Jack? Something tawdry?” She folded her arms across her chest.
Farrell drank from the glass, then said: “The border towns, the tinny glitz, they’ve never interested me. It’s the heart of the country that’s attractive.”
“The heart?” she snorted and took a gulp of the rum. “No adventurer such as yourself wants the heart. They want to bask in the heat and rhy
thm for a while, but they don’t want the heart. It’s too messy in the long run.”
“I admit going native can be troublesome,” Farrell said. “When I lived in Africa, I dressed as a nomad for months, hanging about in robes and a turban. I ate their food—a millet paste in an okra sauce—and even slept with their women. I woke up one day and realized I had dreamed in their language of a place where a great dune meets a granite cliff. I had never been there, but I knew it was a real place.”
“So?”
“I had gone beyond the heart of things and that is messy. The dream upset me so much that I stopped wearing the turban and the robes and became obsessed with a Dutch woman who lived in the town where I did. She was quite obese, but I liked her because her white skin reminded me of the girls who sold hamburgers in my hometown.”
Maria laughed, shook her head, and raised her glass. “You’re quite an actor. To the heart of Mexico, then.”
They stood to touch glasses. Maria ran her fingers across his hand. His heart began to beat wildly, a sound that was immediately accompanied by the creak of the door to Gabriel’s office. They retreated to their chairs.
Gabriel clapped Farrell on the shoulder when he entered the room. “I have good news of which we will talk tomorrow.”
He looked back and forth between Farrell and his wife, who did their best not to look at one another. He rubbed his hands together. “But I have had enough of work for today and I can see that you and Maria are already ahead of me.”
Gabriel brought out two wonderful bottles of Merlot to complement the roast squab that the cook had prepared in a fennel sauce. Maria yawned deeply and excused herself around 10 P.M. Gabriel and Farrell drank Calvados in front of a low fire, listening to the wind buck the trees outside.
“I will break a rule of mine,” Gabriel said, “and mix business with pleasure. Your idea has been met with some interest.”
Farrell smiled, “Should I begin when I return to the States?”
“Interest, not approval,” Gabriel emphasized. “My customers express the same reservations I have. They wish to hear you explain the concept yourself. They want to know you before committing the kind of resources you’ve mentioned.”
Dulled as he was by liquor, a quiver of dread wormed through Farrell. Despite the charge he got working with Gabriel, he had no desire to know these people; he’d decided at the beginning that as long as he remained on the rim of Gabriel’s activities, the odds were in his favor. Beyond the narrow risks he’d allowed himself, he knew there existed a wider, deeper set of connections that he did not want to understand.
“I thought you stayed away from these people,” Farrell asked suspiciously.
“I do, except when it’s necessary,” Gabriel said.
“I don’t see why this is necessary,” Farrell replied.
“You and your bank are now working with a minor, yet significant percentage of the cash and disposable income of their business,” Gabriel said. “You come to me and propose to increase that percentage. They feel that, before that happens, a certain trust must exist. I don’t find that unreasonable.”
Farrell watched the flames burst purple and then blue. He remembered himself as an eight-year-old backing away from a quarry in Maine because he saw a log floating. “Maybe you were right,” Farrell said. “Maybe it won’t work.”
Gabriel took a drink and said, “It is as I thought. Perhaps you are as big as you can be.”
Farrell squeezed at the edges of the fine crystal brandy snifter until he thought it would crack. When he’d regained his composure, he said, “Let me sleep on it. The thought of new people that I don’t know. It’s a little too much to take, that’s all.”
Gabriel patted Farrell on the shoulder as a professor would a student. “Understandable and agreed,” Gabriel said. “We shall talk again in the morning before you leave. Another Calvados?”
The bells of the antique clock in the corner chimed midnight when Farrell said good night. Down the hallway past the library to his room, he heard Gabriel cross the living room behind him and flip on the stereo. The mournful sound of a clarinet blew through the house and Billie Holliday’s voice sang: “Never had nothing, no one to care …”
Farrell lay in bed and listened as the clarinet seemed to melt and mingle with Holliday’s voice and was finally overpowered and drowned by the beating of raindrops on the roof tiles. Farrell’s head buzzed with improvised photographs of swarthy men with ebony hair slicked back in crooner’s cuts. Some wore linen suits. One a diamond pinkie ring. This struck him as so foolish and melodramatic that he waved it off. He rolled over and fell into a troubled sleep.
Three years later, as he shifted in his bed in the motel in Lake Tahoe, he still had trouble clearly distinguishing between the real and the imagined. One thing he did not doubt: hours later he cracked an eyelid, understanding that within the white noise of the rain, the jazz had long since stopped and someone was in the room with him.
