“You hope so. If half of what you say is true then you share her with a thousand other guys”
“I am sure of her.”
“What does she want?”
“Me.”
“Including house, salary and pension?”
“Only me,” I say stiffly.
“Come on Wester. Did you consider discussing it with Elaine?”
“She said that she will kill me if I leave her.”
“So you want to be ahead of her. Is it not a bit exaggerated?”
“She is serious.”
He nods “She loves you, though.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t love her anymore?”
“We are friends. Twenty-three years of marriage create a bond of course.”
“Do you fuck her?”
“Every night.”
“What?” He is surprised. “Have you got enough energy left for your diversion then?”
“Since I minimized food it goes a lot better.”
“A good cock is not a fat one.” Stan grins and his face regains its normal, pleasant expression. “Forgive me for laughing.”
“Please do. As long as you come up with a good idea.”
“Fight.”
“That is what I am waiting for,” I laugh. “This whole setup is meant to avoid a fight.”
“Indeed,” Stan says. “You want to leave with your young sweetheart, but you are too cowardly to tell your wife. So you want to kill her.”
“I am no coward,” I mutter.
“You said that Elaine will kill you if you leave her and to avoid that you want to kill her. Be a man and fight.”
“How? A duel?”
“Yes. You have done it before.”
I stroke my chin. After thirty years the scar of the sabre is a soft, beardless stripe. I greet with my imaginary sabre and stand at attention.
“Not with that,” Stan says. “Elaine must have a chance.”
I let my weapon down. “What do you mean?”
“I bought a couple of duel pistols in Brugge last month. Beautiful things. Old, maybe from Tjsechov’s time. No idea if they still work, but I can have them checked.”
“Absurd. This really is ridiculous, Stan.”
“Elaine might think differently. Make a proposal. Or don’t you dare?”
“It is not a matter of courage. It is weird. Suppose one shoots the other, what do we tell the police?”
“The truth. I will testify.”
“It’s insane. They’ll imprison us all.’’
But Elaine likes the idea. When she has ceased raging about my love for Ellen, the first woman she finds out about in our long marriage, she gives me the option: it is her or Ellen. In the last case they both have nothing because she will kill me. I tell her that I can’t leave Ellen.
“Try!” Elaine says. “Do all you can to save our marriage.”
“If you would not be so stern, we could save our marriage.”
“I want all of you, or nothing. The idea that you are having an affair is unbearable.”
“We’ll fight.”
She nods. We choose place, date and time: at 12 March at seven pm the duel takes place in our bedroom. Stan will be the witness. Elaine and I write a statement for the notary. I suggest recording the duel on video, but she does not want a second witness, not to mention one with a camera and she rejects it angrily. “Stan is enough,” she says. “And if we kill each other the notary will be the second witness.”
Elaine hates sports, but now she takes shooting lessons and practises every day in an obscure shooting club in the inner city. I don’t have to practise. I am a hunter and a good shot with a stern hand and the speed of reaction of a far younger man. But when I hold Stan’s gun for the first time, feel the weight and peer over the long barrel, doubt seizes me. This is ridiculous! Elaine and Stan are deadly serious. They talk about ballistics and trajectories as if they know what they are talking about. Stan proposes some shooting practice. He has the guns checked by an expert. They are really old, but the expert says that we can shoot ten times before the barrel bursts. That is, if we use the right bullets. Heavy bullets with a soft tip that cause horrible wounds.
“I’ll aim at your head,” Elaine says. “I do not want you to suffer.”
“Thank you,” I say seriously.
We shoot under the supervision of the expert in the cellar of his house. Elaine has learned at the shooting club. She holds the heavy gun in both hands, arms stretched, a little bow in the knees and she shoots three bullets in succession into the head of the dummy. It strikes me that the expert takes the duel for granted just like Stan and Elaine. A couple does not want to get a divorce and challenges each other for a duel. It has a bizarre beauty.
It really gives Ellen the creeps. She suggested stopping the affair for the time being until peace has returned. She wants to talk, but Elaine refuses to meet her and I convince Ellen that a conversation is useless.
