The Croning

by Laird Barron

  Not so, as it turned out. He spent a frustrating eight hours routed around the labyrinthine complex of tunnels and offices above and below the main university structures, finally landing in the subbasement cubbyhole of a junior assistant to an assistant of some middle manager of a scarcely spoken-of tentacle of the bureaucracy.

  The alcove was dimly lit and hot as a furnace room, which considering the location, meant the boiler might’ve been perking along nearby. A pallid functionary showed him a seat at a desk mostly obscured by piles of folders and loose-leaf parchments. There Don waited, slumped and battered and beginning to lose his mind with aggravation and no small measure of fear for Michelle’s imagined plights. He chewed the end of his tie in frustration, embarrassedly dropping it when an ascetic, elderly gentleman in a dark suit emerged from the stacks, silent and graceful and pale as a deep-sea fish and took a seat on the other side of the desk.

  The elderly man wore a pair of tiny glasses that rendered his eyes quite strange. He leafed through papers atop the general stack, adjusting his glasses periodically. Presently, he fixed Don with the cold beady gaze of a bird examining a worm and said in cultured English, “I am señor Esteban Montoya. I am in command of campus security. You require my assistance.”

  Don noted the choice of ‘command’ and the customarily interrogative phrased as a declaration, and the tomb-like confines squeezed in a bit tighter. “Yes, I’m Don Miller and my—”

  Señor Montoya wagged his finger. “No, no. Do not bore me. I know about you, señor. I know of this wife of yours as well. You’ve annoyed my staff for many hours today. Asking questions. Now I ask the questions. Start again, por favor.” He didn’t raise his voice, merely allowed ice to inform it.

  “Uhh, right. My wife is missing.”

  “Your wife is not missing, señor.”

  “She’s been gone for…” Don counted the hours on his fingers because he was too tired to trust his calculations. “Over thirty hours.”

  “I see.” The way señor Montoya stared beadily and coldly indicated he did not see.

  “No phone call. That’s really why I’m worried.”

  “Because she went shopping or sightseeing in our lovely city and has not contacted you. Perhaps you missed her call while away from your hotel.”

  “Calls are being forwarded to the front desk while I’m out. I checked an hour or two ago. Still nothing.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?”

  “Frankly, señor, I think perhaps you are excited for no reason.”

  “Well, I don’t know how it’s done here, but where I come from—”

  “San Francisco, USA.”

  “Right. In the USA, if a man’s wife goes off in the morning and doesn’t return for thirty hours, we alert the proper authorities. It means something might be amiss.” Don was flushed and his dander was up. The official’s cool, condescending demeanor almost made him hope Michelle was in trouble (God forbid!). He didn’t wish to imagine the insufferable arrogance Montoya would exhibit when she came prancing along, blithe as a you please.

  “Oh. That is what you do in the USA. Has this happened before?”

  Don hesitated. “Er, not like this.”

  “So it has happened.”

  “But thirty hours! And no call! And nobody here has even heard of Professor Trent! How is that possible?”

  “Your wife is an anthropologist. Well regarded. And you, señor?”

  “Didn’t you say you knew?” Don and the official stared at one another. Don sighed. “Geologist. I work for AstraCorp.”

  “That is not very exciting.”

  “No, it’s not. Well, sometimes. There’s the caving. That can be hairy.”

  “I’m sure.” Señor Montoya scribbled something with a pencil stub. He removed his glasses. The sharpness of his gaze suggested that the glasses functioned as costume jewelry. “Professor Trent, you say?”

  “Yes! Thank god! I thought either I or everybody in this place had gone mad. Yes, Professor Trent. You’ve heard of him.”

  “Of course. He works in Natural Sciences.”

  “That’s swell. We find him, we find Michelle. They’re investigating some ruins. I don’t think she said which ones…”

  The old man clucked disapprovingly. “You let your wife run away with Professor Trent? Muy mallow. He is muy handsome. He’s Swedish.”

  “Swedish?”

  “Si, señor. Swedish. Professor Trent is popular with the señoritas. The faculty know to keep their wives far away.”

