Ryan put the book down and looked at his watch. It was almost five. The blazing heat had passed and the day was moving toward early darkness, the only reminder that the month was November. It was time to meet Mario for a drink and pick up the duffle bag. Ryan got on his screechy rental cruiser and pedalled down the sidewalk, inhaling the ripe scent of rotting leaves from the jungle and the burnt sulfur of exhaust fumes from passing cars.
Mario was sitting at a table on the white stone patio above the darker rocks at the edge of the ocean. “Did you find a place?”
“Oh yes. A nice little hotel on one of the streets in town. Although I was tempted to stay at the compound next door to yours. Some hippie yuppie name. With yoga in the morning.”
“Ah! The one without indoor plumbing or electricity, and with an extra helping of extra-large cockroaches. I think that qualifies it as an eco resort.”
“No thank you, no eco resorts for me. I want to live in wretched excess. How long are you staying in Tulum?”
“I figure I deserve to splurge here for a week after slaving for years,” Mario said with a none-too guilty smile.
“Only a week? I thought for some reason you were staying longer.”
“I’d love to stay longer, maybe go somewhere else after Tulum. But I feel I need to get back and start my new life. Get my little shop up and running. I’ll reward myself with a longer holiday once things are up and running.”
“Why not pay it forward and reward yourself now? Once your firm is up and running it’ll be harder to leave.”
“I’ve thought about that. But I know that if I stay here long enough, I might never go back. Mexico does that to you. Makes you wonder if all the running around in the civilized world is just a crazy delusion.” He laughed and pointed to his left. “That beach is for everyone. It’s warm here, you could live year-round in nothing more than a tent. Booze is cheap, bananas and coconuts are free. If you want fish, you can catch fish. It takes a small boat and a fishing rod, or a net.”
“So, why not?”
“It’s not my home. I’d miss the fog and the bloody never-ending rain of the Pacific Northwest. And I don’t have the antidote to the local poison. A lot of these people do.” He looked around the patio. All the tables were taken; each had a little flickering tea light. “Many of these people will only ever see the bright and sunny side of Mexico. The stuff they show you in tourist brochures.”
Ryan didn’t need Mario to explain what he meant by the local poison. In his search for a hotel he’d cruised the streets that only locals walk, had seen the skeletal dogs resting with regal dignity on piles of rubble, the slovenly children with expressions of muted wonderment at the sight of a gringo on their street, the ruins of houses that had never been finished. The worlds of the living and the dead were not so very separate on those streets. And like Mario, he didn’t have the antidote.
“Speaking of poisons, do they serve a good tequila here?”
“I don’t know. I can’t stand tequila.” Mario laughed. “I know that’s what you’re supposed to drink in Mexico, but I much prefer red wine.”
“Let’s see if we can change your mind with a really good one.”
“It’s not the tequila itself, it’s the worm in the bottle. The idea of it gives me the creeps. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m drinking formalin that was used to preserve some monstrosity or some evil growth. Things in a jar on the shelf in biology class.”
“Things in a jar on the shelf in biology class made me what I am today. A technician in a cancer research lab.”
Mario looked at him with amused skepticism.
“Yes, a lab rat,” Ryan said proudly. “What, I don’t look the part?”
“Not really. I always thought that’s the kind of job for a recluse with freakish tendencies. Someone with a hooded cloak and a hump.”
“What hump?” Ryan laughed. “I take it you don’t think I’m a recluse with freakish tendencies.”
“Are you?”
“Nah. I just like the silence of a lab. Never have to listen to stupidity, never get lied to. I observe brutal honesty on a cellular level. Cancer doesn’t pretend to be better than it is.”
“And that fascinates you?”
“In a way, it does. Sure you don’t want to try some of this delicious formalin?” Ryan swirled the burnished amber liquid in his glass, making slow hypnotic circles under Mario’s nose to try to temp him.
“When you put it that way, how can I refuse?” Mario laughed and took the glass. “It’s okay,” he said after taking a sip. “It tastes of—soil, mulch. Mold. Hummus. But it’s not all bad.”
“Slow and steady, I say. We’ll make a convert out of you yet.” He winked at Mario. “Hey, I want to ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“Your little shop, as you put it. Now that you can choose your clients, aren’t you afraid you’ll be out of work? How many wrongly accused people are out there for every dozen rich scumbags who can afford to buy an acquittal?”
“Ooh! That sounded more like a sentencing than a question.” Mario chuckled, but he was on guard. “I know you disapprove of what I do, you’re not the first one. My work is to figure out if the person in front of me is guiltyas charged, and to defend them if I believe they’re not. I’m not trying to get them off the hook for what they actually did, only to present the case objectively. Sometimes it means pleading guilty to a different charge.”
“Yes, I know. Haggling about the facts, splitting hairs. But have you had cases where you changed your mind about your client after you agreed to represent them? Where you realized they actually are guilty as charged?”
“Twice. Both times I handed the case over to someone else in the firm.”
“Someone without your scruples.” Ryan nodded knowingly. “And you washed your hands of them.”