On the 12 March Stan arrives in morning dress. I am also in morning dress. Elaine wears a new black costume that suits her adorably. For the first time in weeks I notice how beautiful she is. What a waste to shoot her.
Stan carries the guns upstairs. We follow him, Elaine first, I follow two steps behind. Stan places the box with the guns on the table near the window. He opens the box. Suitable, solemn gestures. The guns glow. They have a 30-cm barrel, hexagonal on the outside, perfectly round at the inside. They are identical, but Elaine chooses her weapon with care. I get the other gun. Stan loads the weapons. Each gun contains one heavy bullet with a soft tip. Horrible wound. I try not to think of it.
We have a big house. The rooms on the first floor are situated around a gallery. Our bedroom is as long as the house is: fourteen metres. One of the walls consists of a cabinet with mirror doors, which reach to the ground. We push our twin beds aside to create a wide path in the middle. Stan posts us. Elaine and I stand back to back on the path in the middle. As soon as Stan gives the signal we can begin to walk six steps. Then we turn and aim our guns. I am the first to shoot. It has been assigned by fate: heads or tails. Elaine did not move a muscle when the coin fell with my side up. I concentrate. Until tonight I saw it as a joke, but now the weird truth enters my brain in all violence. One of us will be carried out of this room, I thought that it would not be me, but I am not sure any more. Concentrate!
“One, two three, go, for Heaven’s sake,” Stan says.
We start to walk. Six steps. One, two, three, four, five, six. We turn at the same moment. Each of us holds the gun in front of the breast. Elaine lowers her gun. She stands there with the dignity of Mata Hari in front of the firing squad. Behind her back I see myself, six times in a slightly distorted image.
I shoot. The mirror bursts into splinters. The noise is deafening. Elaine stands there, pale as death, unharmed. I try to control myself, but I start to tremble. My image is in thousands of fragments behind her on the ground. My mouth is dry. I sweat. My heart beats as if it wants to prolong every second of life. I want to say something, scream, beg for forgiveness, but Elaine stands motionless, deaf to my silent appeal and points her gun. I close my eyes.
“Bang,” she says.
She unloads the gun and puts it back in the box. I stand as if I am cast in wax. Stan takes the gun out of my hand, cleans it with a cotton rag and puts it next to the other gun in the box. He bows to Elaine. He shakes hands with both of us and leaves with his guns.
Elaine takes my hand and leads me to the bathroom. She takes off my clothes and washes me like a child. Then she takes off her own clothes. We lay down on her bed. She pulls me against her body and says: “You dreamed”. My mouth is dry and my voice rasps when I say: “I dreamt that someone wanted to kill me.”
I put down my head. It fits in the hole of her shoulder. She hums a song from our childhood, very softly, in such a way that it sounds far away and nearby at the same time.
We fall asleep.
Translation by Josh Pachter
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The Deepest South
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
The sun, a perfect, orange-colored ball on the horizon, almost made up for the difficulty the breeze was causing me. I lit the third match and tried to cover the flame with my left hand. Alex had taken off his shoes and was squatting down, in deep conversation with a group of fishermen. He was speaking Spanish at full speed, eating his vowels, charming the three men. Seen from a distance he looked like the best vacuum-cleaner salesman in the world. He wasn’t. Halfway through the conversation, the monologue, he looked up and nailed me with those two blue eyes. I was about twenty yards from him, next to his abandoned shoes. I released the smoke from the cigarette in his direction; the wind blew it away.
I was already becoming accustomed to this relationship – distant, yet in a way affectionate – that turned us into phantoms, shadows of each other. Four days before, one of the lawyers who handles his father’s business had placed an envelope full of cash in front of me. “Alex will probably travel to Mexico sometime this week. Take care of him,” he said.
