by William Boyd
“Yes.”
“I was wondering what I should do.”
“If you’re happy, I would proceed as normal.”
“All right. Bye.”
She hung up. It was illogical but for some reason she felt more insecure knowing that Romer had been called away. Proceed as normal as long as you’re happy. There was no reason not to, she supposed. Standard operating procedure. She wondered who the two men were—FBI? Romer had said the FBI were growing worried at the size and scale of the British presence. Perhaps this was the first sign of penetration…All the same, she changed trains twice more on the way to Albuquerque, making slow progress.
She sighed and ordered another cocktail from the waitress. A man came up to her and asked if he could join her but he didn’t use the passwords, just wanting to pick her up. She said she was on her honeymoon, waiting for her husband and he wandered away looking for more promising material. She finished her drink and went to bed where, try as she might to calm herself, she slept badly.
The next day she wandered around the old town, went into a church on the plaza and took a stroll through Rio Grande Park under the tall Cottonwood trees and looked out at the broad turbid river and the hazy mauve mountains to the west and, as she frequently did, marvelled that she should find herself here, at this stage of her life, in this town, at this time. She lunched at the de Vargas and, as she passed through the lobby afterwards, the desk clerk suggested she might appreciate a tour of the university, telling her that the library was ‘magnificent’. She said she’d save it for another day. Instead she took a taxi to her other hotel and lay on her hard bed, reading a novel—The Hollow Mountain by Sam M. Goodforth—with dogged concentration throughout the rest of the afternoon.
She was back in a booth in the cocktail lounge at six, enjoying a dry Martini, when a man slipped into the seat opposite.
“Hi, glad to see you looking so well.” He had a plump, pasty face and his tie had grease stains on it. He had a local newspaper in his hand and was wearing a frayed straw trilby that he didn’t remove.
“I just had a two-week vacation,” she said.
“Go to the mountains?”
“I prefer the seaside.”
So far so good, she thought. Then said, “Have you anything for me?”
He pointedly placed the newspaper on the seat beside him. Very BSC, she thought, we love newspaper drops—anyone can carry a newspaper. Keep it simple.
“Go to Las Cruces. A man called Raul will contact you. The Alamogordo Inn.”
“How long am I meant to stay there?”
“Until Raul shows up. Nice talking to you.” He slipped out of the booth and was gone. She reached over and picked up the newspaper. Inside was a brown envelope sealed with sticky tape. She went up to her room and sat and looked at it for ten minutes then she tore it open to find a map of Mexico with the printed title: LUFTVERKEHRSNETZ VON MEXIKO. HAUPTLINEN.
She called Transoceanic.
“Sage, hello.” It was Angus Woolf—she was surprised to hear his voice.
“Hello. Moonlighting?”
“Sort of,” he said. “How’s the party going?”
“Interesting. I’ve made contact but my gift is particularly intriguing. Inferior material, I would say.”
“I’d better call the manager.”
Devereux came on the line. “Inferior?”
“Not that you’d spot it immediately but it wouldn’t take you long.”
The map looked professional and official and was printed in black and white and two colours, blue and red. Mexico was divided up into four districts—Gau 1, Gau 2, Gau 3 and 4—and blue lines between red cities indicated air routes; Mexico City to Monterrey and Torreón; Guadalauara to Chihuahua and so on. Most unusual were lines extending beyond Mexico’s boundaries: one south ‘für Panama’, and two north ‘für San Antonio, Texas’ and another, ‘für Miami, Florida’. The implication, Eva thought at once, was too clear—where was the subtlety? But more worrying too were the errors; HAUPTLINEN should have been HAUPTLINIEN, and ‘für’ in the sense of ‘to’ was not correct either—it should have been ‘nach’—‘nach Miami, Florida’. To her eyes the positive first impression was quickly undermined and subverted by these factors. The spelling mistakes might just be explained by a compositor who didn’t speak German (perhaps the map had been printed in Mexico) but the mistakes plus the territorial ambitions enshrined in the air routes seemed too much to her—trying too hard to get the message across.
