Angels in Heaven (Vic Daniel Series)

by David Pierce

  "If I could walk that way, I'd save a fortune on talcum powder," Doris said. Sometimes the kid surprised me.

  We followed him into the steam part of the steam baths, a small room that was off the front room and also tiled, and also with two wooden benches. Benny turned the handle on the bottom of the steam pipe and an awful lot of very hot steam is what we were immediately in the midst of, trying to breathe. And after a few minutes of steam came the dream—a gorgeous pool next door, done in three levels, into which fresh greeny-blue water was gushing.

  Every inch of the room and the pool was covered with decorative tiles—birds, flowers, greenery, butterflies—it was mind-boggling. I tried not to think of poor Billy and his once-a-week cold shower.

  "Just one thing, Sara," I said sternly, gingerly testing the water with one big toe. "And I mean this sincerely—no splashing."

  "Of course not," she scoffed. "What do you think I am, a kid?"

  How long do you think it took from the time I finished enunciating the word splashing for the first freezing tidal wave, sent my way courtesy of the queen of the twerps, to drench me and my towel completely? Well, the speed of H2O may not be quite as rapid as the speed of light, but it isn't far behind either.

  So we larked about and drank our drinks, which had mysteriously appeared on a tray inside the front door, and got steamed up again and then cold again, and a good time was had by all.

  Afterward, much refreshed, we took our customary coffees at the café in front of our hotel, positively glowing with good health and clean pores. Then I let Benny beat me in two games of chess up in his room, played on his midget magnetic traveling set; then I let Montezuma take his excruciating revenge one more time; then Mrs. Daniel's little boy went bye-byes. I hated that stupid pathetic set of Benny's, it was so small that even with glasses on, you could hardly tell which men were which. I was just about to invent the world's most innovative chess move since the Queen's Gambit when the sandman took me far, far away.

  The following morning, not too early as mornings can go sometimes, like on farms, in hospitals, and in prisons, we had our breakfast coffees in the hotel dining room for a change, dawdled around a bit, did a bit of shopping and this and that, and almost went for a ride on one of the brightly painted horse-drawn hansom cabs that cruise the avenues looking for unwary tourists, and then we all dropped by the office to say buenos días to the portero, drop off the hammocks, return his toolbox, and at least try to look like a going concern. I checked out the phones and the intercom; they all worked. Doris checked out the toilet down the hall and reported it worked.

  At noon Benny took himself off in the car on his errand. I gave Doris one of the postcards I'd purchased earlier, and told her to be a good girl and drop a line to her folks and I would be a good boy and write my mom. Doris obliged, but with a somewhat faraway look on her face. She put her pen down abruptly.

  "What's the plural of metamorphosis?" she said.

  "I don't even know what the singular is," I said. " 'So, Mom, having wonderful time, wish you were her—"

  "Isn't this office in one of its metamorphosisms supposed to look like the Cultural Ass.?"

  "Obviously," I said patiently.

  "Well, it doesn't," she said.

  "How would you know?" I said, looking around. "It looks OK to me."

  "Because I poked my head in the one downstairs when I was going to the bathroom," she said.

  "Oh," I said.

  "I mean, I figured it made sense," she said. "What's the sense of calling yourself a Cultural Ass. if you don't look like one?"

  "There's so many answers to that," I said, "that I won't even begin to start. Also, it so happens," I said, picking up my desk diary and waving it at her, "it so happens that there is an entry in this diary for ten minutes from now and that entry says—I quote—'Check out C. A. noonish.' " I put the diary in my top desk drawer and locked the drawer just in case Doris was petty enough to disbelieve me and tried to take a look before I had time to write the entry in.

  "You big fibber," she said.

  "So what did you say when you poked your head in?" I asked her. "I hope you didn't ruin our whole setup by saying, 'Hello, we're the fake Cultural Ass. on the top floor. How're ya doin' down here?"

  She grimaced in pretended agony.

  " 'We'll see you in a jiff' is what I said," she said.