I didn’t like the lawyer’s tie, red dots on a metallic blue background, and I didn’t like his cross-eyed look. I liked even less his presumption that I knew who Alex was and why I had to take care of him. At any rate, as the sun entered through the cracks in the Venetian blinds in my Los Angeles office, the smoke from my cigarette made me remember a cup of steaming Mexican coffee I had drunk years ago.
Four days later Alex and I were looking at each other while the sun was setting on that beach some miles from Ensenada, in Baja California. If Alex was getting bored, soon we would be able to eat supper (at separate tables, of course) in some restaurant in Ensenada and I would be able to drink the coffee I remembered.
Alex seemed to get my message and, patting the fishermen on the back, walked towards his shoes. I didn’t move. Alex approached, reeling like a sailor in a Hollywood musical comedy, and picked up his shoes without looking at me.
“Dinnertime, shadow,” he said while speaking to the sea.
We walked toward the automobiles: his, a cherry-red Fleetwood convertible; mine, parked so close that it almost scraped his bumper, a green Oldsmobile that showed its scars and could have used a paint job.
I gave him a few seconds’ advantage, tossed my cigarette on the ground, took one last look at the sun which was beginning to set in the sea, and got into the car.
Alex was no vacuum-cleaner salesman on vacation south of the border. He was the only heir to the Fletcher supermarket chain. Not that it mattered to me, but this seemed essential to the lawyer who slipped the envelope with dollars across my desk. He offered me very little else: a photograph of a boy of twenty-three with wild, blond hair that seemed to want to rise into a horn over his forehead, and a little bit of chatter about how “reckless” and “unstable” Alex was, “how sick he had returned from the Pacific,” and “how bad it had been for him during the war in one of the Japanese concentration camps in Burma or the Philippines or Malaya.” When I tried to determine the exact nature of my obligations as nanny, I couldn’t find out anything more concrete. “. . . gets into too much trouble, you know? You can stop him from getting himself stabbed in some bad-luck brothel in Tijuana, that sort of thing.” When I asked whether Alex should know that I was following him, he answered, shrugging his shoulders, “Do as you wish. One way or the other, Alex will find out and I’m sure he’ll blame me. It’s difficult to hide things from Alex, as you’ll soon realize.”
Monday. Alex fulfilled the lawyer’s predictions and went south, first toward San Diego and later following the border to Calexico. He entered Mexico through Mexicali and stopped the Fleetwood right at Revolution Park, a few yards from the borderline. He rubbed his eyes as if he had just woken up and approached my automobile. Through the open window he said, “They told me that a China-Mex jumped that green fence seven times in one day. They captured him all seven times and sent him back to Mexico. He holds the local record. No one saw him, no one seems to know his name, but everyone knows the story. Maybe he never existed. I always wondered why he had to be Chinese. Why choose a Chinese guy for a myth?”
He didn’t wait for my answer and walked left toward the Hotel Palacio, carrying a suitcase. By the way he was carrying it, it must have been heavy. We ran into each other a half hour later in the hotel bar. I was weighing the possibilities of a margarita as opposed to a gimlet, when Alex made his appearance on the scene. The ceiling fans seemed to be bothered by arthritic pains. A pair of Central European refugees were sweating copiously while drinking an acid wine, their silent faces fixed on a horizon that must have been thousands of miles away. Just watching them made me hot, the worst kind of hot, sad and exhausting. A girl of about fifteen, probably German, was playing the piano in the corner and humming. Alex came over to me.
“I don’t know why the Chinese guy wanted to go to the United States. It’s much better down here. We’re the ones who ought to be jumping the green fence, not them,” he said. Then he sat down at the next table and in Spanish ordered a pitcher of sangria.
Mexicali at that time was a way station for refugees from all over Europe who were seeking permission to enter the United States. It had been, and probably still is, the trampoline for thousands of Mexicans who illegally cross the border to make themselves a few dollars in the north. Above all, it was a languid city; dirt was everywhere; clouds of dust tried to cover the poor tracks of progress and return the city to its ancient desert condition. It was a city where you heard songs in many languages, songs that were almost always melancholy.
