Cleopatra Gold

by William Caunitz

  Hernandez y Hernandez picked up a single sheet of paper from his otherwise clean desk, read it, and said, “We faxed your fingerprints and photo to the States. You have no criminal record; you are unknown to the drug intelligence community. And”—the major stared at him—“you have never been a member of any law enforcement agency.” He let the paper fall from his hand.

  “The wonders of modern communication. You get to know all that in a matter of hours.” Alejandro started to get out of the chair.

  “Sit down. You’re not out of here yet. It’s not often we get to arrest a major drug dealer.”

  “That’s because they all have you on their payrolls.”

  Hernandez y Hernandez laughed. “You have cojónes. Most people who sit in that chair tremble when I look at them.”

  “How much?”

  Hernandez y Hernandez pulled out the top drawer, took out a calculator, and began punching in numbers. “My personal expenses … damage to government property … and then there was your private accommodations … That will be two thousand U.S.”

  “Two thousand for a ninety-minute stay in that shithole? Amigo, put some real into your life.”

  The major looked up from the calculator. “If we had put you into a holding cell with the general population, I don’t think you would be able to sit right for a long, long time. Amigo.”

  “What’s the total?”

  Hernandez y Hernandez pressed the button, looked up at him, and said, “Since you’re a friend of a friend, we’ll round it off to an even five thousand U.S.”

  “Tell ya what, amigo, send the bill to our mutual friend, I’m fresh out of cash.” Alejandro heaved himself out of the chair, making for the door.

  “Open it and you’re dead.”

  Alejandro grabbed the doorknob, pulled, and found the same two guards lolling up against the wall with their shotguns nestled in the crook of their arms. He closed the door quietly, walked back, and lowered himself onto the chair, saying, “Amigo, we got a problem.”

  “I have no problems.”

  “We’re both businessmen who work for the same people. We both know that you were well taken care of for your speedy fingerprint check to Washington. And now you’re trying to sweeten your mango by scoring me. The people we work for wouldn’t like to hear that. I’m important to them, very important. If anything happened to me, you’d be in deep shit.”

  Hernandez y Hernandez’s easy smile vanished. He regarded Alejandro in wary silence.

  “I don’t have any money with me, and even if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you,” Alejandro said, feeling the icy flow of adrenaline. “My friends are waiting.”

  Hernandez y Hernandez bit down on his lower lip, walked over to the door, threw it open, and told the guards in Spanish, “Let him go.”

  Alejandro walked out of the police station and darted across the avenue, quickly melting into the crowd of strollers in Plaza Cuauhtémoc, relishing the sounds and smells of home. He didn’t know where Pizzaro and Barrios were, but wherever they were, he hoped they hurt as much as he did. He looked at his watch: 9:10 central time. He did not know what plans had been made to get them back to New York, but he did know that now that he was here, there were things that needed doing and not much time to do them.

  Rosa’s ice-cream store was crowded, and all the outside tables at Polio Loco and La Sirena Gorda were taken. Many families were out for their evening stroll through the plaza. Hurrying along, he happened to glance into Coconuts restaurant, and there, sitting under a palm tree inside the open-air part, was his old dognapping partner, Bill Trout. His beard was white now, but he still had his trademark boar’s tooth around his neck on a silver chain that some lost love had given him. By the look of things, he was trying to calm a frantic couple from the States. Another disappearing pet caper, and Trout to the rescue. Alejandro was tempted to go in and say hello, but he didn’t; there was no time.

  He hurried to Benito Juarez Avenue, where he turned left and gingerly navigated the broken sidewalk past stores without any doors, just curtains stirring in the gentle evening breeze.

  Crossing Antonia Nava Street, he saw his destination spread out in front of him: El Globo, the town’s boomerang-shaped market that was open until eleven every night, except on Sunday, when it was closed. El Globo would be a good place to lose anyone who might be following him. Once in the market, he made his way down the aisles, pausing now and then to glance around, looking for clouded eyes that refused to meet his.