  "Well, what's keeping us?" I said. We locked up and took the elevator down one flight. I had to admit it did make sense to drop by our neighbor and rival, not only for Doris's reason, which was good enough on its own, but also to make ourselves known so they wouldn't call the cops if they saw us prowling around. On the way down I put on my specs to make myself look even more cultural than usual.

  They didn't seem to be up to all that much downstairs, frankly. They weren't even a "they"; they were one middle-aged American lady with a face suntanned to the exact orangy-brown color of an NBA basketball, dressed in all-Mexican finery including leather sandals and embroidered peasant blouse and sitting behind a desk whose top was cluttered with travel brochures, rolled-up posters, piles of hand-printed handouts for local events, and the like. She introduced herself as Ethel Sayers and pronounced herself delighted to see us and wasn't the weather wonderful again! I said it was and introduced ourselves as Mr. Blackman and Miss Day and pronounced us the new upstairs tenants. Ethel was thrilled to have fellow Americans in the building. And wasn't she looking forward to getting to know us real well! The permanent foreign community in Mérida was quite small, actually, and it was always delighted to wheel out the welcome wagon for additions to its little group.

  Doris and I smiled and tried to look like welcome additions, despite the odds against. After responding politely and mainly untruthfully to a spate of questions—such as, did we play bridge? were we interested in Scottish dancing? were we perchance amateur painters or pottery throwers or aficionados of the Mexican style of horseback riding? and so on—we finally managed to take our leave, clutching in our fevered palms stacks of leaflets outlining the activities of the association and how it came to be set up in the first place, along with assorted posters advertising upcoming art events in Mérida, which we promised to display chez nous prominently.

  As to the origins of the U.S. Cultural Ass. (cutting a long story down to almost nothing compared to the original), some fifteen years ago the doyenne of the southern Yucatán foreign community, one Martha M. Moberg (of the well-known Austin, Texas, Mobergs) had died and left a small trust fund to promote American cultural activities in Mérida and environs—exhibitions of expatriate art, pottery, sculpture, weaving, jewelry, batiks and God knows what else, recitals, poetry readings, and the screening of American film classics (every second Friday).

  "What are you doing a week from Friday?" I asked Doris as we waited outside in the hall for the elevator. "I see they're going to screen that famous American film classic The Nutty Professor, with sandwiches afterward."

  "Spare me," Doris muttered.

  We delivered our goodies upstairs to our office and scattered some of them on Doris's desk and pinned up a few more on the walls of Doris's office, but none in the inner office. I was thinking of telling her that it did make the place look a lot more cultural, all right, but it was so obvious that there wasn't any point in saying anything.

  A while later we closed up shop. I went back to the hotel to wait impatiently for Benny to get back, and Doris went to sit by the pool and bring her diary up to date and maybe scribble off a mash note to Willing Boy.

  I was in the bathroom checking to see how my tan was coming along when Benny knocked on my hotel room door; that would have been about two o'clock. I let him in, sat down on one of the twin beds, folded my arms, closed my eyes like Nero Wolfe, and said, like the great man himself, "Report please, Archie."

  He reported.

  "Satisfactory," I said when he had finished. "How much?"

  He told me.

  I winced down to my anklets but said, "Satisfactory," again.
"You all packed?"

  "Yep."

  I checked my watch. "Then let us do it, amigo. The tickets should be waiting for us at the airport. I stopped at the travel agency in the lobby and the guy phoned for me. Oh, I also booked you and Doris on a boat trip up Piranha River in a leaky pirogue to watch crocodiles mate."

  I knocked on Doris's door and collected her. To give her credit, she, like me, had only a small overnight bag as luggage, which made sense, as we planned to be away only overnight, but making sense about luggage is, alas, not always a woman's strong point. Me, I could go halfway around the globe with a mere couple of steamer trunks and the odd matched set of hand luggage. And enough mad money for emergencies tucked down inside my jockey shorts to make me look like I was auditioning for l'Après-midi d'un faune.

  We picked up Benny downstairs, where he was unsuccessfully trying to impress the beautiful señorita at the front desk with his fluent Spanish, then piled into the first cab in line in front of the hotel. Benny settled on a price with the driver, and off we went back to the airport.

