Twenty Centavos: A Mystery Set in San Miguel de Allende

by John Scherber

  “Paul, take a look at these.”

  “Wait Perry, what are coins like these worth?” said Bill Frost. “I mean, where have they been for the last 2000 years?”

  “Well,” said Perry, in that voice of the ultimate connoisseur that none of the rest of us could hope to match without a lifetime of study, “they’ve been in that small hole in Yugoslavia until about eight years ago. Coming out, in this condition, they’re basically worth three to twelve thousand dollars apiece. A few might go higher.”

  “Jesus,” said Bill. “What do you look for when you’re buying these?”

  “Well, rarity, of course, but also quality of the strike. They were all made by hand, with the celator, the striker, if you will, holding the cast metal disc between two dies and hitting it with a hammer. Quality was uneven from the day they were made. Naturally for your collection you want the best quality strike with the least wear.”

  I was amazed at their survival in this state but they still reminded me a lot of World War II propaganda. The psychology of brute force hasn’t changed much.

  “Paul, you’ll connect with these.” Perry pulled out the second drawer. “Here’s where the connoisseur’s eye really comes into play.” The others were looking at me as he said this, but he must have been referring to his own expertise.

  More gold, but of a different mindset. Maybe twenty coins, smaller in diameter, but thicker. The faces glowed with the flash of galloping horses, and the reverses were crowded with ripe heads of wheat, bent over in the wind, the motion palpable on the surface. The style of each leaped out with its own individuality. These were not from people who ever marched in formation or wore uniforms. I had never seen anything like them.

  “Think one word: the Celts. The untamed spirit of the British Isles, mostly around 40 to 60 A.D.--I never use that ‘Before Current Era’ bullshit. It’s B.C. or A.D. These were the people the Romans were running down. This was the soul of a different kind of England, one before welfare checks and housing estates, and dowdy old queens. And young ones. The original Brits had a lot of nerve.”

  Sometimes Perry surprised me. Barbara had once said to me that he thought of himself as a Renaissance prince, a collector on a grand scale, a true patron of the arts. Perhaps from the Houston branch of the Medici.

  “Most of these came from the estate of an Englishman named Mossop,” Perry continued.

  “He must have been quite a connoisseur,” I said.

  “Actually, his primary claim to fame was that he was the first man in Britain to own a metal detector. It was right after World War II and they had adapted the technology from hand held mine detectors. He didn’t know much about anything, but he had one great idea. Sometimes that’s all you need. He traveled to all the ancient sites and dug up whatever beeped. He had everything made of metal, from belt buckles to door knobs.”

  All of us looked blankly at Perry. I was trying to picture a Roman doorknob and not having much luck.

  “I went to the estate auction in London,” he continued. “The British Museum had first refusal on a lot of it.”

  “So,” I said, “that means the British Museum has a better example of all these coins, and that’s why they let you take them?”

  Perry looked chagrined. “Yes, unfortunately. But I guess if you have to be second best to someone...” It must have been a new experience for him.

  From below us on the terrace I could hear a group of mariachis singing an old Cuban song about two gardenias. We were in Perry’s study, a large room where the walls were old gold as well, and hung with seventeenth and eighteenth century devotional paintings and knightly ancestors of a kind fairly common in México, but rarely seen in this condition. No paint was chipped, and none of the canvases were bulged or dimpled. The frames were correct and of the period. They were as perfectly restored as the ones I had seen in Tobey’s Galeria Cruz. On another wall four Navajo rugs tried to fit in. I guess quality complements quality. Perry’s glance followed mine. I thought the scale of the rug designs overwhelmed the room.

  “All natural dyes, mostly late nineteenth century. That one on the left end is a very rare Two Gray Hills from about 1905.”

  In a tall cabinet near the door were six fine Mayan ceramic pieces. Most were of the same quality as I had seen at Tobey’s. A couple were a little more beaten up, missing minor parts here and there. I wanted to take a closer look, but Perry was still holding court at the coin cabinet. Something occurred to me.