  Farmers stood behind their stalls, hawking fruits and vegetables. Lamb and pig carcasses lay across the tops of display cases boiling with flies and crawling with insects. Housewives plied the aisles searching for bargains, negotiating with merchants. Going into the children’s aisle, Alejandro was glad to see that the toys were still made the old way, by hand.

  He moved from aisle to aisle, always pausing to look. After slipping into the area where sandals were sold, he ducked outside and leaned up against the wall, waiting to see if anyone came out after him. Again he was struck by how little things had changed. Animal bones were still overflowing from El Globo’s sole Dumpster, which was swarming with all sorts of flying things and surrounded by packs of dogs fighting over the spilled scraps. Across the street, housewives waited patiently in line outside Tortillaria Daniel to buy their morning’s tortillas. The groaning old conveyer belt still crept along, carrying the disk-shaped bread out of the clay oven.

  Satisfied that he had not acquired a tail, Alejandro pushed away from the wall, walked out into the street, and hailed a taxi. Settling into the vintage Volkswagen’s passenger seat, he wished the driver “Good evening,” then said, “Galería Zonya.”

  On the way through town, Alejandro saw that the locals still removed their license plates whenever they parked illegally in order to prevent the traffic police from removing them and ransoming them back.

  Galería Zonya was in the middle of Cuauhtémoc Avenue, a street lined with tourist shops and restaurants. The galería was known for its Indian clothes, handicrafts, and artifacts. Zonya was renowned among the local Indians as a mentirosa, a storyteller. A full-blooded, free-spirited Tarascan, she had dedicated her life to keeping alive the oral history of her people.

  She was sitting in a corner of her empty store, listening to a tape of songs from the Andes, when Alejandro entered. A willowy woman in her late fifties with dark hair cascading down her back, she was wearing an ankle-length red-and-black cotton dress made of a coarse Guatemalan cotton tartan. She wore no shoes and had on necklaces and bracelets made of shark teeth. She looked across at him, and a smile curved her full mouth. She went to him, threw her arms around him, and kissed both his cheeks, asking in Tarascan, “What are you doing here in Zihua? I heard you were becoming a famous singer in New York.”

  He took her hands in his and smiled warmly into her large gray eyes, noting the flecks of black in the irises. “I’m here on a short visit to see my mother and sister, and to ask you some questions about our Indian heritage.”

  “There are no Indians left in Mexico, they traded their heritage for pickups and polyester.”

  He smiled. “You’ll never change. Have you married?”

  Now she smiled back as she said, “Marriage is an evil white man’s institution meant to enslave the female spirit.” She locked the front door and switched off the lights. “Let’s go into the back, I have some homemade mescal.”

  She led him past the curtains into the back room. Cartons of handicrafts were stacked about. A large hand-carved table of brazilwood was centered under the ceiling fan. She poured them “shooters,” tall thin glasses of mescal. They banged the bottom of the glass on the table and downed their drinks.

  “’At’ll get your insides’ attention real quick,” he said.

  She poured them another round. He cocked his head to one side, listening to what sounded like distant gunfire. “Someone must be celebrating.”

  “Or some mestizo found his woman with another man,” she said in
a bored tone.

  “Zonya, I don’t have much time,” he began. “My grandmother used to tell us a story about a queen who sailed across the great waters in a straw boat, and landed here with a great treasure, and married a Tarascan king. Are you familiar with that story?”

  “That queen was Cleopatra.” She scraped her chair back, got up, and went over to the armoire on the other side of the room.

  Watching her rummage through the bottom of the cabinet, he said, “Cleopatra would have had to sail that boat down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean, across the South Atlantic, and around Cape Horn into the South Pacific, and up the coast to here.”