A match struck. Near the footboard, the light exploded, then mellowed into a glow that threw shadows across the room as a candle was lit. Maria put her finger to her lips. She seemed to float to him. Farrell tried to shake his head no. She untied the sash that held the rich blue robe to her hips and let the lapels of the garment slip away like the last wave of a high tide receding down a beach.
The bed creaked with her weight. The robe floated through the air, blew out the candle, and enveloped him. Now there was only the heady aroma of her and the feel of her guiding him, hissing to him, “We have no time. He might wake.” And with the thought that Gabriel might burst in on them, Farrell cupped her with his palms, urging her to open, to quicken, and within seconds she whimpered and contracted.
She froze against him, gasping at his neck.
Then she started again, drawing her thighs tight around his hips, supporting herself on his chest. When she sensed that Farrell was about to arch, she whispered: “No, he’ll know there.” She reached around to move him backward to a place he’d never been before.
He shuddered when he understood and bucked too hard. She cried softly and dug her fingernails into his chest muscles.
“Deliciamente,” she whispered.
Farrell let her have control. She lowered her hips, insistent and slow, and almost immediately he groaned into her breasts. How many minutes later the velvet robe slid then disappeared from his body, he couldn’t remember. The door clicked. He was alone, listening to the rain on the roof. He ran his fingers across the welts her fingernails had raised on his chest. He widened his nostrils to trap the fading rumor of her perfume.
Farrell came awake at the sound of a car door slamming in the parking lot outside his motel room. It was first light. He lay there, trying not to think of Maria, or how he’d avoided looking Gabriel in the eye the next morning; or how well he’d lied to Lena when he’d returned to San Diego. He told her the trip had been routine and that he had to take a brief trip south again in a few weeks. But when Lena had reached for him that night, he pushed her away, told her he was exhausted. The truth was that he feared he’d allowed Gabriel to lure him onto a roller coaster, and he had no clue where the next hairpin turn would occur.
Farrell sat up and shivered. He looked at his watch. It was 6 A.M. He did not have to meet Inez and the crew until eight. It was early evening in Europe, time to talk to his attorney. He dressed, went out into the chill morning air, and walked down the street until he found a phone booth.
“An agent has been hired and is in Lyons as we speak,” the attorney said. “You can expect the first report in thirty-six hours. I should alert you, however. There is a problem—inquires on your accounts here.”
Farrell swallowed hard. “From Colorado?”
“No,” the attorney said. “Los Angeles.”
Farrell pressed his forehead against the cold glass. “Official requests?”
“Unclear,” the attorney said. “They’ve come through a large credit bank, so it could be anyone. Of course, we gave them nothi
ng.
The attorney mentioned the name of the bank. Farrell’s throat dried; it was an institution that he’d used with Gabriel several times. The FBI knew about it, too. The attorney said: “If the request is made official through your government’s liaison, it would take several weeks, but eventually we would have to release the information.”
“Is there any way to find out who made the request?” Farrell asked.
“Professional courtesy, perhaps,” the attorney said thoughtfully. “Money perhaps. But this is not an organization with which I’ve done business. I’ll try.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Farrell said.
“We await your instructions, sir.”
Farrell hung the phone in its cradle, stepped outside, and stared at the ice that had formed in yesterday’s puddles. “Someone’s after me.”
Chapter 16
A TRACKER WAS FOLLOWING his footprints in the snow. The attorney’s words tripped him; they snaked their way into his mind until his normally quick thought pattern crawled. He stumbled back across the parking lot to the room. He dressed in his ski clothes in a robotic manner while the possibilities trudged by: that nosy bank manager in Telluride, the FBI, Gabriel. He remembered Inez mysteriously following Page. He played with it for a moment, then dismissed it. How would she know? The odds favored the bank manager. The fat lout was trying to figure out how much money he had. If it wasn’t the manager, and the FBI or Gabriel were involved, the end would come soon.
This fatalistic notion bore down on Farrell an hour later when he came upon the crew gathered on the deck outside the midstation at Squaw Valley. It was one of those spectacular Sierra Nevada days when the sky was tight blue and clean. Farrell didn’t notice. He dwelt on Inez, calling it remarkable that a face so slack the evening before could now be bursting with animation. He watched her and the cloud of doom that had hung pregnant over him since the phone call lifted, replaced by hope for the heated moment, for the gut-wrenching weird, for the luminous, audacious act taken just for the sake of dancing the two-step on the sleeping fury of the mountain. Inez did not disappoint him.
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