“Yes, Ryan, I washed my hands of them.” Mario was smiling very faintly. “If it wasn’t me defending them, it’d be someone else. It’s the very idea that these people deserve to be defended, that’s what bugs you.”
“Yes, it bugs me. It bugs me that how worthy they are and how well they’re defended is measured by the size of their wallets. Nobody made a fuss over the likes of Ivan Henry, not until thirty years of his life had been taken away and somebody decided the case would be good for their publicity. Do you do pro bono work?”
“Of course I do, but don’t let that fool you into thinking I might be a good person.” Mario was still smiling that faint smile, now with faintly narrowed eyes. “It’s almost a standard requirement for a lawyer.”
It occurred to Ryan that he’d gone too far. “Look, I didn’t mean to be a jerk. I have no idea what got into me. I’m sorry.” He really had no idea how he’d gone from curiosity to attacking Mario.
“In tequila veritas,” Mario offered. His smile was generous and contented, and he wasn’t squinting any more. “I appreciate an honest exchange with a scientist, a man of reason.”
“Shit, I’m no scientist,” Ryan protested in abject gratitude for seeing his insolence forgiven. “I have a front-row seat to watch the future of medical science in the making. I make sure the tests are done properly, but I don’t make decisions that could mean the difference between life and death. I get enough of a thrill working with actual scientists, but I’m not one myself,” he gushed in self-deprecation.
Mario seemed to ignore this. “You asked me how I can live with myself, defending scum who’ve killed and robbed people before and will go on to do so in the future?” His eyes were narrowed once more.
“Not quite in those words.” Ryan laughed, but it came out like the bleating of a fearful sheep.So this is how Mario goes on the offensive. You asked for it, buddy.
“But close enough. Close enough. You’re not the first to give me shit about being part of the problem. I thought you of all people would understand, seeing as there’s so much in common between your work and mine. Cancer is horrible but you’re not grossed out by it, you don’t get angry
at it and throw your hands up in the air and quit your job. Why should I? I’m fascinated by a criminal mind in the same way as you’re fascinated by cancer. Cancer is a criminal. It wants way more than its fair share, it wants to live forever and it will eat everything in its path. For my work I study something similar in human nature: greed and impatience. All crimes come down to greed and impatience. Like cancer, these can grow so fast they outgrow their own blood supply.”
“I agree, there are things in common.” Ryan felt his boldness returning. “But people who study cancer do so because they want to kill it.Kill it. They don’t spend time defending individual cancer cells that happen to be innocent of this or that mutation. You study crime because you want to serve some abstract idea of justice and innocence.”
“It’s not about theidea of innocence,” Mario said with frustration. “It’s not about the idea of anything. I want to find out what really happened, and to make it known.”
“But that’s a huge luxury, Mario! The future victims of your so-called clients are paying the price for this quest for truth of yours. That doesn’t bother you?”
“What would you have me do, change the justice system so only nice people get a fair trial?”
“Why did you become a defence attorney, not a prosecutor?” Ryan wondered why the question hadn’t occurred to him sooner. “You’d have the same opportunity to find out what really happened, and to make it known.” He was incredibly pleased with himself for making this discovery and for putting it to Mario so cleverly and bravely.
“It’s because I want to defend the innocent,” Mario proclaimed with theatrical pathos, and burst out laughing. “What, you don’t buy it? Good, because that’s bullshit. I became a defence lawyer out of spite. A perverse desire to prove people wrong in their assumptions. Their common-sense, commonplace assumptions about bad people doing bad things all the time, every time.”
“Oh, I buy that. You should’ve said so right away instead of letting me carry on and make an ass of myself. Proving people wrong in their commonplace assumptions, I’ll drink to that.” Ryan raised his glass and saw that it was empty. He asked the waiter for another tequila.
Through unspoken understanding they paused their conversation, lulled into peaceable stupor by their drinks and the warm humid evening. In the corners of their minds that were still sober they knew they’d been thinking about everything at once, contradicting themselves, stumbling over their words as they hurried to catch and pin down the iridescent butterflies of thoughts that seemed so rare and precious. Tomorrow, in the merciless light of day, they might decide that a lot of these profound truths were little more than gibberish. Certainly none of them were worth fighting over, worth ending what might become a pleasant acquaintance if not a friendship.
Mario discovered that he’d ordered a tequila of his own and that he rather liked it. It made him giddy and careless in a way that wine didn’t. Wine, while filling him with a warm sense of wellbeing, made him even more of a lawyer: he acted and spoke with added caution. He’d forgotten the reason for his earlier disgust with tequila; he remembered the worm at the bottom of the bottle but no longer associated it with the liquid in his glass, which no longer reminded him of formalin. A benevolent metamorphosis had taken place in what he thought were his established tastes. He closed his eyes and inhaled the smoke wafting from the pipe that a man at a neighbouring table was smoking.
“That’s some powerful stuff he’s got there. Almost enough to make you fall off the wagon,” he said with nostalgia.
Ryan looked at him with a polite question on his face, already knowing the answer.
