The travel agent in Los Angeles was a darling fellow, in tight green pants, yellow shirt, green ascot, desert boots. At a distance he was still a sub-deb, but at close range he wore a thousand wrinkles, fine as cobwebs, and his eyes were as old as tombs. Nora and I sat on his moulded plywood chairs and talked to him across a pale pedestal desk. I had made it clear to him that it was Miss Gardino and Mr. McGee.
He looked pained and said, “If that is REALLY the sort of thing you have in mind, I think you would be TERRIBLY pleased with Mazatlán or Guaymas, or perhaps as far down as Manzanillo. Puerto Altamura is so DIFFICULT.”
“In what way?”
“Transportation-wise, sir.” He studied the folder he had taken from the file, and went over to a large map of Mexico on the side wall. He put a manicured finger next to Puerto Altamura and said, “I could arrange some HORRID little flight into Culiacán, and from there you could rent a car and driver to take you to Pericos, and then over a DESPERATE little swamp road. Or perhaps a flight into Los Mochis, and a car over to Boca del Rio, and a rented boat from there. Or, I understand there is a little charter amphib at Navojoa. And then, of course, there is really only the one place to stay there … and suppose you are not comfortable?”
“It’s supposed to be pretty good, isn’t it?”
He shrugged, fluttered his hand. “The Casa Encantada. The literature always says they are luxurious. I’ve never been there, or talked to anyone who has stayed there. As you see here, sixty beautiful rooms, pool, beach, gourmet food, boating, fishing, tennis.… Really I can TRULY recommend a lovely place in …”
“Puerto Altamura sounds pretty good to me,” I said. “We’d like something … a little off the beaten track.”
His eyes moved sidelong toward Nora, a reptilian flicker of understanding. He gave up. “I’ll see what I can do, sir. It may take some time to arrange. Such perfectly GHASTLY phone service. I’ll try to book you through by the most comfortable means, believe me, provided I can arrange reservations. How long would you want to stay there, sir?”
“A month. Six weeks.”
“My word!” he said, aghast. “Uh … two rooms, sir?”
“Please.”
He looked at his watch. “I suggest you phone me in, say, an hour and I may be able to report some progress.”
We went out into the milky overcast sunlight of the March morning. She looked up at me with a crooked smile and said, “Isn’t he a dear?”
“He seems to know what he’s doing.”
“Could we just walk for a while? I feel very tense and restless.”
“Sure, Nora.”
I phoned him at noon. He said, “I’m doing MUCH better than I expected, sir. I have you reserved there, beginning tomorrow night. The manager, a Mr. Arista, assures me the accommodations are most pleasant. He suggested a way of getting there, and I have ticketed you through to Durango, leaving at nine-twenty tomorrow morning. I am working on the link from Durango to Culiacán, where a hotel vehicle will meet you. Suppose you stop by at three this aftermoon, and I shall have everything all ready for you.”
The Aviones de Mexico prop jet made one stop at Chihuahua, and then flew on to Durango. About thirteen hundred miles all told. It was one-thirty when we got there. It was a mile in the air, wind-washed, dazzlingly clear, very cool in the shade. The men in the customs shack were efficient in an offhand way, armed, uniformed, officially pleasant. The one who spoke English phoned Tres Estrellas Airline for us, and ten minutes later an ancient station wagon appeared and took us and our luggage on a fast and lumpy journey to a far corner of the field. We waited a half hour for the third passenger to arrive, a young priest. The plane was a venerable Beechcraft. The pilot looked far too young. He wore pointed yellow shoes, a baseball hat, and a mad smile. Between us and the sea were peaks of up to ten thousand feet, all jungled green with occasional outcroppings of stone. It was over two hundred miles to Culiacán. He did not waste company gas with any nonsense like climbing over the peaks. He went through the valleys and gorges, the tricky gusts tipping and tilting us, the treetops streaking by. Nora’s hand was clamped upon mine, her fingers icy. And when at last we came out of the crumpled terrain, he followed it downhill, building up more speed and vibration than the aircraft was built to take. Finally, when we reached Culiacán, he achieved some altitude, merely for the purpose of slipping it in, a very flamboyant gesture indeed, and set it down without a bounce or jar.