  It didn’t seem possible Don was hearing these words come from the official’s lips; it was too dreamlike, as if he’d fallen asleep at the hotel and was simply in the throes of a nightmare, any moment Michelle would flip on the lights, or leap into bed and shake him awake for the tale of her adventures.

  Señor Montoya waited, unblinking.

  Don squared his jaw. “Fine. You don’t want to help, I’ll go to the cops. I didn’t want to involve them, didn’t want to make a fuss, but okay.” He stood and straightened his jacket.

  “Wait,” said Montoya. “Perhaps we are hasty.” He slipped his glasses over his nose and smiled, not particularly happily, but a degree or two warmer. “You don’t understand. The policia are… Let us say, unreliable. They will want money or they will do nothing. As you say in America, sit on their hands.”

  “Yeah, that’s what we say.”

  “I shall help you. It must not be held against me that the University was discourteous to a guest.” Montoya clapped his hands briskly and dialed the phone and began speaking swiftly in Spanish to whomever answered. The conversation concluded quickly. He said to Don, “I have friends in the policia. These men are retired, so have plenty of time to assist you. Here, I shall give you their address. Go to them and they will escort you, help with the locals, smooth any difficulties. The city is beautiful. She is also perilous for foreigners, especially after dark. These men, my associates will keep you from coming to harm.”

  “That’s gracious of you, señor Montoya. Perhaps I should speak with the faculty…Trent’s supervisor. As I said, I’m not even certain which ruins they’re visiting.”

  Montoya picked up the phone. He spoke rapidly, and impatiently, or so it sounded, and scribbled more notes all the while not breaking his gaze with Don, not blinking his cold eyes. “I apologize, señor Miller. Most of the administration has departed for the day. Professor Trent’s secretary provided an itinerary. Unfortunately, no site was listed and I am unaware of these mysterious ruins you mention. There are many unusual attractions here.” He tore a square of notebook paper and handed it over. “Some of those establishments are notorious. You will need Ramirez and Kinder, I think.”

  There wasn’t much for Don to do thusly confounded by the certainty and finality of Montoya’s statement. Deflated, he thanked the elderly gentleman and spent half an hour negotiating the subterranean maze before pushing through an unmarked service door into soft, purple twilight. He rented a taxi and hove off to track the policemen as Montoya had directed. The taxi driver frowned upon receiving the address and muttered sourly, but he threw the car into gear and careened through the labyrinth that comprised the surface streets of the city. Meanwhile, Don blotted the rivulets of sweat cascading down his cheeks and held onto the door strap for dear life.

  He was dropped in a strange and largely unlighted neighborhood in a district he wouldn’t have recognized in broad daylight. The street was unpaved and white dust covered everything, turning gray in the quickening gloom. A cat slunk through weeds in the cracked sidewalk, and a Mexican flag rustled limply where it hung from a deserted balcony rail. Faintly came the strains of a man and woman shouting and bits of music and canned laughter from a radio show, drifting through a window seven or eight stories up, the only one with any light shining out. This was disquieting—Don was wearily accustomed to the hustle and bustle of the mighty city, the pell-mell crush of millions of citizens packed like ants into a colony. Such silence, such emptiness, w
as unnatural, was claustrophobic and deafening.

  He spied the twinkle of the cityscape between canted and decrepit brick apartments. The lights of the center of town appeared as remote as the constellations glacially coalescing overhead. This celestial glow permitted him to shuffle across the rutted avenue and barely make heads or tails of the building numbers. None of them bore titles, just numerals bolted or painted onto stucco or wood, if at all. The alleys were black cave mouths and odors of urine and decay wafted from them and his eyes and nose watered and he covered his mouth with a handkerchief. Someone whispered to him from the shadows. A trashcan lid clattered across his path, rolling on edge, rolling fast.

  “Oh, Michelle,” he said and picked up the pace, dangerous as that might be, and soon decided he was at the right door because it was made of rotten wood, its white paint peeling like dead skin, and because it was the only door in the wall that was otherwise crisscrossed with fractures and blurry graffiti and a few windows with iron grilles. No handle, though; the door fit square into the frame, rusty keyhole awaiting a key he didn’t possess. Don was ashamed at the panic rising with helium lightness through his body, but the person in the alley called again, slightly louder, and there was an intercom with the letters worn off the placard, no taxi in sight, no nothing except acres and acres, and row upon row of menacing architecture. So he started pressing buttons. After a while, and a series of hang-ups, garbled responses, or plain static silence, a buzzer buzzed in the guts of the building and the horrid white door clicked open and he ducked through.