  Shortly thereafter we were thousands of feet up in the air again, with nothing but some obscure and highly unlikely law of aerodynamics holding us up there. Two beers and a pack of stale, peppery peanuts later, and we were beginning our approach into Cancún airport. The landing strip was surrounded by lush, green, dank tropical jungle that was teeming—you could tell that just by looking at it—although what precisely it was teeming with I neither knew nor particularly wanted to.

  As soon as we emerged from the airport building, Benny snagged us one of a row of new Volkswagen minibuses that seemed to have the airport monopoly, and for eleven dollars U.S. each, the bandit driving it agreed to conduct us just north of Cancún to Puerto Juarez, where the passenger ferry to Isla Mujeres departed. Our route took us directly through Cancún, so we never saw the resort area on Cancún Island, which the Mexican government had bought or expropriated back in the sixties and then proceeded to fill with rows of hotels and condominiums and villas and time-sharing developments and marimba players and drinks served in hollowed-out pineapples.

  On the way into town we first passed a long row of billboards advertising things like local realtors and local booze; then we hung a left and drove down Cancún's main drag, which looked like Main Street anywhere you find a lot of Americans on holiday; then we passed through one of the native barrios, which looked liked anywhere a lot of poor Mexicans live who are not on holiday.

  We arrived at the Puerto just in time to catch the five-thirty sailing of the Cancún–Isla Mujeres ferryboat. As Isla Mujeres means "Island of Women," I was quite looking forward to the sea voyage (especially the end of it), which took place on a most picturesque, rickety, noisy old wooden two-decker ferry, newly painted in blue and white with red trim. The crossing took some forty-five pleasant minutes, during some of which I amusingly pretended to be getting seasick, as it was getting a little rough out there, and during some more of which Benny told us what few snippets, as he modestly put it, he had been able to pick up about our destination, though, as usual, the snippets turned out to be a lot more than snippets, at least as I understand the word. I do not know where Benny got all his information; the only books I ever saw him read were biographies or autobiographies of famous bank robbers, con men, horse breeders, light-fingered Harrys, great train robbers, and other members of that murky underworld fraternity like Republicans, aluminum door salesmen, and animal psychologists. I did once see in his apartment a copy of the maestro Capablanca's slim treatise on chess opening moves, but I figured that he'd just left it lying around to try to frighten me.

  About five miles long and a mile wide, Benny informed us, the island did unfortunately not get its name because it was crammed with tropical beauties with lustrous black hair and wearing nothing above the waist but a hibiscus behind one ear; it got its name because the Spaniard who first landed there circa 1500 spotted large statues of Mayan goddesses on the coastal headlands. Now not even their ruins remain.

  The island was nice and laid back and funky and cheap not so long ago, he said, as the playful evening breeze toyed with my curls and the captain cut back the engine for our docking, but after we'd landed and were strolling through the main business section toward the Hotel Rocamar, where Benny usually stayed, it became apparent that the isla was moving upmarket and fast. The cobblestoned streets were lined with schlock shops and souvenir shops and T-shirt emporiums and boutiques, and there was even a pizzeria with a small veranda outside, where Doris and I gratefully and thirstily plumped ourselves while Benny disappeared inside to have a word with the management.

  What he wanted a word about was Big Jeff. When, on the high seas, I'd voiced my fears about what we would do if Big Jeff wasn't on the island but still up north playing Ahab with the great white cod, Benny'd told me not to worry. Big Jeff was almost certainly around because the last time Benny'd seen him he'd just bought a half interest in the island's one pizzeria (in front of which me and Doris were sitting waiting for a garçon), and he'd also bought a house down near Garrafón, in the southern part of the island, where the coral reef and good scuba diving were. Anyway, Benny figured we could track down Cap'n Dan without Big Jeff if we had to but that it might take a while.

  Benny returned at the same time the waitress showed up; after she'd shuffled off to get our refreshments, Benny told us he had found out that Big Jeff (a) was on the island, (b) would be in later that night, and that (c) we could probably catch him earlier during happy hour downing a few at his customary table up at the Hotel Rocamar.