At sea level the heat was moist, full of a smell of garbage and flowers, and a faint salty flavor of the sea. It was nearly four o’clock. There was a round and smiling little man there in a bright blue uniform. It said Casa Encantada on his hat, and it said Casa Encantada on the side of the bright blue Volkswagen bus. He kept smiling and saluting. He would load a piece of luggage and salute again. “Hello!” he kept saying. “Ah, hello!” But he had no other English.
When I tried my broken Cuban Spanish, and Nora tried her fragments of Italian, his smile merely became slightly glassy. The back end of the bus was stacked high and heavy with supplies. In his own way he was as fearless as our pilot. He kept bouncing up and down in the seat, humming, muttering, swaying back and forth trying to achieve more speed. We whined north on Route 15 to Pericos, and there he made a violent left onto an unpaved road. We had twenty miles of it, part sand, part shell, part crushed stone, part mud. The tropic growth was dense and moist on both sides.
At five-thirty we came bouncing out of the jungle, climbed a small ridge, and went dashing down into the town of Puerto Altamura, a grievous disappointment in spite of the blue bay and the low green of the tropic islands shielding it. Our driver was shouting and waving at everyone, blowing his horn as though he had just won the Mille Miglia. Unpaved streets of mud and dust, some clumsy churches, a public square with a small sagging bandstand, naked children, somnolent dogs, snatches of loud music from small cantinas, scores of small weathered stalls, squatting street vendors, ancient rickety trucks, a massive, pervasive almost overpowering stench composed of a rare mixture of mud flats, dead fish, greasy cooking and outdoor plumbing. The village was a semi-circle on a curve of the bay, and between the waterfront building we could see rotting docks, a scrabbly beach, nets drying, crude dark boats.
“Paradise,” Nora murmured.
We made a turn around the bandstand and headed south. The houses became a little more elaborate, and then stopped; the road curved and ahead of us, and a half-mile away, perched on a continuation of the ridge we had crossed, we saw the Casa Encantada, low and white and clean-looking, with many white out-buildings, all roofed with orange-red tile.
The driver beamed, nodded at us, pointed and said, “Hello! Hello!”
He drove into a cobbled front courtyard, banked with rainbows of tropical flowers, stopped with a great flourish at the broad steps leading up to the main entrance. Small boys in bright blue came hurrying to get our luggage. We got out. The hotel faced the sea. It was on a headland, projecting into the bay. We could see out through the broad pass to the southwest across water sparkling in the evening sunlight. There was a big pool down the slope to the south of the hotel, with a dozen or so people taking the late sun. In the small bay down beyond the pool, at the end of a long curving cement staircase was a small yacht basin, with a half dozen cruisers and sports fishermen gleaming bright down there, and space for twice as many more. Across from the small bay, on the opposite knoll, I could see several impressive-looking homes barely visible among the lush plantings.
“Paradise?” I said to Nora.
“It is absolutely unbelievably fantastic.”
A bald brown mustached man in a white suit came down the few broad steps and said, “Miss Gardino? Mr. McGee? My name is Arista. I am the manager here. I hope your stay with us will be most pleasant.”
“It’s lovely here,” Nora said.
“Was your trip enjoyable, Señorita?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
We went in and registered. The lobby was small, with a center fountain, tiled floor, massive dark beams, bright mosaics set into the walls.
He said, “We are almost half full at the moment. Dinner is served from eight until eleven-thirty. We have our own water supply and it is tested frequently so do not be afraid to drink it. We generate our own electrical power and so, unfortunately, we halt all kitchen and bar service at midnight when we turn off the main generator and go onto the smaller one which handles our night lighting. It is switched back at seven in the morning. There are brochures in the rooms explaining the hours for everything and what activities are available. We are happy you are staying with us. Will you follow me, please?”
He snapped his fingers and the boys picked up the luggage. He took us down a long passageway, with room doors on one side and, on the other, open arches overlooking the sea. We were two-thirds of the way down that wing, in rooms 39 and 40. The interconnecting door was open, thus saving him the minor awkwardness of unlocking it for us. If we chose to close it and bolt it, that was our affair. Blue tile floors, plaster walls, broad low beds, graceful straw furniture, coarse draperies in crude bright colors, deep closets, low chests of drawers, small bright tiled baths, with tub and shower and geometric stacks of thick white towels.