  “Perry, have you ever thought about being an artist yourself?” I asked, thinking that collecting might be a substitute for artistic ability. You could own it, even if you couldn’t make it yourself.

  “Well,” he hesitated a moment as if recalling a former state of mind, “yes I did. But Dad needed me to go into the business. I was the only son.”

  “I suppose he wouldn’t pay for art school.” Just like mine, I thought. I’d gone on my own dime, working as a part-time cabinet maker.

  “Actually, he didn’t pay for any school. He thought that if I was going to run Watt Industries I needed to show I could make my own way. See, Dad had some oil drilling equipment patents that dovetailed nicely with what Hughes Tool was offering. He had worked for Howard when he first started out, and in the process he developed some good ideas of his own. I took up locksmithing and put myself through a degree in petroleum engineering. But the closest I ever got to art was being a collector. I guess it’s OK. You didn’t cross Dad. Maybe if my family had been poor I’d be a painter now.”

  “And still be poor.”

  “Possibly. It’s a long time ago, now. You make your choices.”

  “And collect your regrets?” asked Bill Frost, looking him in the eye. There was something I liked about Frost, and not all of it was on the surface.

  “Let me put it this way,” said Perry, after thinking about it for a moment. “When I took over Watt Industries after Dad died, it was like taking over someone’s truck full of goods, you know? The inventory was all there, the route was determined, all I had to do was drive it, make my deliveries and collect the money. But at that time it still said Del Watt Industries on the side of the truck. That was OK, but I wanted my own truck. In the end I drove Dad’s truck anyway, and I’ve done all right. The company stock’s tripled since he died, and it’s only been seven years. But I always took art and collecting even more seriously. I’ve reached the point where my eye is as good as anyone’s on this planet. I don’t mind saying that it’s really what I do best. Watt Industries is there to finance my habit. I dropped the Del part a year after he died. It’s a subsidiary of Perry Watt now. I’d set myself up against any so-called expert in any of the fields where I collect. Check my library some time; I’ve got more than 25 books on Navajo rugs alone, most of them out of print.”

  Bill Frost nodded, as if he were seeing a new side of Perry.

  Clare Mason was shifting his weight from one foot to the other as if this was more than he wanted to know. Walt Teller said nothing.

  I felt an arm curl around mine. “Can I talk to you for a moment?” Maya said in my ear.

  “Excuse me, Perry. Wonderful collection.” We headed back down to the piano room. “You’re the most beautiful woman here,” I said to her.

  “Better than the güera (blonde)?”

  “Even on her best day.” This was not quite true, but it may have reflected the fact that I was more interested in Maya than anyone else.

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to go soon, I’m feeling bad about Tobey and Marisol.”

  “OK. Let’s dance to a couple of these tunes for a moment because I want to check on something upstairs when the crowd thins.” She gave me a puzzled look, but then the piano player launched into These Foolish Things and we moved off across the floor, although there was not much foolish about Maya. She was an unusual mix of higher education and the kind of practicality that people with nothing needed to survive. I pressed her close and my hand moved up and down her back. Barbara drifted past on t
he arm of a gringo I didn’t know, and then he took her hand and they began to dance. The room was big enough to hold 30 couples comfortably, if they avoided the sofas.

  After ten minutes I saw Perry and the others come down the grand staircase and he went back to the bar and started mixing mojitos again. There was a satisfied look on his face as he worked. As much pleasure as he took in what he owned, he clearly needed to share it as well. It was important to him that we knew how much he knew, if we did.

  “Talk to Perry a little,” I said to Maya. “I don’t want him coming back upstairs. You know how you always say you can be very charming?” She nodded, smiling now. “This would be the occasion to turn it on.”

  “Show him a little skin?” But she knew that wasn’t what I meant.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary this time. He’s already got that picture.” I nodded at the wall over the piano.

