The Dogs of Mexico

by John J. Asher

“Come,” Valdez said. “We shall celebrate. A nice chicken mole perhaps?”

  Robert took his handkerchief out and wiped his forehead. He picked up the Bible and the document case. “I think we’ll call it a night if you don’t mind.”

  “Understandably. Another time perhaps.”

  “Señor Valdez,” Ana said tersely, “what do you know of Helmut, the man I was traveling with?”

  Valdez observed her closely, critically perhaps. “Very little, señorita. Very little. It seems he was once a benefactor of many people.”

  “But there must be something. Otherwise, why do you know of him at all?”

  “Ah, as they say, we are a small community.”

  “Helmut kept an eye on the political climate here in Mexico and Central America,” she said, “but he’s hardly a James Bond.”

  “I’m told he did much good for the people before…” Valdez trailed off, lifted his hands and let them fall with a sigh.

  “Before what?” Ana persisted.

  “We do not know about señor Helmut. It is as if he has devoted himself to the spirits of alcohol rather than the spirits of humanity. Ah, señorita, who knows of these things if not you, eh?”

  Valdez bowed, gesturing outward with a sweep of his hand, suggesting they were free to leave.

  The boy poured a cupful of salt on the countertop and began scrubbing it down. Killing bacteria. Purifying.

  30

  A Difference of Opinion

  ROBERT LED ANA to a taxi in front of the Hotel Camino Real. “Downtown, Hotel Señoral,” he said to the driver, ushering Ana into the backseat. She jerked her arm free, glaring as he slid in after.

  He ignored her, watching through the rear window to make sure they weren’t being followed.

  Ana stared straight ahead, eyes smoldering.

  “How about that,” he said when they were safely underway. “We’ve struck a blow for the free world. You and me. Maybe we should eat something. Celebrate. Except chicken. I can do without chicken for a while.”

  Ana leaned forward. “Take me back to the Hotel Principal,” she said to the driver.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Robert said.

  “Oh yes I do! I’m getting away from you once and for all!”

  “Not just yet you’re not. Hotel Señoral,” he said again to the driver.

  They rode in silence until the taxi pulled to a stop in front of the Señoral. Robert paid and they got out and stood among the crowds milling about on the sidewalks. He carried the document case containing the canister, the Bible, and the cigarillo box slung over his shoulder.

  Ana glared. “What’re we doing here?”

  “Making sure no one is following us back to our hotel,” he said, looking up and down the street.

  A group of children in grotesque masks hovered nearby. They carried cardboard skeletons on sticks with strings that made their arms and legs dance. Three adult figures in black shrouds stood a short distance back. They wore skull-masks, tiny lights winking in black eye sockets.

  “The problem with you,” Ana said, “is you can’t open your mouth without a lie jumping out.”

  “Excuse me?”

  A ragged little girl of seven or eight, carrying a few packs of gum in a shoebox, appeared at Robert’s side, her paper mask tilted to the top of her head, watching him with big imploring eyes. “Chicle? Fifty cent?” More beggar children hovered nearby. The three death figures lurked in the background.

  “Leading me to believe there was critical intelligence in your tire! You’re a pathological liar, and worse, a gambler.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “No, you can’t just take the money and leave when you’re ahead, you have to push it to the limit: Valdez, which branch of intelligence are you in? Valdez, what do you intend to do with these photos? Valdez, who are the two men in the white Chevy? You just keep on and on until you lose.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are, criticizing me?”

  “Don’t you shout at me.”

  “I’m not shouting. Besides, I’ll shout whenever the hell I feel like it!”

  “Not at me you won’t.”

  Pedestrians skirted around them. Robert stepped out into the street to flag a taxi. The little girl followed. “Chicle? Twenty-five cent?”

  A taxi pulled up alongside. Ana stepped forward and got in.

  “Chicle? Ten cent?”

  Robert dug a fistful of change from his pocket and slapped it in the girl’s shoebox. Coins bounced out on the paving. The children scrambled in the gutter. The three men in skull masks leaped off the curb, shoving the children aside. “Hey!” Robert yelled, taking a step toward them. The men backed away. The children began shouting at them also, seeing Robert was holding them off until they collected the coins.