“These rooms are satisfactory? Good.” A shy brown broad-faced young girl in a blue uniform dress appeared in the doorway. Arista said, “This is Amparo. She will be your room maid while you are here. She has some English.” The girl smiled and bobbed her head. She had coarse black braids tied with scraps of blue yarn. A wiry little man in blue with a face like braided leather appeared behind her, with a gold-toothed smile. “And José is your room waiter,” Arista explained. “You push the top button here for Amparo and the other for José. She will do laundry, pressing, sewing, that sort of thing. Please tip them at the time you leave us. I have given you table ten, and you will have the same waiter each day, so arrange the tip with him in the same fashion, please.” He gave a little bow to each of us in turn. “Welcome to La Casa Encantada,” he said, and left.
Nora selected number 39. José moved her luggage into that room. Amparo went in to help her unpack and Nora closed the interconnecting door. José unpacked my two bags. I took out the two items I did not want him to handle, the zipper case which contained the statuette pictures, and my slightly oversized toilet kit. When he was through, and had asked if I wanted anything else, and had bowed himself out, with a golden smile, I checked the room for a suitable hiding place for the five pictures. I did not hope to find anything that would defeat a professional search. I just wanted to thwart amateur curiosity. One table lamp had a squat pottery base. I dismantled the fixture. The base was half full of sand for stability. There was ample room for the pictures, slightly curled, shoved down partway into the sand. I put it back together again. Now the leather folder contained misleading information, a sheaf of typed sheets of computations, percentage returns on real estate and investments, detailed recommendations for purchases of things I would never buy.
I took the toilet kit into the bathroom. It had a shallow false bottom, so inconspicuous as to be quite effective. I had debated bringing a weapon, and had at last decided on a flat little automatic pistol I had filched from an unstable woman’s purse, a Parisian woman. It is a ridiculous little thing made in Milano, silver-plated, with an ivory grip, one inch of barrel, without safety or trigger guard. The six clip has a sturdy spring however, unusual in these junk weapons. It is .25 caliber. I’d brought a full clip and a dozen extra shells. At eight feet I could be reasonably certain of hitting a man-sized target every time. At fifteen feet I would be half sure. At twenty-five feet it would be better to throw stones. It is a bedroom gun, with a brash bark like an anxious puppy. Its great advantage is its size. It is very thin. The grip fits the first two fingers of my hand. I can and have carried it in my wallet, tucked in with the money. It makes an uncomfortably bulky wallet. I dumped the toilet gear out, pried up the false bottom and felt a little ridiculous as I looked at the toy gun. I had more faith in the other two items concealed there, the little vial of chloral hydrate, and the tin of capsules of a tasteless and powerful barbiturate, labeled respectively as nose drops and cold medicine. I checked the clip on the little gun and transferred it to the side pocket of my trousers. It was safe. It could not fire until I had jacked a shell into the chamber. I left my medicines and extra shells concealed.
After I had showered and changed, Nora rapped on the interconnecting door. I opened it and she came in, in an ivory linen dress that darkened her skin.
“Amparo is a jewel,” she said.
“Nice rooms.”
“Maybe the food will be good too.”
“I hope so.”
“Shall we walk around? Explore?”
“If you’d like.”
“Why are we almost whispering?” she asked, and smiled nervously, her dark brown eyes glinting in the diminishing light of dusk.
“Before we go out, is there anything in your room, anything that ties you to him in any way?”
“You told me to be sure of that. I was. There’s nothing at all, Trav. But … he could have talked to someone about Gardino and McGee. Old friends.”
“There has to be a scrap of bait left out, a hint of bait, nothing definite.”
“I have the feeling someone is listening to us.”
“Not from this room. You’ll feel that way all the time we’re here. Until we know. Until we’re sure.”
“It isn’t anything like I thought it would be.”
We walked to the far end of our exterior corridor, away from the lobby and found a sun deck at the end, large, with an iron railing, with a short curved staircase leading down to a path that led to the apron of the pool. The sunbathers were gone. A couple swam, dived, the man full of the spurious peppiness of the mid-forties living up to the demands of a lovely young girl, making his youthful motions, keeping his belly tucked in, having a whee of a time. We walked to the far side of the pool and looked down at the little yacht basin. Two more sports fishermen had arrived, unloaded the customers, and the crew of two aboard each one was hosing down, oiling reels, slipping the canvas covers onto the boat rods, talking and laughing across the dock to each other.