“Are you sure this is our product?” she asked Devereux.
“Yes, as far as I know.”
“Will you tell the boss what I think and I’ll call back later.”
“Are you going to proceed?” he asked.
“With due caution.”
“Where are you going?”
“A place called Las Cruces,” she said instantly, then thinking: why am I being so honest? Too late now.
She hung up, went to the front desk and asked where she could hire a car.
The road to Las Cruces was due south on Highway 85, some 220 miles or so on the old Camino Real that followed the Rio Grande valley all the way to Mexico. It was two-lane tarmacadam most of the way, with some sections in concrete on which she made good, steady going, driving a tan-coloured Cadillac touring car with a retractable roof that she did not bother to retract. She barely looked at the scenery as she drove south but was aware, all the same, of the rugged mountain ranges to the east and west, the ranchitos with their melon and corn patches clustered around the river and, here and there, she saw from the road the rocky stretches of desert and the lava beds of the fabled jornada del muerte— beyond the river valley the land was hard and arid.
She arrived in Las Cruces in the late afternoon and drove down the main street, looking for the Alamogordo Inn. These small towns already seemed familiar to her having driven through some half-dozen or so identical ones on her journey south: Los Lunas, Socorro, Hatch—they all blended into a homogenous image of New Mexican provinciality. After the adobe ranch houses came the gas stations and the auto shops, then the neat suburbs on the outskirts, then the freight yards, the grain silos and the flour mills. Each town had its wide main street with its garish shop-fronts and neon advertisements, its awnings and shaded walkways, dusty cars parked at an angle on both verges of the road. Las Cruces looked no different: there was the Woolworths, a jeweller with a winking plastic gem the size of a football, signs for Florsheim Shoes, Coca-Cola, Liberty Furniture, the drugstore, the bank and, at the end of the street, opposite a small park with a stand of shady cottonwoods, the plain concrete façade of the Alamogordo Inn.
She parked in the lot at the back and went into the lobby. A couple of roof fans stirred the air, there was a cracked-leather, three-seater sofa and worn Indian rugs on the wooden floor. A cobwebbed cactus stood in a pot of sand studded with cigarette butts, below a sign that said: ‘Positively no loitering. Electric light in every room’. The desk clerk, a young man with a weak chin and a shirt collar three sizes too big for his neck looked at her curiously as she asked for a room.
“You sure you want this hotel?” he asked, meekly. “There are much nicer ones just out of town.”
“I’m quite happy, thank you,” she said. “Where can I get a bite to eat?”
Turn right out the front door for a restaurant, turn left for a diner, he said. She chose the diner and ordered a hamburger. The place was empty: two grey-haired ladies manned the soda fountain and an Indian with a sternly handsome, melancholic face swept the floor. Eva ate her burger and drank her Coca-Cola. She experienced a strange form of inertia, an almost palpable heaviness, as if the world had stopped turning and only the swish of the Indian’s broom on the cement floor was marking the passage of time. Somewhere in a back room jazz was playing on the radio and Eva thought: what am I doing here? What particular destiny am I playing out? She felt she could sit on here in this diner in Las Cruces for all eternity—the Indian man would be sweeping the floor, her hamb
urger would remain half eaten, the thin jazz would continue to play. She allowed the mood to linger, steeping herself in it, finding it oddly calming, this late-afternoon stasis, knowing that whatever she did next would set a new chain of events in motion that would be out of her control. Better to savour these few moments of stillness where apathy ruled unchallenged.
She went to the diner pay phone, in a small booth by some shelves stacked with tins, and called Transoceanic. Devereux answered.
“Can I speak to the boss?” she asked.
“Alas, no. But I spoke to him yesterday evening.”
“And what did he say?” For some reason Eva felt sure that Romer was in the room with Devereux—then she dismissed the idea as absurd.
“He says it’s all up to you. It’s your party. If you want to leave—leave. If you want to change the music—do so. Trust your instincts, he said.”