  “Son of a bitch,” Robert mumbled, climbing back into the taxi. “What kinda damn country is this anyway!”

  “And just what have you done but make trouble down here?”

  “I’m taking you to the goddamn airport. You can go wherever the hell you please!”

  Ana leaned forward over the seat. “Hotel Principal,” she said to the driver. She turned on Robert. “I’m going to the airport, yes, but I will get there on my own, thank you!”

  “The sooner you’re out of my hair, the better.”

  They rode back to their hotel in terse silence. Ana got out and stormed ahead, limping into the hotel’s courtyard while he paid the fare.

  He followed up the outside steps, entering the room after her. “This is exactly why I wanted you to go on back to the States,” he said.

  “You’re nothing but a cheap smuggler,” she replied, gathering her things, throwing them into her bag in a disorganized rush.

  “And you’re nothing but a self-righteous pain in the ass. First, you come charging into the gift shop where I’m making arrangements to meet with Valdez; then you insist on going with me, shooting off your big mouth, criticizing everything I do. Every time I turn around, there you are, your fat yapping ass in my face! Just who the hell do you think you are, anyway!?”

  She turned on him, glassy-eyed, fists clenched as if to attack him physically. “Listen mister, you’re a smuggler, a thief and a liar. And to think I helped you bury another human being—a child no less! I tried to tell myself it wasn’t your fault, that there were extenuating circumstances. But I was wrong. You’re a low-life. That’s what you’re all about, you and your work. A man without principle. I can’t believe I actually made love to you. I never dreamed I would sink this low!”

  Robert stood for a moment, something going out of him, leaving him empty and without substance.

  “Yeah, right,” he managed, “Helmut’s such a classy guy, you should’ve stayed with him.” He had a headache again, the film of grit evident in his peripheral vision.

  “You go to hell,” Ana said.

  “I’m going to give you some money,” he said evenly, “get you out from underfoot once and for all”

  “I don’t want your damn blood money!” She snatched up her bag and stumbled out, slamming the door shut after herself.

  He waited a moment, then stepped out onto the balcony. A yellow haze lay low over the city of Oaxaca. Dogs barked in the distance. Music sounded from somewhere, barely audible above the whistling grind of cicadas. A few doors down, half a dozen truck hoods stood upright, spooned together like taco shells against the exterior wall of an auto repair shop. From inside an open bay, a truck engine revved over and over. Down on the street, his and Ana’s old pickup looked to be sleeping against the curb.

  She appeared below, hurrying out through the courtyard entrance, swaying a little under the weight of her bag and her bad knee. But her shoulders were drawn back, her chin up in determination. She jerked the handle out of the bag, rumbling on its under-wheels as she limp-swung past the auto repair shop. She stopped in the dim light at the end of the block, stood her bag upright and pushed the handle back in. She looked up the empty street in each
direction, obviously searching for a taxi.

  So. This was it. Ana, disappearing from his life for good. An epiphany more troubling than even she might have hoped for bloomed to fruition in his mind: He would never be able to live a whole life. She was right; he had seen and done too much. The feeling of aloneness that had overtaken him was compounded by sudden, abject hopelessness.

  His attention was diverted to a dark recess in the facade of a building across the intersection from Ana—a small flare of yellow light briefly illuminated two men huddled there as one of them struck a match and lit a cigarette. They stepped out into the pale light of the street, shambling along in front of the building toward Ana. Robert couldn’t hear over the whistling insects and the repetitive roar of the truck engine, but he read by their body language, their gestures, heads cocked at an angle in Ana’s direction, that they were going to approach her.

  Robert went back inside, left the room and pulled the door closed. By the time he crossed the courtyard and stepped out onto the sidewalk, Ana had seen the two men crossing the intersection toward her and had begun to withdraw, cripple-shuffling backward.