  The door didn’t have a handle on the inside either. “What?” he said, his voice rebounding unpleasantly from the walls. He stood in a caved-in foyer that smelled almost as putrid as the alley had and was illuminated by a greenish-red light in a distant aperture. The floor was a partially skinned aggregate of tile, slate and gravel littered with broken glass and shreds of packaging and tatters of fliers. The walls were soft and pocked, corroded rebar exposed. A rickety metal staircase spiraled up and up into the green-red gloom. The radio program he’d heard outside echoed from the invisible upper levels, muffled.

  Away from the icy stare of señor Montoya, this entire endeavor seemed less of a wise idea with each passing second. Here was the kind of place a dumb, bumbling American might easily find himself set upon by vagabonds and held for ransom, or simply murdered and dumped in a ditch. He seriously wondered if it would be better to brave the unlighted streets and find a police station, or a payphone to contact the consulate and get the highest authorities involved. However, there was the small matter of no door handle or evident method of egress from the squalid foyer.

  In his moment of doubt, the clang of a heavy door thrown wide rebounded down the stairwell and the music and recorded laughter tripled in volume. Footsteps and creaking approached at length. Minutes passed. From the shadows above, a man said, “Hey, gringo. Get your ass up here, pronto!”

  “Who goes there?” Don said, not quite sufficiently gullible to traipse farther into the dark without verifying the identity of the speaker first. Ransoms and ditches, ransoms and ditches. Might already be too late.

  “Listen, amigo—this is a bad neighborhood. There’s some muchachos in the alley wanna slit your throat or make sweet love to your lily white ass and they gonna be tryin’ the door. I ain’t plannin’ on hangin’ out here all night. Come on!”

  The man didn’t sound Hispanic and that threw Don until he recalled that Montoya had referred to the contacts as Ramirez and Kinder. Etymologically speaking, Kinder was awfully Caucasian, and that was close enough for Don, especially as he was anxious about the potential appearance of thugs who wanted to make love to his ass or cut his throat, or first one then the other. Someone knocked on the door and dragged what sounded like a nail or knife across the wood. Don ascended the stairs to the second floor landing in three or four bounds. He stopped short of a man in a turban, v-neck silk shirt, cotton harem pants, and grimy sandals.

  The fellow was extraordinarily pale, as if he’d given a bonus quart at the blood drive, and his eyes glinted blue as chips of ice. He was lean and his nose hooked at precisely the right length to be character-enhancing rather than repulsive. His voice was husky and raw; a drinker’s voice. “Yeah, you’re him. I’m Ramirez. Follow me.” Don didn’t have an opportunity to reflect on this turn of events as Ramirez turned and began to climb with the speed and agility of a mountain goat, remarking over his shoulder around the fifth floor, “Hug the wall, whitebread. Some of the supports are comin’ unscrewed. Long way down.”

  Don, soaked in sweat and hallucinating from exhaustion, lacked breath to respond. He hugged the wall, though, and gladly. Sixteen months since his last caving expedition and he had seen his stamina decline to the degree his belly ever so slightly pooched over his belt. Michelle hadn’t commented, although he suspected she wasn’t impressed.

  On the seventh floor, Ramirez led him through a swatch of near-perfect darkness and into a shabby studio. Wallpaper hung in loose flaps and bare bulbs dangled by wires from a water-stained ceiling. A radiator thumped and rattled under the single prison cell window. In the corner a stove and antique fridge sat covered in mold. A vinyl couch, gradually coming unstuffed, and two wooden chairs were the only furniture. Boxes of newspapers were stacked waist-high, their surfaces layered with the white dust. The floor was bare wood, notched and scarred and stained. A naked woman sprawled on pile of blankets near the fridge. Her hair was so blonde it was nearly white. She snored. A cockroach balanced upon her thigh, preening its antenna. On the wall above her, a nude Aztec princess and a jaguar in velvet. Doom sliding over a purple horizon, its wormy shadow a bruise upon the princess’s bare shoulder.