“You told him what I thought about my gift.”
“Yes, he’s checked. It’s our product, so they must want it out there.”
She hung up, thinking hard. So: everything was up to her. She walked slowly back to the Alamogordo, keeping to the shady side of the street. A large truck went by loaded with massive tree trunks followed by a rather smart red coupe with a man and a woman in the front seat. She stopped and looked behind her: some kids stood chatting to a girl on a bicycle. But she had the strangest feeling that she was being shadowed—which was crazy, she knew. She went and sat in the small park for a few minutes and read her guidebook to drive these demons from her mind. Las Cruces—‘The Crosses’—so called after the massacre by local Apaches of a freight party in the eighteenth century en route to Chihuahua and the tall crosses that were erected over their subsequent graves. She hoped it wasn’t a bad omen.
The small red coupe passed by again: no man—the woman at the wheel.
No: she was being jumpy, naïve, unprofessional. If she was worried there were procedures she could follow. It was her party. Use your instincts, Romer had said. All right—she would.
She went back to the Alamogordo and drove her car out on the Mesa Road towards the state college and found the new motel her guidebook had promised—the Mesilla Motor Lodge. She rented a cabin at the end of a wooden walkway and hid the map in the back of the wardrobe, behind a panel that she eased away with her nail file. The hotel was only a year old, the bellhop told her as he led her to her cabin. It smelt new: the odour of creosote, putty and woodshavings seemed to linger in her room. The cabin was clean and modern, its furniture pale and undecorated. A semi-abstract painting of a Pueblo village hung above the desk, which was fitted out with a bowl of cellophane-wrapped fruit, a tiny yucca in a terracotta pot and a folding blotter and writing kit of paper, envelopes, postcards and half a dozen monogrammed pencils. Everything is complimentary, the bellhop told her, with our compliments. She professed herself very pleased with the arrangement. When she was alone again she took 2,000 dollars out of the envelope and stashed the rest with the map.
She drove back to Las Cruces, parked behind the Alamogordo and went into the lobby. A man was sitting on the sofa, wearing a pale blue cotton suit. He had white blond hair and an unusually pink face—an almost albino she thought—with his pale blue suit he looked like a big baby.
“Hi,” he said, standing up. “Good to see you looking so well.”
“I just had a two-week vacation.”
“Go to the mountains?”
“I prefer the seaside.”
He offered his hand and she shook it. He had a pleasant, husky voice.
“I’m Raul.” He turned to the desk clerk. “Hey, sonny, can we get a drink here?”
“No.”
They walked outside and looked vainly for a bar for five minutes.
“I got to get some beer,” he said. He went into a liquor store and came out with a can of beer in a brown paper bag. They walked back to the park and sat on a bench under the cotton-wood trees while Raul opened his beer with a can opener that he had in his pocket and drank it in great draughts, not removing the can from the bag. I will always remember this small park in Las Cruces, Eva thought.
“Sorry,” he said, letting air escape from his belly with a whispery wheeze. “I was dying of thirst.” Eva noticed his voice was markedly less husky. “Water doesn’t work for me,” he added by way of explanation.
“There’s been a problem,” Eva said. “A delay.”
“Oh yeah?” He looked suddenly shifty, displeased. “Nobody told me nothing.” He stood up, walked to the trashcan and dumped his beer-bag. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked around as if he were being set up in some way.
“I’ve got to come back next week,” she said. “They told me to give you this in the meantime.”
She opened her handbag and let him see the money. He came over quickly and sat beside her. She slipped him the wad of notes.
“Two thousand. The rest next week.”
“Yeah?” He couldn’t keep the surprise and delight off his face. He wasn’t expecting money, she thought: what’s happening here?
Raul stuffed the money in his jacket pocket.
“When next week?” he said.
“You’ll be contacted.”