  Zonya came back holding a clay figure, which she put on the table in front of him. It was seventy centimeters high and depicted a stately woman wearing a Tarascan queen’s headdress with a cobra and a viper coiled around the parrot feathers. The serpents had almost human grins. The woman’s face bore a striking similarity to Cleopatra’s profile on ancient coins dating from her dynasty. Around her neck was a silver chain holding a miniature of a solar bark or boat with the symbol of the Egyptian sun god, charms of dung beetles, and baboons worshiping beneath a crescent moon. Ibex heads decorated the bark’s bow and stern. “This is part Tarascan and part Egyptian,” he said.

  “This is a replica of a bust that was excavated on Ixtapa Island in 1962. The original is on display in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.”

  Alejandro was so fascinated that he forgot his still-aching body and his anxiety. “I’ve never seen snakes like these in any Tarascan art.”

  “Because you’ll never find them in Mexico.”

  “What makes you say that the queen was Cleopatra?”

  “My grandmother’s great-grandmother said it was Cleopatra.”

  “Was the original carving dated?”

  “The classic era, somewhere between 40 B.C. and A.D. 10.”

  Alejandro thought for a moment and then said softly, “Cleopatra was supposed to have died August 30, 30 B.C. How did the archaeologists explain Egyptian myths on a piece of Tarascan art dating from the classic era?”

  Zonya smiled triumphantly. “They couldn’t. Some of them speculated that it was coincidence. My grandmother’s great-grandmother said that after the queen married the king, he gave her Ixtapa Island as a wedding present. The queen used the island for herself and her ladies, allowing only women on the island. There is a letter in Madrid from Cortés to Carlos Primero reporting that Ixtapa Island was populated only by women.”

  She toyed with her glass of mescal, making wet circles on the brazilwood tabletop. She looked past him, her eyes focusing on the ancient past. “The world believes the queen died of an asp bite.”

  “I don’t,” he said in Tarascan, gulping mescal and looking at her. “Asp venom attacks the blood. It’s a slow, agonizingly painful way to die. It swells and discolors the body. The ancients weren’t toxicologists, but they knew the effects of different snakebites. Women do not kill themselves by disfiguring their bodies. Cleopatra was too beautiful and vain to do that.”

  She nodded vigorously in agreement. “What do you think really happened?”

  Alejandro said, “Cobra venom attacks the central nervous system. It’s a painless death, and it does not disfigure. We both have reason to believe that the queen escaped. Vanished from Egypt. I think Cleopatra ordered that a slave with a similar build to hers be dressed in her royal robes. She then had this slave bitten by an asp. Then she ordered her two loyal servants, Iras and Charmian, to stick their hands into a basket containing a cobra. When the Romans battered their way into the throne room, they found a disfigured corpse in royal robes, and the two servants. Charmian was still alive; that’s a historical fact. She told Octavian that ‘it was a fitting death for a princess descended from so many royal kings,’ and died.”

  “Wouldn’t the Romans have wondered why she allowed herself such a painful death?”

  Alejandro went on with growing assurance. “I believe that the Romans saw exactly what they wanted to see: a dead Cleopatra. Again, historical fact; she knew the end was near and had five ships built for her escape. Cleopatra was a direct descendant of Ptolemy and guardian of the Ptolemaic treasure. When the Romans went to the treasure rooms the cupboard was bare. Archaeologists have been searching for the treasure for centuries. Recently a royal Mayan tomb was unearthed in Campeche, Mexico.” He leaned close to the mentirosa and said softly, “They discovered some of the treasure in that tomb.”

  Her eyes fell to the table as if she were studying the grain of the red-and-purple dyewood. “You appear to have spent a lot of time studying the queen’s life.” Her eyes met his. “Is that because someone named Cleopatra killed your father?”

  Holding her gaze, he shifted on his chair, aware that she had gone to the very heart of his secret, the real purpose of his entire life.

  A profound silence fell between them.

  Finally he broke it by asking quietly, in English now, “Did you ever know or hear of anyone in or around Zihua using the name Cleopatra?”

  She poured more mescal into their glasses. “Your journey has been long and painful, hasn’t it, Alejandro?”

  “Yes.”

  She downed her drink. “Years ago I heard of a Medellin assassin who used that name. But she was not from Mexico.”