  A thick man in a serape sat on one of the chairs. His hair was blue-black, and thick and shaggy and fell to his waist. He hunched over a long, primitive stone knife, sharpening it with a whetstone. He glanced at Don and returned to his business.

  “Kinder, it’s our wayward gringo. Gringo, this is Kinder. Wanna drink, amigo?” Ramirez didn’t wait for a reply. He threw the bolt on the door and peeked through the spy hole, as if it were possible to see a damned thing on the pitch-black landing. “Yeah, all clear. Sometimes the pendejos follow us. That’s when I reach for this.” The pale man slid a nine iron from a bag stuck between two piles of boxes, brandished and slid it back into place. “Okay. Time for a drink.” He stepped over the snoring woman and retrieved a bottle of tequila from the shelf. He squinted, then poured some booze into a dirty glass and brought it to Don. Don had a sip against his better judgment. When in Rome, and so forth. Ramirez swilled directly from the bottle and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and belched. “Yo, Benny, wanna slug?”

  “Uh-uh.” Kinder spat on the stone and kept grinding. He might as well have been hunkered near a prairie campfire. The muscles in his shoulders flexed and rippled through the fabric of the serape.

  Don couldn’t tell if that was a petrified worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle or a trick of the light. “Señor Montoya says you gentlemen can help me with a problem. He says you are policemen.”

  “Retired,” Ramirez said. He didn’t appear old enough to rate retirement. “Montoya sent you over here. That was dumb. We woulda come to you. But whatever, hombre, whatever. What’s your problem, uh?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “No, amigo. Montoya only said a gringo pendejo was making waves at his office and we needed to take care of it. We gonna take care of it. You got money, right? American dollars. No pesos.”

  “Huh? Wait, he sent me to you because the cops would shake me down for cash.”

  “Damned right those pigs would. Never ever trust the pigs, my friend.”

  “But… You want money. And you’re a cop.”

  “Of course we want money. That’s how it works. Grease the wheels so they roll, amigo. I’m no pig, I gave that up moons ago. Trust me, I know how the pigs think. You’re way better off with us. You’re with the angels now. Right, Benny boy?”

>   Kinder spat and slid the blade across the stone.

  “Okay, man. How much you got?” When Don hesitated, Ramirez rolled his eyes and snapped his fingers. “Let’s go. How much?”

  “Uhhh… Thirty-five, American. A couple hundred pesos.”

  “You…say what? Thirty-five American?”

  “Thirty-five American.”

  “Throw him out.” Kinder didn’t bother to glance up this time.

  “What the hell you doin’ here?” Ramirez said. He took away Don’s glass.

  “Montoya sent me—”

  “Oh, for fuck sake. Yeah, yeah. Why?”

  “My wife. She’s missing.” Don found it difficult to form words. He swallowed and set his jaw. “I can write you a check for more. Or get it from the hotel, or whatever. Or, you know what? Forget it. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Slow down, don’t be mad. I’m yankin’ your chain. Montoya said to take care of you, that’s what we do. Benny’s into reruns of Bob Hope. After he listens to his show, we talk. Come to an agreement.”

  “This was a bad idea. The worst. Thanks for the drink. I’ll show myself out.” The very idea of navigating the stairway of certain death terrified Don, but he wasn’t going to accept any more grief from these seedy characters. Likely true that the police would be unsympathetic, yet such was his predicament that calling in the cavalry, an cavalry, appeared the only tenable option.

  “Hang on, hang on. Thirty-five is something. Not much, but something. I dunno. Maybe I could make a call. Besides, you’ll trip and break your neck if I don’t go with you. Montoya might not want it like that. Gotta picture of your woman?”

  “Here.” Don sighed. The mention of the stairs clinched it, though. He thumbed through his billfold and handed Ramirez a snapshot of Michelle standing on the lawn in her blue sundress, croquet mallet in hand, a floppy hat shading her face.

  “Mother Mary, that’s a fine-looking woman,” Ramirez said in a reverential tone. He scooted over to Kinder and showed him the photo.