“Okay,” he said, standing up again. “See ya.” He sauntered away. Eva waited five minutes, still checking for shadows. She walked up the main street and went into Woolworths, where she bought a pack of tissues. She turned down a narrow lane between the bank and a realtor’s and immediately retraced her steps back up it at speed. Nothing. She did a few other manoeuvres, finally convincing herself that no one had or could have been tailing her, before going back to the Alamogordo and checking out—no refunds, sorry.
She drove back to the Mesilla Motor Lodge. It was dusk now and the setting sun was striking the peaks of the mountains to the east, turning them a dark-fissured, dramatic orange. Tomorrow she would return to Albuquerque and catch a plane to Dallas and make her way home from there—the sooner the better.
She ate in the hotel restaurant ordering a steak—tough—and creamed spinach—cold—washed down with a bottle of beer (“We don’t serve wine, Mam”). There were a few other people in the dining-room, an elderly couple with guides and maps, a plump man who propped his newspaper in front of him and never looked up, and a well-dressed family of Mexicans with two silent, beautifully behaved little girls.
She walked along the walkway towards her cabin, thinking back over her day and wondering if Romer would approve of what her instincts had led her to do. She looked up at the stars and felt the desert air chill on her skin. Somewhere a dog barked. She checked the other cabins routinely before she unlocked her door: no new cars, all accounted for. She turned the key and pushed the door open.
The man was sitting on her bed, his thighs spread wide, his revolver pointing at her face.
“Shut the door,” he said. “Move over there.” His accent was heavy, Mexican. He rose to his feet, a big burly man with a hanging gut on him. He had a dense wide moustache and his suit was dull green.
She moved across the room as he wagged his gun at her, obeying him, her mind frantic with questions, receiving no answers.
“Where’s the map?” he said.
“What? Who?” She thought he had said. “Where’s the man?”.
“The map.” He made the ‘p’ plosive. Spittle flew.
How could he know she had a map?
She noticed that her room and her suitcase had been searched, as her glance flicked about its four corners. Like some super-calculating machine her brain was running through the permutations and the implications of this encounter. It became clear to her almost instantly that she should give the map to this person.
“It’s in the cupboard,” she said, walking over to it and hearing him cock his gun.
“I’m unarmed,” she said, gesturing for his permission to go further and then, when he nodded his head, reaching behind the loose partition and removing the map and the remaining 3,000 dollars. She handed them to the
Mexican. Something about the way he took them from her, checked them and kept her covered made her think he was a policeman, not a crow. He was used to doing this, he did this all the time; he was very calm. He put the map and the money on the desk.
“Take your clothes off,” he said.
As she undressed she felt sick. No, not this, she thought, please no. She felt a horrible foreboding now: his bulk, his easy professionalism—he wasn’t like Raul or the man in Albuquerque—it made her think that she was going to die very soon.
“Okay, stop.” She was down to her brassiere and panties. “Get dressed.” There was no leering, no prurience.
He went to the window and pulled back the curtain. She heard a car start up some way off and approach the cabin and stop outside. A door slammed and the engine stayed running. There were others, then. She dressed faster than she had ever dressed in her life. She was thinking: don’t panic, remember your training, maybe he just wants the map.
“Put the map and your money in the handbag,” he said.
She felt her throat swell and her chest tighten. She was trying not to think what might happen, to stay in the absolute here and now, but she realised the awful implication of what he had just said. It wasn’t the map or the money he was after—he was after her: she was the prize.
She walked to the desk.
Why had she refused Romer’s offer of a gun? Not that it would have made any difference now. A simple courier’s job, he had said. Romer didn’t believe in guns or unarmed combat: you have your teeth and your nails, he had said, your animal instincts. She needed more than that to fight this big confident man: she needed a weapon.
She put the map and the 3,000 dollars in her handbag while the Mexican went to the door. He kept her covered, opened the door and glanced outside. She shifted her body. She had one second and she used it.
“Come,” he said, as she was adjusting the combs that held her hair up in a loose chignon. “Don’t bother with that.” He linked arms with her, the snout of his revolver pressed into her side and they walked out to his car. Over at another cabin she could see the little Mexican girls playing on the porch—they paid her and her companion no attention.