We took a flagstone path through the flowers toward the main entrance, watching the orange sun slip down beyond the far islands which guarded the bay from the hundred-and-fifty mile sweep of the Gulf of California.
“We’re almost opposite La Paz,” I said. “I guess it’s just a little south of us.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Once upon a time.”
“Trav, tell me why I feel so strange and uncertain and … unreal?”
“After we find the bar.”
“Okay. After we find the bar.”
It was on the level below the lobby, an upholstered little room hoked up with candles, nets, tridents, glass floats, but dim and pleasant enough. We got our drinks at the bar, took them to a banquette corner. Several tables had been pulled together to seat ten people, five couples—the men big and brown and beefy, and their women smallish, tough, leathery. I needed one glance for the whole story.
“Those are the big game fish buffs,” I told Nora. “Names in the record books. Invitation tournaments. Except for the fox hunting crowd, they are the most insular, most narrow and arrogant and self-satisfied bores in creation. If you can’t kill fish in proper style, you’re vermin. They clutter up Bimini. They ought to be restricted to Cat Cay, where the only ruder people in the world are the Cat Cay dock hands.”
“How about the four dark suit types in the corner?”
“Mexican businessmen. Maybe looking for another place to stick up a hotel.”
“And those kids at the end of the bar?”
Three towering and powerful young men, and two slim sunbrowned girls, and a huge black dog. “That’s tougher. I’d say scuba types, if this was a better area for it. I’ll say it anyway. From the way they’re dressed, they’ve got a boat here. Probably came down the coast of Baja California and around to La Paz and cut across to here and will end up in Acapulco. How about the gal clothes?”
“That simple little beach shirt on the blonde is a forty-dollar item.”
“It would have to be a good hunk of boat. So it’s that big motor sailor at the far dock out there. Fifty-something feet.”
“And the couple just coming in?”
“Ah, the firm tread and the steady eye of shutter-bug tourists. Kodachrome and exposure meters, and hundreds of slides of the real Mexico.”
She lowered her voice. “And the couple at this end of the bar?”
The woman was dark, hefty and handsome, glinting with gemstones. The man was squat and powerful, with an Aztec face and a gleaming white jacket.
“Just a guess. They’re from one of the houses over there beyond the boat basin. Drinks and dinner at the hotel tonight, for a change.”
“You’re good at that, Trav.”
“And often wrong,” I said, and went to the bar and brought fresh drinks back.
She sat closer to me and said, “Why do I feel so strange?”
“Because on the other side of the continent it looked easy, Nora. Now all you can see is closed doors, and no way of knowing if any of them will open. Baby, nothing is easy. Life comes in a thousand shades of grey, and everyone except madmen think what they do is reasonable, and maybe even the madmen do too. People don’t wear signs, and being dropped into a strange area is like a starfish landing on a strange oyster bed. You don’t know which one to open, or if you can open anything. On serial television it’s easy. For Superman it’s easy. For Mike Hammer it’s easy. But real people wander around in the foggy foggy dew, and never get to understand anything completely, themselves included. You put on your heroine suit, honey, and now you feel a little jackass in it. That’s good for you. I brought you along as cover. A place like this, a man comes here with a woman, or comes after the fish. With you along they classify me harmless, as I did most of the people in this room. So keep your head close to me and glow at me. You had to come here or you’d never feel right about him, so it’s good for you. But remember, we’re standing at the plate blindfolded. They give us an unlimited number of strikes, so you swing until your arms get too tired, and hope you don’t get hit in the head.”
She leaned closer and said, “What kind of a lousy defeatist attitude is that?”
“It’s the attitude that keeps me from getting anxious and careless. And dead.”
Her eyes looked sick and I knew the vision of Sam dead had flashed in her mind.
“You’re in charge,” she said.
Table ten overlooked a sunken flood-lighted garden behind the hotel. The food was good. It was almost very good. The individual table lights made little cones of privacy in the expanse of the big room. Our waiter, Eduardo, was deft and diligent. We lingered long over coffee and brandy, and at ten o’clock we wandered down and sat in deck chairs by the lighted pool. The area had been fogged for bugs, a taint that spoiled the heavy scents of the night blooming flowers.
“Listen,” she said.
