by Jim Butcher
“About Guillermo? I don’t know much except that he’s the biggest New York Yankees fan in Mexico. And I’m not even sure that’s unusual.”
“Baseball?”
“Yup. Baseball is big in Mexico City. A few years ago he had season tickets and flew up to watch the games—I swear that’s why he took his international courses at Columbia; so he could go to Yankees games—he even tried to take Nan out to one, but she’s not a sports fan. Don’t get him started on any conversation about baseball or you’ll miss your plane.”
I said my good-byes and started thinking while I waited for Banda. It was after one o’clock already. I’d have to get lunch at the airport and see what I could do by phone. I’d miss the open hours in person today at whatever government office might have the burial records and I’d only have Friday to do records searches before the holiday weekend hit—if they didn’t close early or not open at all. I’d have to get to that office first thing on the thirtieth if I was going to stand much chance of finding the right grave. I only hoped that whatever I could turn up about Hector Purecete in that time would help me get information from Maria-Luz Arbildo. If she showed up at his grave. Definitely no time for “Who’s on First” discussions with Guillermo Banda that afternoon—I hoped he didn’t look as much like Lou Costello as he sounded or I might lose it.
Fish called me before I could get anything done with directory assistance, saying there was not much to report on the scrapings he’d taken from the clay dog, except that the black paint was colored with crushed charcoal and volcanic sand, with just a touch of human blood. Not your average pottery glaze. No sign of dread diseases or drug residue. No unusual clay substrate, just plain terra-cotta. I mentioned that the dog had broken and dropped the bundle of hair out.
“So it is hair?” he asked.
“It looks like it. My Spanish is lousy, but I heard the inspector call it pelo—which I recognize from my shampoo bottle as the Spanish word for ‘hair,’ ” I replied, gazing into the plastic bag of shards. “Five or six strands here, dark brown and black, with a red thread holding them together.”
“Two different kinds of hair?”
“Two different colors, but they have the same look and texture.”
“Interesting. I wonder if the DNA matches the blood in the paint. . . . I’d love to take a look at it when you get back—if you’re game.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring it back. It might have to stay here,” I added, glancing down again at the phantom hound. Once the knot of hair had come free, so had the dog, and I wasn’t sure if it was the hair or the sculpture that had held the spirit in the clay shell, but I wanted to know more before I let any of the parts out of my hands.
The ghost dog leaned against me and seemed to doze. I envied it; the beer had made me feel more tired than ever. Resigned, I stuffed the bag of pottery bits into my purse and went back to fruitless phone calls for the next hour. Outside of Mexico City directory assistance, most of the people I talked to had no better English than I had Spanish—and my Spanish was embarrassingly poor. The dog stirred and I could feel its low growl as it pressed against my leg.
A man of medium height with short black hair stopped beside me and looked me over as I tried to make myself clear—without much success—to a clerk in a provincial office somewhere in Oaxaca. The man carried a leather briefcase. He wore a gray suit, had a bland, oval face made interesting only by a boxer’s crooked nose and basset-hound eyes. He smelled of laundry starch. The aura around him jittered and jumped in flickers of vibrant orange and blue as his eyes moved over everything, evaluating, cataloging. . . . He seemed to have a hot-sauce stain on his tie, but it could have been part of the pattern.
His eyes flicked down toward my feet and he blinked, but I wasn’t sure if he saw the ghost dog or if he just didn’t like my boots. He turned his restless gaze back to me, waited until I hung up in frustration, and said, “You gotta be Harper Blaine.”
He didn’t look at all like Lou Costello, not even a Hispanic version. He didn’t look like an international law practitioner with an advanced degree from Columbia, either. He looked like a guy who worked in an office eight to five, like an insurance adjuster or a midlevel manager in a very expensive suit.
“You must be Guillermo Banda,” I replied.
“Willy. You can call me Willy.” He hoisted himself onto the bar stool next to mine, keeping his feet away, as if I might kick him without warning.