  Robert stepped up his pace. The two men saw him and paused. One said something. The other nodded. They came on again, but with greater stealth. One of the men paused near Ana. The other continued as if to meet Robert head on. The man flipped out a knife. Robert reached under his jacket, withdrew the .380 and cocked it. The man stopped in his tracks. His expression changed to surprise and then fear as Robert picked up his pace, arm extended, the gun pointed directly in the man’s face. Instead of shooting him, Robert deflected the knife aside with his left hand and at the same time swung the .380 with his right, hitting the man in the temple with the gun butt, hard, jarring Robert’s arm. The man went down with an airless grunt. Robert never slackened his stride, advancing on the second man, the gun extended. The man broke and ran.

  Ana stared slack-jawed as Robert pulled the handle out on her bag with his free hand and then turned back toward the hotel. When she didn’t follow immediately but stood paralyzed, he turned back, tucked the gun in his belt, took her by one wrist and half-dragged her along with her bag, past the fallen assailant lying huddled in a fetal position, groaning on the pavement. Ana didn’t struggle, but limp-hurried after him. When they reached the foot of the stone steps inside the courtyard, Robert let go, shoved the handle back into the bag, and carried it back up the steps by its side grip. Ana hesitated only briefly, then hurried after.

  Robert dropped her bag inside the door, then, wordless, went straight to his carry-on and broke the seal on a new bottle of brandy. Ana watched in silence as shakily he poured an inch into a water glass and took it out onto the balcony. The assailants were nowhere to be seen, the street empty.

  Robert turned. Ana was visible through the open doorway, sitting on the straight-backed chair, hands cupping her lower face, staring at him.

  “You can relax,” he said. “Looks like everybody’s gone home.”

  She looked tentatively around the room. He was reminded of the night she and Helmut stayed with him in his room in Taxco—how fearful, how suspicious of him she had been.

  “Stay here tonight,” he said. “You can leave in the morning in the safe light of day.”

  She looked on as he went back inside to the chest of drawers, removed a wool blanket and folded it double on the floor. He took one of the pillows from the bed and tossed it on the blanket. “You can have the bed,” he said. “I’m going in to brush my teeth…unless you want to go first?”

  She shook her head, barely detectible.

  He took a clean T-shirt and his Dopp kit from his carry-on, brushed and flossed and washed up and went back out. He gathered all the guns into the top drawer of the dresser, and stretched out on the floor on the doubled blanket.

  Ana had taken her zippered kit from her bag and carried it now with a clean pair of jeans and a shirt into the bathroom. When she came out, she had changed from the dressy black slacks and blouse into jeans and shirt. She took another look at him on the floor, then stripped the blanket off her bed and spread it over him.

  He said nothing, but rolled over and hoped to sleep. She shut the light off and he heard her getting into bed. But his head was too wired: A thought would run through his mind, then collide with another thought like a car wreck. Eventually the night silenced a little, the truck engine shut down in the garage, though the cicadas seemed louder than ever.

  Sometime during the night he sensed movement and sprung awake. Ana knelt over him, her fingertips gently touching his lips for silence. “Come,” she whispered. “Get in the bed.” After a moment he took the blankets from the floor and spread them over the bed. She picked up his pillow, laid it alongside hers. She then climbed into bed and threw the covers back on his side and held them until he slipped in beside her. She snuggled, her breath warm on his neck. After a moment she began stripping her clothes off beneath the covers. He was unbuckling his belt when she raised herself on her knees, reached one leg across him and let herself down astraddle.

  ROBERT WOKE TO the smell of cigarette smoke, opened his eyes and peered into the first dim light of dawn.

  It took a moment to convince himself that Helmut really was parked in the chair at the foot of the bed. Helmut—red-eyed, unshaven, disheveled. Helmut—calmly holding a cigarette in the peculiar way he had of holding it, backward, between thumb and forefinger. Only now his middle finger was in a splint where Robert had hit him with the bolt cutter. Robert’s brandy bottle, several inches down, stood on the floor at his feet alongside a new leather computer case with a shoulder strap.