  No one was watching me as I moved off to the kitchen, where I had never been, knowing that in a house of this size and pretension there would be a servants’ staircase. In the pantry, platters were being assembled with tiny sandwiches and miniature quiches. There were trays of champagne glasses. The kitchen was vibrating with activity. No one had time to look at me as I headed for the back hallway and climbed the stairs.

  On the second floor I emerged from a doorway that looked just like three others. I took note which one it was and crossed the corridor to Perry’s study. No one else was in view. I slipped into the room through the partly opened door and closed it behind me. The lights were still on and the coin trays were back in the cabinet. I scanned the two walls of bookshelves where Perry stored his expertise when he wasn’t showing it off, then took a survey of the room, trying to record the detail. I had a good visual memory from the exercises in art school where the model would take a break but the students would all keep painting from recollection. The trick was to focus on a particular detail, say the shape of an ear or a mole on a hand, and then place that detail in context. Some people thought it was voodoo, but with enough practice it could be done.

  My context this time was the desktop, and I felt a twinge of anxiety as I sat down. I opened a few drawers, but they contained nothing unusual. The top held a notepad with a leather cover, a thick fountain pen with an opalescent finish and gold nib, a phone with three lines, a Rolodex, and a silver framed picture of Perry and Barbara. She wore a voluminous wedding dress, her hair up and she was not much younger. They were standing next to a vintage Bentley, older than she was, in front of tall wrought iron gates. Through the gates the entry of a massive Georgian style brick mansion was visible at the end of a long drive. It had to be the Watt family compound. Georgian architecture always means old money, especially when it isn’t.

  I lifted the lid on the Rolodex and flipped through it randomly. The usual expatriates with phone numbers and spouse’s names in a neat masculine hand. Stopping at C, however, there was no card for Cross, Tobey. Under G, nothing for Galeria Cruz. Under Z, no Zacher, Paul. But under S, I found Sanchez, Maria. It had our current phone number, not her old one.

  I was not sure what this meant, the Watts’ acquaintance with Maya and me dated only two years back, but I was beginning to feel more like a common snoop than a detective, poking around in other people’s business when they had graciously invited me into their house. I had come back upstairs to examine the Mayan ceramics, which Perry glossed over when he gave his tour.

  I stopped and listened, then crossed to the cabinet. It was not locked. Of the six pieces, all but one were vessels. Two were cylinder forms, one squat and the other about twice as high. The shallow one had two minute chips on the rim. The exposed clay looked dark and earthy, not like the pale interiors of our own crockery. There was one figure, whether human or divine I couldn’t tell for certain; it may have been a vessel as well. I didn’t want to handle it to see whether the top came off. One was a shallow bowl or deep plate with incised animal figures. The other two were deeper bowls also with figures, one with jaguars, one with humans.

  I studied the incised figures in detail on each one, and it confirmed my first, cursory impression. Looking at them this closely, I wished I had examined the ones at Galeria Cruz better. But from what I remembered these could easily be from the same area and period.

  Everyone knows that fingerprints are unique. The combination of hand, eye, and mind leaves a distinctive mark too, but one that is not as well understood by the police and probably not admissible in a court of law. I had the strong feeling that these ceramics were all made by the same hand. As little as I knew about Mayan pottery, I still had little doubt about their common authorship--they had they same feel to me. I can’t explain it better than that. As I pushed the cabinet door shut I heard the creak of the parquet floorboards outside on the stair landing.

  I whirled around. To the right of the cabinet was a door fit flawlessly into the paneling; I slipped through it and found myself in a powder room. I locked the door and turned on the light. It was done in Perry’s understated style. Gold faucets rose like trumpets from the onyx counter and gold towel bars held mahogany-colored deep-pile towels. Liquid soap was available from a Baccarat crystal dispenser. I was straining to listen to someone moving around in the study, and as I turned to press my ear to the door I glimpsed something shocking in the mirror over the sink.

