Twenty Centavos: A Mystery Set in San Miguel de Allende

by John Scherber

  Steadying himself with one of the bars, he paused to consider for a moment whether or not he should go on, and at that instant, the end of the pipe he was facing dropped quickly away as the entire 25 meter section turned end over end into the ravine, passed the first cataract and looped again into the second, cracked in half, and then into three more sections, which all fell like a train wreck into the stream at the bottom of the third cataract.

  Licenciado Delgado had managed to hold on to the interior bars through the entire fall. The bar held almost all the way down, breaking free only on the final shock, but the impact in the shallows at the gorge bottom flattened the section of pipe and punctured it in several places from rocks in the stream bed. If it had been daylight, the two federal officers would have seen the immense cloud of rusty red dust hovering over the canyon.

  Even though the fall had broken three ribs, his left ankle, and his collarbone, as well as given him a dandy concussion, Licenciado Delgado experienced no discomfort as he lay in the stream bed below the third cataract. His section of the pipe had been reduced to about five meters long and had a distinctly oval, rather than round, profile. Flakes of rust thickly covered his black clothes. The discomfort would begin in an hour or so when he regained consciousness. He was more fortunate than he knew, since it was only the lower half of his body that was under water.

  * * *

  When Licenciado Delgado awakened he didn’t realize in the dense darkness that his vision was blurred, but he knew from the intense pain that wracked his body that he was no longer trying to escape the federal officers. They had become his only hope of getting out of the stream alive. He tried to yell, but the fractured ribs limited his breathing to shallow gasps and the only sound that came from his mouth was a muted wheeze. It didn’t escape the ends of the pipe.

  Nearly two hours later he heard one officer calling to another and abruptly a powerful flashlight swept over his body. It was not until dawn that the medical team was able to reach him and strap him to a stretcher. Another hour and a half was required to muscle the stretcher out of the gorge and into the waiting ambulance. Diego Delgado’s career as an antiques dealer had come to an end, as had his career as an officer of the judicial police.

  Having done his duty, Perry Watt had been home sleeping peacefully for hours.

  Chapter 18

  The home of Julian and Laura Soames was on Loreto, only two long blocks from our place on Quebrada, with a faded reddish-brown facade and two tall grilled windows on the first floor and three on the second. The windows were framed in old cantera stone, blurred from centuries of weather and fractured in places. The double doors of the entry looked like mesquite and possibly eighteenth century; relatively recent additions, judging from the look of the rest of the house. As I stood there I began to wonder again what my standing in this investigation was, not sure whether I myself would talk to someone like me in these circumstances. The best official title I could muster was friend of a friend of the spouse of the deceased.

  After a couple of rings he answered the door. Soames was a short, thick-chested man in his mid-fifties, bearded and wearing steel-framed glasses that may once have been fashionable and perhaps were about to be again. He had coarse, sandy hair, just touched with gray here and there. The beard was mostly gray, and he had no mustache, giving him a farmer look. I had met him a few times at various gatherings, and he was friendly enough, although he hadn’t seemed comfortable in a large group. His wife Laura, taller than Soames and with short auburn hair, was not in evidence this afternoon. I remembered her as looking as if she had once been very attractive but hadn’t held up well. Maybe the air here was too dry.

  “Come in,” he said. We shook hands. He had a firm grip, but his fingers were thick and stubby. He would never play the piano.

  We went up the two deeply worn stone steps into a living room that ran across the width of the house. The ceiling was probably 18 feet high, with an ornate stone fireplace at the side opposite the entry. The ceiling beams bore traces of decorative painting that I could not quite make out at that distance. Bookshelves lined the walls up to eight feet and the deep leather chairs and two matching sofas seemed not quite to the scale of the room. Probably not much would be. The coffee table was an ancient door four inches thick, still bearing its iron strap-work, thickly varnished over.

  “You haven’t been here before, have you?” he asked.

  “Never. It looks like a very old house.”

  “It is. That’s what appeals to me. I can’t quite say for certain that Cortés slept here, but he could have. I’ll give you the tour.”

  I wondered whether the realtor had told him this. Cortés had died in 1547, five years after the town was founded. Although it was an old street, Calle Loreto wouldn’t have been thought of yet at that point. Was Soames a little gullible and had it influenced his purchase of ceramics?

  On the far end the living room led directly to the narrow end of the dining room, which was twice as long as it was wide, with walls that had been taken down to the bare stone. Or it was possible they had never been plastered. Two and a half stories up, the ceiling was barrel vaulted in the same stone. It almost felt like it should be part of a monastery, and maybe it had been. A small sixteenth century abbey serving the needs of the mule drivers bringing silver down from the capital at Guanajuato on the way to Vera Cruz.

  On the long outside wall a massive sideboard ran from one end of the room to the other. I couldn’t place the style of the figures carved in deep relief on the doors, but it had obviously been made for this room and could easily have held four pair of the tall silver altar candlesticks that Maya thought were too large for Mrs. Harris’s dining room. Soames had chosen hammered copper vessels instead. On the opposite wall an arched doorway led to the small tiled kitchen, which was lit by a tall shaft leading to a skylight. Other than this there were no windows in the room.