Considering my ex-boyfriend was named Will, that particular first name didn’t sound like a good idea. “I’d rather not,” I said and wondered if he could see the ghost dog—he seemed a little wound up.
He shrugged. “I’m sorry if I offended you, Miss Blaine.” He put the briefcase on the bar and snapped it open. It held a single manila folder and a business-size envelope. Banda picked up the folder. “These are the last three versions of Miss Arbildo’s will. I don’t have to show them to you, but since a will in probate is a public record here, just as it is in the U.S., you could get most of this information by searching the district probate records—”
I cut him off. “Mr. Banda, I’m not offended with you and I’m not trying to put your back up. I’m just at a loss to understand this. I don’t know why I was named in your client’s will—I’ve never met her or heard of her. I just want to understand what I’m doing. I don’t want to be stuck with some creepy mystery for the rest of my life.” I did not look at the dog, but I could feel it still rumbling and pressing to me. “The conditions say I’m to put the dog on the grave intact. What am I supposed to do, now that the statue is broken?”
He put the folder down in the case and picked up the envelope, offering it to me. “That’s easy. You take the money and run. I’m sure Miss Arbildo won’t even know. She inherited a truckload. Thirty thousand U.S. is a drop in the bucket.”
I was sure she would mind. Very much. I shook my head and didn’t touch the envelope. “I can’t do that. Maybe if I knew why she wanted the dog put on Purecete’s grave, I could agree, but I don’t. What is with the dog?”
Banda laughed—a tired laugh but genuinely amused. “It’s a tradition. A really old one. You don’t see it around here much anymore—up in the mountains around Michoacan and Yunuen, maybe in Oaxaca, but even there it’s dying out. It’s from the Aztecs. They used to sacrifice a dog and burn the body on the funeral pyres because they believed the dog could lead the spirit of the dead to Mictlan. Now we just use a statue.
“See, the Mexican Land of the Dead is kind of like Dante’s geography of Hell—it’s got rings, only nicer. In the middle is Mictlan—where the dead live just like we do and from which they can someday be reborn. But it’s a long way for a soul to go and there’s a river you have to cross as well, so you need a guide: the dog, because tradition says dogs can always find the way home. Every year, the dead come back to visit us during el Día de los Muertos. The really traditional people put a statue of a dog on the ofrenda—the offerings on the family altar—so their dead relatives don’t get lost coming and going.”
“OK, I get the dog, but why me? Why would your client want a perfect stranger from two thousand miles away to take the dog to Purecete’s grave?”
Banda shrugged again and dropped the envelope back into the briefcase, glancing down. “I don’t know. Before you ask, I don’t know who Purecete was or what his connection was to Miss Arbildo, either. You want to see the will for yourself?” he asked, looking back up at me.
I nodded. He pulled a draft copy of the will from the folder and handed the long pages to me. He pointed as he talked.
“See how she left her money to all these charities? That was pretty much unchanged from the first version I ever saw—one Jimenez, my partner, drew up for her. You can tell she was kind of an oddball when you look at the list.” He pulled out another version of the document. “In an earlier draft of this will, she’d designated Jimenez’s grave as the recipient of the dog, as you can see. She did it right after he died and she was
very upset with him. Then she changed her mind—out of the blue—and named Purecete. Just a few months ago, she marched into the office and she handed me this.”
He fished a creased scrap of paper out of the file. It was the hard white of a cheap notepad, torn along one side to make a ragged square from a longer piece of paper. The handwriting was similar to the signature on the will, but more crabbed and wandering:
Harper Blaine
Seattle Wash USA
The letters were cramped up against the left edge, but became more expansive and arched as they moved to the right, as if she hadn’t thought she’d have enough space when she started and tried to stretch the words out to fill the page as she finished each line. It looked odd.
“She just held it out to me and said ‘this is the one’ and I knew better than to argue with Maria-Luz. So I wrote you in.” He offered me the collection of drafts. “Take a look, you can see she had pretty definite—if crazy—ideas about her money. The woman was kind of loopy.”