  Being a painter requires a fair degree of confidence and an outgoing temperament, since you’re also a salesman. But what I saw tonight was a nasty sheepish look on my own face, as if I had been about to slip a few of Perry’s Roman coins into my pocket or poke around in Barbara’s underwear drawer. It was not a look I had ever seen before in a mirror and not one I ever wanted to see again. I couldn’t imagine that a detective ever had that expression as he worked, and decided I had to change my frame of mind. A drawer in the study closed and then the hallway door opened and closed again. Then welcome silence.

  I waited a while without any idea whether the visitor had been Perry or just another snoop like me. When I opened the hallway door from the study a crack there was no one on the landing and I slipped out and went back down through the kitchen. In the great room more couples were dancing and I got no strange looks. No one had missed me. Perry was no longer at the bar, and Maya was at the piano talking to Clare Mason. I touched her shoulder.

  “I think I’m ready now. Let me say a few goodbyes.” Maya looked relieved. As I moved off I tucked a 50 peso note into an oversize brandy snifter by the music stand. The piano player smiled and nodded while he played. I found Walt and shook hands, promising to come to the house tour again soon. It was probably time for us to put our place on it. Suddenly the güera was by my side. She grasped my hand in both of hers and looked into my eyes. Her index finger was rubbing my pulse again, which didn’t fail to respond. Then my index finger was rubbing her pulse. This was her game. Some people would stick their face too closely into yours to make a point, Barbara would find something to touch. It felt like intimacy, but it was more like power. Whatever it was, it worked. Maya watched us narrowly from the doorway.

  “I have some business for you, something I think you’ll like,” Barbara said.

  “Hmmm?”

  “I’d like you to paint a nude of me, like you always do of Maya. Just for a record, you know? In case I don’t always look like this. What do you think? Perry will buy it, of course.”

  “Call me,” I said. “We’ll set something up.” She kissed me on the cheek, lingering half a second longer than necessary. “Great party,” I said. “I look forward to seeing you.” It wasn’t small talk, I already knew how to do the shadows. The skin tones would be challenging; I’d never painted a blond nude in México.

  As we moved toward the door something that had been bothering me all evening came into focus. San Miguel is a gossipy town. The gringo population of 7,000 acts like a town within a town. News travels rapidly. If Tobey had sold his gallery for a million dollars everyone would have been talking about it tonight, but no one had said
a word about his death, except Perry as we walked in. The silence was as big as a billboard; the underlying message was clear. Tobey had not been robbed, therefore he was murdered by a gringo. One of us. Maybe someone at the party. That was why no one brought it up, other than Perry’s brief mention.

  Outside the night was black. San Miguel after hours didn’t generate enough wattage to light the sky, although possibly Barbara did. I kissed Maya and we walked down the hill toward our house on Quebrada. The street name means broke or bankrupt. It seemed like a good choice when I bought there. Some months it still is, but it seemed like this wouldn’t be one of them.

  I thought about Perry and the difference between making and collecting. When I was first starting out I copied pictures I wanted to own, as a kind of test, I suppose. Some Georges de la Tour and other old masters, an Alfred Sisley, and a couple of Juarez Machado, a Brazilian painter whose show I had seen in Paris before I came to San Miguel. Even two Diego Riveras. I found I could copy just about anything, but it wasn’t the same as doing original work. Just collecting was probably even less satisfying. Maybe Barbara was part of Perry’s collection; one of the more satisfying parts.

  As for the Mayan ceramics portion of his collection, I couldn’t see how you could assemble six pieces by the same maker. Perhaps if they all came from one dig, or if the excavator had come across a buried potter’s studio. Or maybe the Mayans themselves had been collectors, and this group came from some wealthy household that had patronized a single preferred artisan. Unfortunately the only expert I had ever known was no longer available for consultation.

  “Did anyone else, besides Perry, mention Tobey’s death to you?” I asked as we came down Calvario to Calle San Francisco.

  “No. That’s odd, isn’t it? Maybe the gringos don’t talk about death at parties like we do.”