  Many people in San Miguel leave their stone or tile floors bare, but Julian Soames had covered almost every inch with a large number of old Persian rugs, most of them worn and almost threadbare. They gave house the feeling of having been lived in for generations with the same furnishings. You could walk from room to room without making a sound and you almost expected to see hunting dogs on the furniture.

  In two corners of the dining room circular balconies projected from halfway up the wall. But the dominant feature was a tall pine carving of the Mayan God of Maize, bracketed with iron fasteners into the stone. It did not look very old, but it certainly fit the feeling of the house. After all my paintings for the show, he looked like an old friend.

  Soames saw my look. “I got that from a Mayan carver in Campeche in 1996. He’s dead now.”

  “Have you traveled in the Yucatan much?” I asked.

  “I did years ago. My wife liked it a great deal, but I found after a while that the climate bothered my asthma. I stopped going down. I guess I was tired of the people too. Seems easier now to just hang out with the Americans up here. My Spanish was never that good. Too many verb tenses, don’t you think? Doesn’t always make sense to have that many ways to say something.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to this. Maybe if blunt were a verb tense he could have gotten by with just that one. The subtleties of Spanish verbs can be difficult, but it seemed to me they were just part of the richness of the culture. Méxicans had a lot of ways to say what might happen under certain circumstances, few to say what absolutely would. None that were take it or leave it blunt.

  Beyond the dining room, a hallway led to a bathroom and a large bedroom. The bed was held by a black metal frame with mosquito netting over the top and tied back like draperies at the four corners. A sleekly modern glass wall with French doors in black steel frames led to a small garden area with sheer stone walls on three sides. It probably caught the sun for an hour a day. I preferred a garden to be more spread out, so it didn’t seem like I was lying at the bottom of a shaft. But my house was about 150 years later than this one, from a tim
e when the conquerers were feeling more secure, able to stretch out a bit and relax without worrying about the Otomi coming through the windows at them with hatchets.

  “This is the guest room,” said Soames. “I haven’t had many guests since Laura left. In fact, I can’t think of any.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “She went off with a German tourist she met at the house tour. Sent me a postcard from Guadalajara. His name was Wolf.”

  “Sounds appropriate.” I was trying to sound sympathetic but I didn’t know what else to say. His manner was matter-of-fact, not looking for sympathy. We went up a stairway next to the bathroom to a sunlit landing roofed with glass. One bedroom over the living room faced the street and had a glass door opening onto one of the balconies halfway up the dining room wall. The other was evidently the master bedroom. It also had a Juliet balcony to the dining room and a glass wall with another balcony overlooking the small garden I had seen below. On the back wall of the house was a bathroom and dressing room, and on the inside wall a display case with several old swords and daggers and two Mayan ceramic pieces.

  “I think these are what you mentioned on the phone,” he said. “I got these from Tobey Cross a couple of years ago. They’re probably the best things I have.”

  The ceramics had the look of Ramon Xoc. I didn’t exactly feel like an expert in the Mayan style yet but I was definitely developing a feel for Ramon’s work. Even though they both lacked the loopy incised figures I had seen on many of the other pieces, hand made things do have the look of the person who made them. It’s a subtle thing, and difficult to define. Maybe it was just the concept that I was seeing, since the ceramics bore no tool marks. There was nothing like, say, a particular brush stroke that would help identify a painter, like Van Gogh or Monet.

  “Let me take them out for you,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve handled things like this before.” I guess that was his way of telling me not to drop them.

  He opened the case and placed a three legged bowl in my hands. It was lidless and the edge was ragged for a couple of inches along the top where chipped clay was visible through the paint and glaze. The bottoms of the feet were worn a bit, too uniformly, I thought, as if they had been rubbed over with an abrasive. Other than that, nothing about it specially suggested Ramon Xoc, yet I still felt they were from his hand. I gave it back to Soames.

  “What was Tobey able to tell you about these?” I asked.

  “Well, he felt they were both northern Mayan, probably from the State of Tabasco. Sixth to eighth century, so not early, in fact, past the classic period. He got them from a collector in Mérida and they’ve never been recorded. The one in the case has two legs replaced. I don’t handle it much. That’s always the vulnerable spot, of course.”

  “Yes. And you weren’t ever moved to buy anything more from him?”

  “I had bought these weapons from him earlier, and I thought I might add to that part of my collection, but then he couldn’t come up with any more pieces I really liked. He had a spur that I considered for a while, but then I decided I wanted more arms.”

  “How was he to deal with?”

  “Knowledgeable but rather cold, I thought.”

  “Did that bother you?”

  “I didn’t think so at first, but it may have as time went on. He had a take-it-or-leave-it sort of attitude. I guess people may have said that of me as well, when I was in business. I didn’t mind. I can decide things pretty well for myself. I don’t need anyone to stroke me a lot just to make a purchase. If I like a thing I buy it. I always have. And I don’t like to quibble about price the way everybody does down here.”

  “They must have been expensive.” I already knew what he had paid for them from the office records.