  Alejandro picked up the effigy of the stately woman wearing the Tarascan headdress; the serpents coiled around the parrot feathers seemed to be laughing at him.

  19

  The horizon was a distant line where black met black and the stars disappeared.

  A thatched-roof house stood on the side of the cliff overlooking La Playa Ropa. There was a porch in front of the house that afforded a breathtaking view of the entire lagoon. A brick path ran down from the ocean road and was lined with avocado and coconut trees. The path ended at the rear door of the house; it led inside, into a large kitchen floored in rust-colored tiles.

  Alejandro had taken a taxi from Zonya’s and now stood in the shadows of the trees, listening to the pounding surf. He was home.

  He stood there for a while, gazing at the darkened house, and then made his way out of the shadows and walked down the lane. The family’s several dogs shattered the midnight air with barking.

  “Who’s there?” his mother’s voice called in Spanish.

  “Mama, it’s me, Alejandro,” he shouted, running into the creaking house.

  His mother’s hair was white in the light of the single overlight in the kitchen, and it cascaded down her back. She wore a cotton nightgown, and despite her wrinkles, her beauty was still much in evidence. She flung herself into her son’s arms, crying, “My baby is home!” Smothering him with her loving kisses, she said, “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming? Look at you, you’re too skinny.”

  He hugged her close, savoring her love. “I love you, Mama.”

  His mother was so excited at seeing him after a lapse of eight years that she was trembling and almost in tears. “What are you doing here? Are you home for good?”

  Still holding her in his arms, Alejandro told her, “The hotel association wanted me to do a show in one of the hotels in Ixtapa. I’m only going to be here for a few more hours.” He looked around, savoring the changeless comfort of home, relishing the familiar smells. “I love you, Mama.”

  Her tone changed. “Let’s go outside and look at the stars together.”

  They walked between the coconut and avocado trees, holding hands, not talking.

  “Why do you lie to your mother? Do you think that my son could appear in any hotel in Mexico and that I would not hear about it?”

  “Mama …”

  “No, Alejandro. I fell in love with an Irish cop, and married him. I married him because he loved me. But he also loved that damn police department. There was not a day that passed in our lives together that his mistress did not break my heart.”

  “Mama—”

  “Listen to me! Seaver and Romano, the one they call Joey-
the-G-Man, were always talking their secret talks with your father when they visited on vacation. They’d go off so I could not hear what they were saying. I didn’t have to hear; I only had to look at them to know what they were talking about. And then your father retired, and we lived here in paradise, and I was happier than I’d ever been.” She paused, memories crowding in on her. “One day much later, Seaver came alone. He and your father sat under that avocado tree, talking their secrets, and my heart broke. The traficantes had come to Zihua, and then Seaver came, and two weeks later your father was dead.…”

  “Mama—”

  “Listen! When you were twenty years old Seaver came here again. You sat with him under that same avocado tree talking secrets just like your father did, and my heart was torn with fear for you. I knew what they wanted. And then you left; and my life left with you.”

  “Mama, a man has to do—”

  She slapped her son’s face. “Don’t you ever say that macho nonsense to me! Your father used to say the same thing. A man doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

  Alejandro rubbed his stinging cheek. “You don’t understand.”

  “That’s the problem, I do understand.”

  He kicked a fallen coconut across the ground. “I never meant to cause you any pain.”

  She placed the flat of her hand consolingly on her son’s cheek. “I know. It’s time you came home and got married, had a family. I need to see my grandchildren before I go to God.”

  A physically painful feeling of immense guilt shot through him. “Mama, please don’t talk like that.”

  “When will you be coming home?”

  “Soon, Mama, real soon.” He looked back at the house. “Where is Maria?”

  “Your sister is out with friends.”

  “At one o’clock in the morning?”

  She laughed. “You’re not home thirty minutes and you’re already the Mexican brother. Your sister is a woman; she doesn’t have to account to you.”

  He smiled in embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Mama.”