“I wonder what you meant by saying every case was a fairy tale,” he said. “You mean it didn’t seem real?”
“Each one felt like a story being told by someone else. It’s a wild feeling one gets. One thing leads to another, but later you can’t remember how it all pieced together.”
“Does it make any sense being here now?”
“None.”
He let his chuckle play out for all it was worth.
* * *
—
Soon he had fallen asleep again. The maid came silently across the lawns with a metal lantern with a candle inside it. She set it down on the stone garden table before us and gathered up the emptied glasses and the extinguished cigars. I asked her if he fell asleep like this every night. She said he was getting ready for death, and that she added a little sedative to his drink every night to ease him into sleep. Almost immediately, moths began to swirl around the lantern and from behind them she looked down at me with a cold indecision. She began to smile. Since her employer was now unconscious I asked her about the policeman’s visit. Oh, she said, she had listened to the whole thing from the kitchen while they were sharing a fino.
The cop had told Quiñones that the quantity of blood at the scene of the abandoned house had aroused their interest, but not yet their solid suspicions. He had wanted to know who I was. “I have no idea,” El Doctor had said.
“So he’s a stranger who your man picked up from Dr. Abrego that night? And he had been found at the hotel in Cuastecomates?”
That was how they had talked.
“The policeman told the doctor to keep you here until he has dug around a bit. They think you are not telling the truth.”
“Is that right?”
I tried to sound as indignant as I could.
“That’s what they said,” she drawled.
“I think I should leave tonight, if I can. I can walk down the track—is it five miles?”
“A little less, but you’ll be able to manage it.” But she looked unsure.
“Is there a village where I can catch a bus tomorrow morning?”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to head down south to San Miguel de Allende.”
“Right at the road, they have buses that go to Ciudad Guzmán.”
It was then two hours before midnight. I said I would come down again from my room at two in the morning. The doctor would be in his nightly coma and she had all the keys to the property. I walked with her back to the house as she pushed the wheelchair ahead of her, and from the fortress came the calls of birds that I hadn’t heard during the day. I asked her what she did with her nights. She drank alone in the magnificent house and played jazz. She was saving up to go home with enough money to buy a shop. It was a plan, at least. It was more than I had. I went upstairs and dressed in my own clothes for the first time since arriving there, then waited for the appointed hour.
She came up to the room before that with my money and the cane from the safe, true to her word. In the kitchen she made me coffee and a sandwich for the road.
“What will you tell the doctor?”
“I’ll say you disappeared without a trace while I was sleeping.”
* * *
—
At two she took me up to the gate, unlocked it, and saw me out onto the rocky dirt road. I had nothing with me except money and the cane. I didn’t know what to say to her: it was a kindness that an old man wouldn’t forget. As I picked my way down the road, she stood at the gate watching me until I passed out of sight. It must have given her some kind of small satisfaction. Left alone with no bag, but without a shred of anxiety about it, I walked through the remainder of the night in a cool air, the yucca on the hills around me forming what looked like a vast nave of votive flowers. The sky was suddenly dramatized by a nervous, uncertain moonlight, by which the shapes of things became more and more unknown, and by its light I found the little road that led to the neighboring village.
EIGHTEEN
It was a dusty farm town with tractors parked in the alleys and jacaranda trees serving as shelters for donkeys. The trees lent the animals a pale-lavender tint as light returned to the world, and I found the bus stop with benches where a few old ladies were already gathered. I asked about the bus to Ciudad Guzmán. It would come at seven. I sat on one of the benches and emptied a coconut I had bought at a store on the square, then wondered how much the maid would lie for me when El Doctor woke up and demanded to know where I was. But the bus came at seven with no incident. I sat at the back and no one shot a glance at me and my exotic sling. I asked the driver if I could change in Guzmán for another bus to San Miguel. Claro que si.
The mood on the bus was jovial. Before we left, a small boy came down the aisles and placed a paper image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on each passenger’s knee. A protection against traffic accidents.
All morning I slept again.
When I was jolted awake, we were sailing like children on a school trip through apricot groves and hills of maize and villages filled with closed hotels and cantinas where the televisions were never turned off.
The road went through valleys of cactus, upon whose heads hundreds of crows sat as if waiting for their morning sun. It ran through a quiet valley of golden prickly poppies. On either side stood ocher churches with skulls and crossbones cemented into their façades. The milpas bursting with fresh corn, rising toward crests of rock. The dogs stirred as the bus swept past them, opening their jaws for a moment. As the agave farms petered out, the fields were charred, smoking, men beating the fires as they labored across them.
The road curved in places with operatic courage through slopes of flor de izote and shaving brush trees. The flower heads shone for miles in a high and mighty sun, entire hillsides covered with the miracle.
At Guzmán I went for lunch near the bus station. The heat had returned a little. How good it was to disappear again into a crowd, to drink beer with tortas. The bus for San Miguel left in the middle of the afternoon.