  “They were. But my bias is for the very old things. It’s the same appeal as this house. Some of these walls, maybe all of them, go back to the earliest days of San Miguel.” Here it was again. Was it that he absorbed some of the pedigree of the house? We came back downstairs and sat in the living room. Soames was wearing faded gold corduroys, worn and baggy at the knees, and oddly, a crisp white shirt. I couldn’t think when I had last seen a white shirt in San Miguel, except on a waiter. It didn’t seem like he was about to leave for work at Tio Lucas or the Santa Monica. I’d always heard he was well-off.

  “He tried to interest me in some pictures as well, but they were mostly eighteenth century and they would have seemed too modern for this place. Anyway, I had already owned a large number of eighteenth century paintings in a Georgian house I restored in Baltimore. I wanted to live in a different period here.”

  “You had no disagreements with him?”

  “Why, do you think I killed him?” He spoke without hesitation, looking me in the eye, but his face held no expression and his tone of voice did not change. It was as if what I might think was not that important to him.

  “No, I don’t think that, but I am trying to get a feel for his business. When his widow asked me to look into this I found that his dealing activities were veiled and she knew practically nothing about it. I’m wondering why.”

  “I can’t tell you that. Maybe he just liked his privacy. Maybe his clients did too, and that certainly included me. But I will say that I’ve pretty much always been able to do the business I wanted to do without killing anyone. Seems excessive. There’s usually a less complicated way. Besides, murder can have unintended consequences. I prefer that all my consequences be intended.”

  There seemed no reason to not believe him, especially the last part. “What sort of business were you in, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Residential property, mainly. When I first came to Baltimore in the seventies there was a wave of house restoration just beginning, and there were many properties for sale in terrible condition. You couldn’t get a mortgage on anything like that, of course. The real estate business was being done on a contract for deed basis, at least in that neighborhood. The sellers all carried their own paper. It was hard to get insurance. The blacks often thought they were being gentrified out of their own turf. I suppose the locals think the same thing here, not that it matters. People without means always move on to cheaper properties. I certainly did before I had any money and I never resented it.

  “But there was money to be made by fixing them up and turning them around quickly to people with more money than time or ability, who wanted to be seen as on the cutting edge of a trend. I had a great fondness for Georgian buildings then and I kept the best of the restorations for myself. Laura and I had a lovely mansion with formal gardens, lots of boxwood hedges and a summer kitchen at the back of the lot. Brick pathways. It was built in 1730. Only middle-aged by San Miguel standards. We entertained a great deal then.” He gazed into the cold fireplace.

  “Don’t you ever miss it?”

  “Not really. I got tired of surrounding myself with other people’s ancestors. I do miss the entertaining, though. This was a good house for it.” He began to stroke one of the leather pillows at his elbow. “If it weren’t for that Wolf...”

  “I suppose he said it like a V.”

  “Never really saw him, but yes, it would have been Volf. So where are you in this? Any ideas?”

  “I have Tobey’s customer list. The killer’s name must be on it. But they’re not all in San Miguel. Could be anywhere in México, practically. I’m hoping he’s here.”

  “How about the wife?”

  “Not likely. She’s devastated. My girlfriend Maya has known her for a long time. She can’t see her doing it. Besides, if she’s guilty, why would she invite me in on it?”

  “Muddy the waters?” He grinned. “But I suppose the police are already doing that. Who’s on the case, Rodriguez?”

  “No, Delgado. Do you know them?”

  “I try to follow the local politics. That includes the Policia Judicial in this town. Delgado’s ambitious, he might try to solve it. He’s got his finger in a lot of pies. Can’t say that I’d trust hi
m, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t trust any of them. That’s just my policy.”

  “Is it a gringo thing?”

  “Not really. It’s that they don’t make enough to get by, so they’re inclined to supplement their income any way they can. People have to live. There are a lot of opportunities when you’re an investigator.”

  “Well, it’s hard to tell what he’s doing. At any rate, the police aren’t telling me anything much except to mind my own business.”

  “Maybe that’s a good idea.” He was watching me carefully with his cool blue eyes behind the steel rims. “What I mean is, you don’t know who might be coming after you if you start getting too close. And you’re not likely to know it until you are too close. Might be too late by then.”

  “A lose-lose situation.”

  “Potentially. What do you have to gain, after all, Paul? You identify the killer, you get the eternal gratitude of the widow. So what? You aggravate the killer without knowing it, quite possibly you’re eternally dead.”

  “Either way, it lasts a long time.”

  “Exactly. A little cost/benefit analysis might be in order here. Give it some thought.”

  “What would you do?” I thought I knew. He would sit and admire all his stuff in its sixteenth century showcase house, and wonder about the appeal of Wolf. It could have been more about what Julian didn’t have than what Wolf did.

  “Just as I always have done,” he said. “I pick my battles. The trick in business is not to know how to win every one; it’s to know which ones you can win and then to ignore the rest. People think the great determining factor for success is power, but it isn’t. It’s restraint. The ability to just walk away. Not many people realize that. You may have picked the wrong battle here. It’s not going to sell any paintings for you, so why does it matter?”