“That’s right, I smoked myself all the way to emphysema,” Mario said with some pride. “The pleasure of smoking was supposed to be worth it, and itwas worth it, until I couldn’t breathe all that well any more. Some would call it a calculated risk. Which is just bullshit, word salad. Risk means that the outcome is uncertain. There’s nothing uncertain about smoking: it’s guaranteed to end badly.”
“So you really quit smoking, you’re not just taking a break?”
“Yes, I really and truly quit. I just didn’t light up any more. Not even one cigarette a day.”
“And they say cold turkey never works.”
“Cold turkey was the only way for me. I set myself a day to quit, and a month in advance I started doing research on how I was going to go about this. Because I couldn’t afford to fail. I quickly figured out the twelve-step programme wasn’t for me. Then I came across Augusten Burroughs’ bookThis is How, and it just clicked like a key in a lock. The guy was saying all the wrong things, all the politically incorrect things about will power and self-reliance, and downplaying the hold addictions have on you. I needed to be told just that, because those were all the right things for me. He said it would be horribly difficult, and it was. He said it would be simple, and it was. You simply do not light up.”
“I know the book! I listened to the CDs driving to work and back. But he says you can only succeed if you want something else more than you want the pleasure from your addiction. What was that something else for you?”
“You didn’t think there was a something else for me, did you?” Mario grinned.
“What? No—why did you ask me that?”
“Because I could see what you were thinking. The surprise. I know I don’t come across as a strong or passionate person.” There was no trace of lightheartedness in his voice. “One morning when I was shaving in front of the mirror I wondered what I’d look like as an old man. It made me rather curious. That’s gross, and scary, right? We’re like perpetual kids: we want to live long but never grow old, so most of us are afraid to imagine ourselves as old people. We’re supposed to spend our lives trying to recapture our youth, practicing age regression right until the moment we keel over. But I was way more interested in what I’d look like as an old man. I stared at myself in the mirror and I did an age progression: enhanced the wrinkles, imagined my hair all grey, put on a tasteful pair of glasses. I rather liked what I saw: a British country gent, all spruce and trim and wiry. Am I creeping you out yet?”
“It’s not exactly mainstream thinking. But no, you’re not creeping me out.” Ryan had to smile back. He rather liked his strange new acquaintance, and he’d forgotten why he was angry with him such a short while ago.
“Good. Because what I wanted badly enough to quit smoking was to become that old man one day, with all his wits and lungs still about him. That, and enough money to buy a little vineyard in some politically stable third-world country with the right climate. Yea, I’m really curious how this old codger’s life turns out.”
“I’ll drink to the old codger and his vineyard.” Ryan did. “Choose a nice country so I can visit you there.”
“You don’t even like wine.” Mario was smiling, but Ryan knew he’d assumed too much about their future friendship even if he’d said it as joke. However, Mario seemed to think nothing of it and was content to change the subject. “What brings you to Mexico by yourself?”
“Oh, the usual. A broken heart.”
“Awww, poor lamb. Who did the breaking?”
“What do you mean?” For a moment Ryan wasn’t sure if Mario was having a laugh or accusing him of something. His eyes weren’t laughing; they were fixed on Ryan.
“You don’t strike me as the victim type,” Mario explained. “So when a guy like you complains of a broken heart, I justhave to—”
“You just have to call his bluff! That’s fair. To answer your question, I did the breaking up, and now my heart is feeling it. Is that enough clichés for one day?”
“It’s plenty.”
“We were supposed to take the camper down to Baja,” Ryan explained. “It was Sam’s dream to swim in the Sea of Cortez. Maybe that’s what she’s doing now. Why not? I went on my holiday, maybe she decided to have one of her own. I hope she did. I left my cell phone in the camper outside LA so I wouldn’t be tempted to call her. Or to see if she’d called me.” Ryan had fo
rgotten that his cell phone was useless outside of Canada, that its uselessness had been the beginning of their breakup. “You think I’m poor or cheap for taking a hotel in town instead of a nice one like this, on the beach? But it’s not that. It’s because a place like this is for romantic couples. If I stayed here, I’d be miserable because I’m alone, looking from my balcony at the sunset over the sea all by myself.”
“Well, I’m staying here by myself, and I’m not particularly miserable,” Mario said with good humour. “But I can see what you mean. So what did you fight over?”
“It seemed very important at the time. It felt like we’d wronged each other very deeply. She was expecting me to propose, and nothing was good enough without that. I was just enjoying the whole trip like a fool, thinking everything was fine.” Ryan looked at his new friend for confirmation that he was right to feel wronged.
“I guess now would be a good time to tell you that you’re talking to a guy who’s been married and divorced twice, and never learned his lesson. Doesn’t even know what the lesson’s supposed to be.”
Ryan’s look told him that this was perfectly okay, that it was in fact a mark of superior wisdom, so Mario continued.
“You might wonder what the big deal is with this whole engagement ring and wedding thing, but to a woman it’s huge. It can feel like everything.”
Killer of a Mind Page 4