At a hotel in San Miguel I asked the front desk to call me a cab to Atotonilco, which was about six miles to the north; for the next half hour I basked in the sun in the hotel courtyard and healed. The wound was beginning to close.
* * *
—
The taxi driver parked up in the main square in Atotonilco. The little village was known for its church built shortly after the Spanish conquest, with its high, corroded wooden doors flung open and covered with monochrome frescoes. I went over to a tiendita and asked a woman if she had seen a Señor Aguayo that morning.
She knew him because everyone did. There were little more than six streets in Atotonilco, all of them around the church, and he lived on one of them. It had long red walls and dry, whispering trees. The gates were locked and the house beyond them couldn’t be seen beyond the walls. I rang the bell.
When no one came, I rang again.
Before long a maid opened the gate and peered out. I asked where Jesús was.
“He’s down at the grutas taking a hot swim.”
Behind her I saw a low villa with yellow walls and a chained dog panting in the shade.
“A hot swim?”
“It’s a hot spring out on the road. You can walk there.”
He went there every morning for his rheumatism.
“Are you a friend?” she asked.
I went back to the tiendita and asked about the hot spring. It was a half-hour walk on the road, but there was also a shortcut through the woods.
I told the driver to wait in the square and set off.
At first the path cut through fields of wild trees and high weeds, through ruined fragments of houses. On the far side of the woods there was indeed a hot-spring outdoor spa of some kind with steaming pools and what looked like a small hotel. It was deserted. The pools ran into man-made
caves where the steam collected, and out in the sunlight there was a deck chair with clothes folded on its back. When I appeared, a boy came out of the trees and asked me if I’d like a day pass for the hot springs and a bathing suit. I got a suit and changed in the open. The horror of the body unseen. The boy brought me an ice water and I went down into the burning water and waded across the pool, keeping my sling raised and dry, toward the grotto.
The caves were built with loose rocks and vaulted high. The water was chest deep and the whole labyrinth was filled with an ultramarine light. I came to a darkened chamber where the steam was intense, and here I found a man of about forty sitting peacefully by himself with a washcloth over his face.
When he sensed my presence he removed the washcloth and sank down and looked over at the stranger.
I stayed by the opposite wall and we stewed for a few minutes. No sound came from the outside world and no new guests had arrived at the spa. It was the moment to ask him if he was Jesús Aguayo.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m a friend of the Linders.”
“Ah, I see.”
He asked me how I knew them.
It was a spiel I had down pat by now. I said I’d heard they’d retired in Mexico and had a house somewhere in the vicinity.
“Sure they do.”
“They told me they had a friend here. They gave your name. I went calling on you in Atotonilco and your maid said you were here. So I’m here, too.”
“I see.”
But his eyes panicked for a moment.
“What happened to your arm?”
“Arthritis. It feels better in a sling.”
“Maybe we should go and talk about this outside?”
“Maybe we should talk about it here. It’s cozy and I like the steam.”
It was jolting the way we smiled at the same time.
“I don’t really know the Linders,” he went on. “They’re friends of friends. I do favors for them when they ask.”
“I’d like to know what it is you do for them. Or if you like we can go down to the police station in San Miguel and you can tell them there. I’ll tell them there’s a white Grand Am parked at your house and it might not matter to them, but then again it might. I’m sure you’ve been busy with other jobs.”
“I have nothing against going down there. But why should I? And, again, who are you?”
“Well, let’s just say I lost my car and I’m annoyed about it. Whoever stole it owes me compensation. Rather than involving you, I thought I’d ask Mr. Linder himself. I thought you could take me to his house if I made a donation to you and also forgot about going to the delegación. It could be a very simple arrangement, and Mr. Linder would never know it was you. You could just leave me in the road nearby.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Yes, I know I have a funny way of speaking. But actually I’m a really unpleasant person. I don’t have any sense of humor at all.”
He swore in the Mexican way: la chingada.
I suggested he go back to the house, take his car, and return there to pick me up. From here he could drive me to wherever they lived. Where was it, since we had come to the matter?
“I think I should call them first and see what they say.”
“You could do that,” I said. “Or you could just let it be a surprise. They won’t know how I found them.”
With their haul from Pacific Mutual, they had found a compound in the hills above Guanajuato, according to him. From there they drove down to the coast for parties and social occasions, and as it was slightly off the beaten track for wealthy Americans they enjoyed more discretion.
“But I’m not taking you there,” he insisted.
He said he would call Mrs. Linder and ask her what she wanted to do.
“I’d rather you didn’t. If you’re scared of them just give me the address and I’ll go there on my own.”
“Scared?”
Wounded pride flared up and his eyes enlarged to the point of explosion.
“I am scared of no man!”
“Just give me the address and we’re quits. I like that you’re not scared of a measly little gringo drifter.”