  But what got Robert’s attention was the little handgun Helmut held on his knee, a baby-bottle nipple stretched over the muzzle. In the trade, a baby-bottle nipple stretched over the muzzle of a .22 semiautomatic was known as the cheap assassin’s silencer. Cheap, but effective. Touched to the skull, the sound was no louder than slapping shut a book. One-time use.

  31

  Helmut

  THOUGH HELMUT TOOK satisfaction in having so easily invaded their little nest, it was difficult to breathe around the humiliation of seeing Ana cozy in bed with another man. It was one thing to know it abstractly, quite another to sit in a chair observing while they slept. Nevertheless, some inner voice insisted it was very much his own fault. The problem with being a realist was that you were forced to bear the scars of self-acknowledged flaws.

  He thought of turning the gun on himself. It would be a relief not to have to contend with the pain of day-to-day living, which so far (he acknowledged this as well) he had dulled with alcohol. He took pleasure in imagining Ana suffering the shock of waking to see him in the chair, shot through the head by his own hand, knowing she was responsible. Suicide, the ultimate revenge. On the other hand, he couldn’t realistically predict how she might react.

  He hadn’t planned to kill them, only to retrieve the photos and the container. Now he wasn’t so sure. He looked on with blunted satisfaction as Robert raised himself to a sitting position, eyes shifting between him and his .22 semiautomatic.

  “Well,” Robert said, “I didn’t hear you knock.”

  Ana made a small sound in sleep, stirred and bolted upright, blinking awake fast.

  Despite his resolve to remain aloof, Helmut thrilled in the moment—inflicting fear—a base impulse, yes, but one should never underestimate the healing power of revenge. He flicked ashes on the floor, looked at the two of them, one to the other. “Cozy.”

  “So. What’s this?” Robert said, nodding at the gun.

  He took another drag on the cigarette. “This,” he said, exhaling smoke, “is a twenty-two-caliber Walther. The little muffler on the end is a sound suppresser so as not to wake the neighbors.” He was aware of his accent, his anxiety—Walther, pronouncing it Valter.

  “No. Mustn’t wake the neighbors,” Robert said. He stood out of bed and took a pair of pants from a hanger on the dresser drawer.

  Ana stared, fear and anger equall
y alive in her eyes. He was torn between despair and euphoria—crushed by her infidelity, but pleased to assert himself over her, to exact revenge on the two of them from a position of absolute power.

  Robert pulled his pants on. “You know,” he said, “maybe it’s your mouth I never liked, the way it sort of curls around in that pouty little bulb, like a pig’s ass with hemorrhoids.”

  Helmut dropped the cigarette on the tile, ground it underfoot and worked up a sneer of his own. “Is this a sophomoric attempt at wit? Or should we be concerned about a fit of insanity?” He saw he had scored a hit, for Robert hesitated, if little more than a blink.

  Robert recovered quickly though. “A sophomoric attempt at vit?” he mocked. “Vot is dis? Der Gestapo?”

  Helmut felt himself flushing. “Ana, ask your clever boy here about his confinement in the state mental hospital in Big Spring, Texas. An escapee no less.”

  “Speaking of mental, you’re the one seems to think that gun’s a baby bottle.”

  Ana stared at him, then at Robert, one to the other.

  “My dear, dear Ana,” he said with exaggerated pity. “You certainly know how to pick them. Ah, you poor tragic child.”

  “She chose you,” Robert said. “Yep. That should’ve tipped everybody off, right there.”

  “The photos. The container.” Helmut lifted the little pistol at arm’s length, sighting along the barrel directly at Robert’s head. How easy it would be.

  Robert pulled his shirt on. “I don’t know how you found out about my little sit-to in the scramble-bin there in Big Spring, but there’s only one way you could know about the photos. Mickey.”

  Ana blinked, her expression turning to revulsion as she recognized the truth of it.

  “Ah, yes,” Helmut replied. “Mickey. The young woman with Soffit in Acapulco. I am sorry to disappoint, but I had nothing to do with that unfortunate incident.”

  Ana pulled the covers tight under her chin, glaring, tears rimming her eyes.