I glanced at the will again, making mental notes of the recipients of her bequests. They were mostly church charities for the unfortunate, the homeless, the poor, the dispossessed. There were a few odd animal charities as well, such as support for retired racing greyhounds, a rabbit shelter, llama farms, and care for retired circus elephants. None of them had conditions. And there were no individuals named other than me and Purecete.
“Didn’t she have any family, or friends . . . employees even?” I asked.
Banda laughed and pretended he was coughing. “Miss Arbildo? No. She was the last of a literally dying breed—the Arbildo family died with her. And as I said, she was pretty strange and she wandered around a lot, didn’t settle down much after a certain age, didn’t make a lot of friends. She was kind of fond of Jimenez once—like I said, she put him in the will at one point—but about the time he died she was furious with him. She stormed into the office screaming about it: ‘Why did he do it? Why, why?’ I almost thought that she would have dragged him back out of his grave and killed him if she could.”
“What was she so mad about?”
“Well . . . his dying on her. She worked Jimenez pretty hard—he used to say if he died suddenly it would be her fault. His death shook her up. She was irrational. You know how some people get mad instead of grieving. . . .”
I nodded; I was familiar with that phenomenon. Arbildo sounded like a difficult client, and I could understand not wanting to argue with—or console—one like her. But there was something incredibly strange about both the wills and Banda himself. I just couldn’t pin down what was bugging me. . . .
As I pondered the problem, under cover of checking the wills, the ghostly dog at my feet began whimpering and moving restively, then it got up and walked a few feet away from the bar, toward a column of thick mist that was forming in the Grey between the bar and the doorway. I adjusted my position on the bar stool so I could watch the dog and still seem to be reading the documents. The dog stopped near the smoky mass, then looked back at me with that pleading look dogs have. It looked at the ill-defined shape, whimpered, then glanced back to me.
The form that interested the dog was vaguely human in size and shape, but it had no features. There was no face, and after a few moments the dog turned and trotted back to me, whimpering and scratching at my legs with its cold, incorporeal paws. The specter drifted out the door. I didn’t know what it was or where it was going, but the dog seemed to be urging me to follow it—or at least humor the dog’s desire to do so. Banda would still be in Mexico City in a day or an hour, but whatever the ghost dog was after might not last another five minutes.
I wanted to ask him more about Arbildo, but I excused myself from Banda and said I’d be right back. Let him assume I needed the washroom, if he liked. I stood up and the dog darted out of the bar and into the main concourse. I hoped my luggage would be all right with the lawyer for the time it would take to chase the dog.
And it was fine, since the dog only got a few feet farther into the concourse before the shape seemed to fall apart and drift into the clutter of thousands of passengers’ energy coronas moving through the silvery space of the air terminal. A few shapes had no living person within them, but most of those were simple repeating ghosts or fogs of happenstance and emotion left over from some altogether human interaction. The shadowy dog trotted back to me and pushed against my legs again.
Banda was looking impatiently at his watch when I returned to the bar.
“I can’t stay longer. Have some clients to meet in twenty minutes and the traffic is getting bad. I have to go.” He took a card from his inner jacket pocket and offered it to me. “If you have any more questions, call me. My cell phone number is on here. Good luck, Miss Blaine,” he added, picking up his briefcase and heading for the door.
“Hey,” I called. “Aren’t there any other documents? And what am I supposed to do about the dog?”
“Any other documents in Miss Arbildo’s file are none of your business, Miss Blaine. As to the dog, the check is right here—you could just turn right around with it in your hand and call this thing done, as far as I’m concerned. But if you feel you have to, take the broken bits up to Oaxaca and leave ’em. Stick ’em back together with superglue if you want.”
“What about the grave? Where is it?”
“Damned if I know,” he called back. “Pick one!”