“In that case,” he said, suddenly placated, “we can just go outside and have a drink. I will write down the address for you. It’s fortunate that we are in such a lonely place.”
“It’s fortunate I don’t have to call the police.”
“Ah, you wouldn’t call them.”
His moods were as quick as those of an English sky.
Outside, we sat on the deck chairs and the waiter brought us lemonades. It was a cheerful resort of some kind, but fallen on hard times or else it had never known good ones. My correspondent was now more at his ease, sure as he was that I would go away and leave him in peace, and he wrote down the address on a postcard that the waiter brought him. To think that I had come all that way to get an address scribbled on a piece of paper. I asked him about the man who had brought the car back to Atotonilco, the man who liked to play with tops, but he had never heard of such a person.
“I do errands for rich people,” he said with an uncrooked smile. “I’m just someone who does them small favors. I’m nobody.”
He added that he had never met the Linders.
“El Linder,” he concluded, “es una fantasma.”
I glanced down at the card and saw an address on a road not far from the remote church of Mineral del Cedro and a settlement called Calderones. So it was another wild-goose chase to a small pueblo or a shaded lane in the middle of nowhere. Another lark for an old man with fading legs. For a moment I wondered if it was worth the time. But then I couldn’t stand the idea that the little greasy con man had gotten the better of me and that I couldn’t keep up with his cat-and-mouse games. I wanted to see the fantasma’s eye light up with a moment of horror, just once. And aside from that, I have a curious dislike for people who try to cripple me, although I often understand their emotions and even more their motives. Motives make more sense than emotions.
NINETEEN
By two that day I was in Guanajuato in a cheap hotel, tall and narrow, on a street called Cantarranas, the singing frogs. I got a room on the very top floor, so high that the city itself seemed far below me, a city unlike anything I knew: a place shoehorned into a narrow ravine. Its lights and white houses made me think of Bethlehem in long-ago books. At sundown I went down into the streets and had dinner. Through the squares and alleys, students in black capes and masks went in bands strumming mandolins, serenading opportunistically, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the Linders having their weekend dinners here.
It was past nine by the time I hailed a taxi and asked him to take me out to the address on the slip of paper. He didn’t know it, but he said he would find it without fail and that was good enough for me. It was only a mile out of town, into the mining hills that had once made Madrid the silver capital of Europe. Roads winding into the darkness where the houses of the wealthy stood in isolate grandeur.
The taxi left me at the foot of a sweeping drive flanked with cypresses. He asked me how long I’d be staying and if he should wait. I said he could park for an hour or two out of sight, if he didn’t mind; the pay would be good.
I went up the drive. Halfway to a low but capacious hacienda-style villa I heard chatter, music, the terrible noise of merriment and party making. This was not what I had expected. It was too shabby to intrude on a party without a change of clothes. With my bandaged arm, I looked already like a man waiting for the hospital ward from which he wouldn’t be leaving. But on the drive itself servants suddenly appeared with welcoming torches and little silk masks with elastic bands. It was a masked affair and the disguises were given out to all arrivals. Just as they saw me, another car drew up at the end of the drive and a party of four got out and followed me toward the h
ouse. I decided to tag along with them. They were Americans, two elderly couples in ghastly finery. I have a way of getting on with the ghosts of the past. Did they know Paul and Dolores? Why no, they’d never met them. They’d been invited by mutual friends in San Miguel. The American club in the Central Highlands was wealthy and large. Every year new members appeared, retirees anxious to start a new life, and they were buying all the lovely haciendas in the hills. The Reagan years had been good to them. I introduced myself as Barry Waldstein and we came to a grand columned porch with the masks fixed to our sweating faces. They were Aztec themed, gods and goddesses we didn’t know but that made us look like psychotics in the context of butlers holding out flutes.
A house in the hills, servants and tapestries: so this was what the ambitious fantasma had managed to procure with his haul. It was as impressive as it was baffling. Its proprietor had been running around on buses just to shake off an old hand like me, while all the time he could have hidden out here and I would not have found him easily. I suddenly realized, then, that I was the only threat to his wonderful new life. Maybe no one else there knew how his chandeliers had been paid for. He was a man on the run; but you’d never know it on that Friday night.
The party spilled out into a magnificent Spanish garden with a tile fountain and more cypress trees, where bars were set up next to a buffet of silver tureens. The crowd was large enough that I could blend in and disappear. I felt the pulse of drugs making their way around the rooms, the quiet drugs of the respectable and the rich that are discreetly laid over the usual cocktails and shots of liquor—and indeed there were two tables devoted solely to mescal and tequila served in artful forms, Italian shot glasses and saucers of pink salt. The men were going at it, roaring with satisfaction and swaying slightly as their nerves began to lose control. Soon a jazz band started up and cocaine appeared nonchalantly on the tables in the remoter rooms inside, spread out over eighteenth-century tables and sucked up by teenagers and fossils alike.
Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 14