  The Rocamar turned out to be full, although it was supposed to be off season, so we moseyed a couple of hundred yards along to the Caribe and were soon installed in three spacious rooms on the first floor overlooking the pool. And soon after that, as there was still an hour of sun and it was still hot, although we were into late afternoon by then, we installed ourselves on the small sandy beach in front of the hotel, accompanied by an ample supply of beer from the snack bar, and watched the rollers finish their long journey across the Caribbean Sea with a gentle lapping over our outstretched limbs. Doris, I couldn't help noticing, was wearing a new beach ensemble (paid for by guess who), and a new sun hat that had First Mate written on it.

  A blessedly tranquil half an hour passed.

  I tried not to feel too guilty too often about my being there by the briny and Billy being there in the brig—that way lay madness. I was doing all I could as fast as I could do it, but still . . .

  "The last time I was on a beach like this I was with Evonne," I offered finally, breaking the long silence. "The waves were rolling in over our legs like they are now, and I gave her a big smooch just like Burt Lancaster did to What's-her-name in whatever that movie was."

  "I wouldn't know what you're talking about even if I knew," Doris said, rousing herself sufficiently to sprinkle a handful of sand on my muscular torso.

  "The Naked and the Dead, stupe," I said. "By John Jones."

  "From Here to Eternity," Benny said from beside us without opening his eyes. "By James Jones."

  "Yeah, right," I said. "Anyway, it was all about the last days in Hawaii before the Japs attacked on Sunday, December 7, 1941."

  "You probably remember it well," she said, flipping a broken seashell so it landed right on my you know what. Luckily it only weighed a pound or two. I looked around for something damp and nasty to tuck down inside her bikini bottoms, but there was nothing within reach.

  After another long pause Doris said, "I like Evonne."

  "Me too," I said.

  "Me three," Benny said.

  "You gonna marry her?"

  "None of your business," I said.

  "That's what normal people do," she said. "They get it on, and then if they like getting it on and want to go on getting it on, they get married."

  "Thank you, Emily Post," I said, turning over to let some of the scars on my back get some sun.

  There was another, welcome, pause. Then Doris said, "Wel
l?"

  "Well what?"

  "Well, are you gonna get married?"

  "Hell, how would I know?" I said. "Anyway, she hasn't even asked me yet."

  "So what are you afraid of?"

  "Me?" I scoffed. "That's a good one, Doris—me afraid. I've only been afraid twice in my life, once was when the dentist said, 'Open, please,' and the second time was when he whistled and then asked me if I knew a good gum surgeon."

  "That's not what she says," she said.

  "That's not what who says?" Benny said sleepily.

  "Evonne," Doris said.

  "Ah," Benny said.

  "Evonne says every time superdick here gets even close to having to talk about marriage, he changes the subject so quickly his mind stays dizzy for a week."

  "My pet said that, did she?" I said. "That's rather well put. A total lie, but well put."

  There was another pause, which I filled by emptying my second beer. It was broken by Miss Nuisance of the Decade saying "Well?" yet again.

  "Well, shut up for a change," I said, losing my legendary control for perhaps the third time in my life. "Well, what do you want from me anyway? Well, why don't you take a long walk somewhere cool, like straight out into shark headquarters out there until that silly hat you're wearing, which I paid for by the way, floats, so don't lose it."

  "Which philosopher was it who opined that for the thinking man, life is a comedy, but for the feeling, a tragedy?" said Benny.

  "I neither know nor care," I said. "The only philosophy I have ever held was one which I learnt as a boy at my father's knee: to wit, everyone else's philosophy is full of shit. Now come on, the snack bar is a-calling with its old siren song. I'll get another beer or two and buy you two something especially revolting to snack on."

  We picked up our leftovers and departed. Then they snacked and I drank. Then we trooped upstairs, showered and changed, met down by the pool again, and then headed off back up the hill to the Rocamar and, fingers crossed, Big Jeff. On the way we passed several open-sided, thatch-roofed cantinas in which merry tourists were busily taking advantage of half-price happy hour booze.