He waved and ducked out before I could ask him anything more. It appeared that Guillermo Banda just wanted shut of Marie-Luz Arbildo and her nutty will and I was as convenient a way as any. I followed him a few paces out the door, saw him duck past the customs area, waving to the guards on the other side as he went past—old friends? Something odd was going on with Banda, but I wasn’t entirely sure what. I did pause to wonder if the breaking of the dog was entirely an accident. . . . I shook off that thought and went back to my seat, the Grey dog scampering along in my wake.
I ordered some food and ate in a hurry before heading to the Mexicana Airlines desk to pick up my new boarding passes and check my luggage for the flight to Oaxaca. The phantom dog stuck to my side the whole time, casting glances around the room and sniffing for signs—of what I didn’t know.
For just a moment as I boarded the little prop plane I wondered what to do with the dog before I remembered that no one but me would even be aware of it. It huddled under my feet the whole hour we were in the air and again on the ride from the airport, which reminded me of the regional airports I’d grown up near in Los Angeles County with their pushcart stairs and wind-blown tarmac. A white van was standing at the curb outside, offering rides to downtown Oaxaca City, and the ghost dog and I shared the vehicle with a family of six and two couples who all seemed excited beyond my ability.
The van driver dropped each group off, leaving me at a tall, Spanish colonial building on the edge of the downtown core. As far as I could tell, the whole area was late Spanish colonial, though at that elevation, darkness had already fallen and it was hard to see details beyond the streetlamps. The road was layered thickly with silvery ghosts and loops of memory, playing like old movies in a two-dollar theater. I saw a discreet sign on the buttercupcolored plaster wall that indicated the carved wooden door before me led to my guesthouse. I pulled the bell handle as instructed and was greeted with a flood of light and the odors of spicy cooking as the door was opened wide.
“Soy Harper Blaine—” I started.
“Oh! Miss Blaine! Sí! Come in! You were bumped to a later flight?” the dark-haired woman in the doorway asked, snatching my bag indoors with one hand as she waved me in with the other. “We have dinner for you if you like it.”
She turned her head and called for “Miguelito!” who proved to be a teenager as tall as a professional basketball player and as dramatically emo as a Cure album cover. “You are in manos de leon,” she continued to me while pointing at my suitcase without shifting her gaze from my face. “My nephew will take your bag. You can wash and come back down to the sala for some f
ood.”
I was almost dizzy with exhaustion by then, but I know better than to argue with whirlwind women. I followed “little Miguel” up the tiled stairs and around an open gallery to a door with a painting of a magenta coxcomb flower on it. Miguelito unlocked the door for me and put the suitcase just inside before handing me my key and slouching off with an insouciant nod.
I glanced down over the railing before I went into the room. In the courtyard below I could see people gathered around a ceramic firepit that gleamed with heat, serving themselves from a nearby table laden with food. The cool mountain air settled gently from above through the open center of the building’s roof, drifting down to meet the swirl of sparks and heat that rose from the gathering below.
I was so tired I didn’t make it back down that night. I woke up in the morning on October thirtieth with one boot on and one off and the ghost dog running in and out through the closed door, whining. Someone was tapping on my door. Groggily, I stumbled to it and opened up.
Miguel-the-not-so-small was slouching there—clad in black jeans, black T-shirt, and black boots with his naturally dark hair hanging over his eyes—probably hoping I hadn’t heard his timid tapping and he could lope off to whatever he’d rather do than wait on me. The energy around him was a dun-colored cloud shot with red lightning bolts of annoyance—or something short-tempered and pissy—while thin gold lines trailed off his fingertips in a way I’d never seen before. In the face of his determined gloom, I smiled at him with perverse malice, in spite of being still half asleep.
“Buenos días, Miguel!” I chirped—fairy-tale princesses had nothing on me for chipper.
“Yeah, yeah . . . good morning to you, too.” His accent was still pretty strong, but his English was clear. And abrasive. I could almost see the expletive deleted from that sentence still hanging in the air in all its F-bomb glory. “Tía Mercedes said I’m supposed to show you around the city ’cause you have some kind of business thing. . . .”