I heard small music from the boat basin, a deep drone of the faraway generator, a distant competitive chorus of tree toads.
“It’s so quiet here,” she said.
“It would be good to be here for other reasons.”
After a little while she said, “Maybe he would have brought me here some day.”
“Cut it out, Nora.”
“I’m sorry.”
A few minutes later she stood up and said, “Goodnight, Trav. I’ll try to … keep things under better control.”
“Want me to walk you back?”
“No, thanks. Really.”
“Sleep well, Nora.”
I watched her, slim and slow, her dress pale in the warm night, climb the stairs to the sun deck and disappear along the corridor.
After a little while I went back to the bar for a cold Carta Blanca. Aside from a young couple with a honeymoon humidity about them, sitting in the corner, the bar had turned into a men’s club. The men at the bar gravely caught conversational fish, found them too small, explained how badly they had handled them, released them without regret. They lost decent billfish to the sharks, had reels bind at the wrong moment, frayed their lines, broke their tips. The occasional fisherman tells of triumphs. The compulsive ones relate only disaster. I listened, and picked up crumbs of information. The hotel owned four sports fishermen. One was hauled for repairs. “If you don’t have your boat down here next time, Paul, the one to sew up is Mario. He’ll keep you stern on, beautifully. He anticipates. George was out with him last year when he got that bruising son of a bitch of a blue. What did it go, Harry?”
“Four ten and a bit. Three hours, twenty minutes. Six thread. George swears by Mario. Pedro is second best.”
“But Pedro’s mate is a cretin entirely.”
They got into a travelogue then. Fishing around the world. Zane Grey in Australia. Tarpon in the Panuca River as compared to tarpon in Boca Grande pass. They told each other stories of tragic disaster.
I like to fish. I like to fish absolutely alone, wading the flats, or casting from shore into the tide patterns. And when I catch something I like to eat it as soon as possible. I spent my slave time popping my shoulder muscles and bursting my blisters on tuna the size of Volkswagens. I gave it up, much the same way I gave up climbing trees, driving motorcycles, dating actresses and other equivalently boyish sports.
I tuned them out, and leaned on the padded rail of the little bar and tried to relate myself to time and place. They haul you too far too fast, and unless you can think of the distances, unless you know distances from the brute process of walking them, sore-footed, scared and hungry, every place you go becomes a suburb of every other place. The screaming machines had whipped me from Florida to California and down into Mexico, and the soul had to follow along at its own pace, tracking me down. This was an ancient tropic coast backed by cruel mountains, and La Casa Encantada was an implausible oasis, Americanized by fish money. The people in the village of Puerto Altamura—a thousand of them? Fifteen hundred?—would find it even less plausible than the tourists could imagine. For all the years the generations of them, in the dust and the mud and sea smell, had lived and worked and died in this coastal pocket, the young always dreaming of going far away, and few of them making it. Then suddenly, down the beach, appeared the big hotel and the new homes of los ricos. What could make Puerto Altamura so attractive to people that they should come incredible distances? Fishing? But fishing was a brute dangerous business of nets and gambles and bad prices and the unpredictable and hostile sea, a fact of life. It brought in new money. Dozens of villagers had a new kind of employment. Insane touristas would walk into the village and buy things foolishly, and click click their cameras at the most ordinary and ugly and familiar things. But, on the whole, the change was less than the sameness. The old things continued, sin and salvation, sickness and death, work and school and fiesta, drinking and violence, drowning and dancing, politics and pesos. The sprained bus came waddling in three days a week, and the old ice plant clattered, and the trucks limped and groaned out over the bad road with the unending harvest of fish.
One thing was obvious to me. From what Sam Taggart said, he had spent an appreciable amount of time here. He had become a residente. He would be known. It was inescapable that he would be known, and known well. He said there had been trouble. So people would not want to talk. I had to find some way of unwinding it, of following the single strands to the marks he had left on this place and these people.
From the shadowy corner came the sound of the bride’s febrile chuckle, and soon they walked out, obsessed with the legality of it all, the permissive access, and all the fishermen at the bar turned slow heads to appraise the departing ripeness of her, and all seemed to sigh.
I signed my chit and went to my room. Amparo had turned the bed down. Nora slept beyond the closed door. Or lay restless and heard me come in, and wondered what would happen to us here, among the flowers and fishermen.