That first day on Alex’s tracks turned into a pilgrimage that seemed absurd, erratic, but at other times motivated by some obscure design. He entered a shoe store and spent hours trying on Mexican boots, only to end up not buying anything. He stopped by the local newspaper and placed an announcement (for two dollars I got hold of a copy: “I’ve already arrived, Ana. I’m at the Palacio, Alex.”). He visited three doctors. (I duly noted the names and addresses and promised to stop by later on. One of them had a marvelous bilingual sign in the window: “We cure incurable diseases, the others cure themselves.”) He went to the fair on the outskirts of the city and with absolute seriousness dedicated himself to winning rounds in the shooting gallery, in between flirting sessions with the gypsy woman who ran the booth.
At the end of the afternoon, with his white linen suit and my black shoes covered with dust, we went walking toward the border, bound for the hotel like a pair of defeated gamblers. As we went inside, he looked at me with curiosity. His two blue eyes were shining with a strange intensity. I entered the bar to kick around some ideas and get rid of the taste of dust with a pair of margaritas.
“Marlowe, you work for that guero, that blond guy?” a man at the next table asked me as I was finishing the first drink. I should have looked up before. The tables around him were empty. I never like Mexican police, but Mexicans liked them even less than I did. The man had a big scar that went from his right eye to his throat. Through his open jacket you could see the butt of his .45.
“I don’t know. It seems he doesn’t like me very much.” I laughed.
The policeman smiled. “I don’t like him either.”
“And me?” I asked, returning the smile and signaling the waiter to bring me the next margarita.
“No, amigo. You’re in the business. With you, we always know what’s going on, and if we don’t, we guess, or we ask. No, the one I don’t like is that blond guy. He came here to go crazy. Do you know what he has in that suitcase?”
I kept on smiling. There’s nothing like candor when engaged in chit-chat with the police.
“He’s carrying a pile of dollars and a Thompson sub-machine gun. Ta loco el pendejo ese. That asshole’s crazy.”
“And why didn’t they take it away from him at the border?”
“He must have paid a mordida, a bribe. You figure it out.”
The heat kept me from sleeping.
The morning of the sec
ond day I ran into Alex in the corridor. The bathroom was around the corner and we were both on the way to shave. Alex wasn’t wearing a shirt; an enormous whitish scar crossed his back.
“You can call me Alex,” he said, turning his back to me, knowing that my eyes were mesmerized by the scar. “I’ll call you Marlowe. It doesn’t matter to me if that’s your name or not. It’s the name you used to register and that’s good enough for me. By the way, if you talk to the doctors I saw yesterday, they’ll tell you that I have a fatal disease. There’s no point trying to cure me; it’s a matter of months.” He was speaking without looking at me, not even granting me a gesture over his shoulder. He presumed that I, with my towel on my shoulder and my shaving brush and razor in hand, was following him.
“Try not to cut yourself shaving. There’s nothing that bothers me more than blood in the bathroom sink,” I said.
He laughed forcefully. Neither of us could shave. There was a Mexican in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and playing the guitar. He had the face of a man with few friends. Disturbing him didn’t seem like a good idea.
In the afternoon he took off in his Fleetwood at seventy-five miles an hour down the terrible roads that go to Ensenada, crossing canyons and desert. Every once in a while, despite the best efforts of my Oldsmobile, I lost sight of him.
We got to Ensenada as it was getting dark. At the entrance to town he swerved off the road and drove directly onto the beach. I took all the time in the world to light a cigarette, because I hadn’t been able to enjoy one during the roadside chase that afternoon. Alex appeared in between the shadows; he seemed annoyed that I hadn’t followed him.
“I’m in love with a woman who lives around here. Her husband is a famous Mexican poet. He threatened to kill me if he saw me near his wife again. What do you plan to do, Marlowe?”
His eyes sparked with fury. He was about to take a walk when I landed a direct hit on his jaw. He collapsed in silence onto the white sand. I walked along the beach, guided by the lights of a cabaña some two hundred and fifty yards away.
The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Page 42