24

Mexico, 1953

They left Cuernavaca early the next morning, before Henry Fink was up, which Tom was just as glad to do. The bungalow he had eventually dragged himself to at the end of the night proved as filthy as the rest of Shangri-La. When the sun woke him through the uncovered window he discovered a gang of enormous insects and a couple of small, bright lizards scuttling across his mosquito netting, not to mention the pulpy remains of slower bugs he’d heard himself crunching the night before but hadn’t wanted to turn on the light to acknowledge.

Yet by the time he got himself dressed, and washed as well as he could with the few rusty drippings that emerged from the showerhead, Charlie was already up and waiting for him. Looking little the worse for wear, having a cup of the strong local coffee. Watching Guillermo, back at his Sisyphean labor of netting the mango droppings in the big pool.

“Hi, Tommy, how’d you sleep?” Charlie called out, and took a deep breath, pushing his chest out.

“All right, I guess.”

“Smell that air! Air like that could keep a man perpetually young!”

“Yes. That’s why they call it Shangri-La.”

Beneficio was already waiting for them as well, and they traced their way down through the narrow streets, past all their riotous hedges and crumbling walls. Heading west, they passed little, grass-roofed houses, and wooden shanties, and a grim, stone-gray fortress. On the next corner, Tom noticed a cluster of vultures, hunched on the high branches of a cypress tree like petty hoods occupying a street corner, the ammonia stench of their vomit spoiling the spring air.

 

They moved through one valley after another, as the sun rose higher and the big Lincoln grew hotter. The highway deteriorating with each mile they moved away from Cuernavaca, the signs with Presidente Alemán’s name on them growing scarcer, the land between the mountain passes rockier and starker.

They pulled into the bare trace of a village about noon, with the sun beating down and the inside of the big Lincoln truly sweltering. Beneficio cosseted the car off the crumbling highway and into the gravel and dirt of the shoulder so carefully that Tom could barely feel the difference beneath their wheels. Rolling it to a perfect stop by the antique pump, the gas bubbling languidly up in its clear, glass circular head topped by the image of a flying horse.

There they waited with the motor off and the windows open, eyeing the whitewashed brick garage and office. After a long minute a yellow dog emerged through its open door, plodding slowly forward, seeming too enervated by the heat to bark. It merely raised its snout at them, then turned back toward the garage, where a mechanic presently appeared in an oil-slicked pair of tanned leather overalls, nodding and smiling and wiping off a wrench. As he approached, his eyes grew wider and a smile spread across his face.

“Señor Embajador!” he chortled, walking to the back-seat window and sticking out a hand to Charlie—then quickly pulling it back to wipe it on his rag, then proffering it again.

“Señor Embajador! Bienvenido!”

“How are you, my friend?” Charlie said, pumping his hand while he turned to shoot Tom a look and a quick, delighted wink. “How good to see you!”

There was a rapid exchange of Spanish, and then the three of them were out of the car, walking down the one dirt street behind the gas station. The mechanic walking ahead, announcing their presence with calls and whistles as he went. Weary-looking people emerged from the square adobe homes, or walked in from the fields behind them, grinning and waving their hats and calling out, “Señor Embajador! Señor Embajador!”

“They seem to know you, Charlie.”

“Well, now, it may just be that Slim and I stopped here a time or two on our ramblings,” Charlie allowed, blushing a little but still looking completely delighted by their welcome. “How nice to see somebody remembers me with kindness.”

They let the mechanic lead them into a little box of a pulquería, a cool, dark place with tiled floors and green shutter doors. There Charlie talked and joked and laughed with the villagers, seated around them, and they downed nochote in smoky green glasses, and ate goat burritos just off the grill with their fingers until they were sated. Charlie leaning back in his chair with a sigh—all his previous edginess from their talk the night before gone now, Tom thought.

“It was like this all the time when Slim and I used to tour,” he said, tapping his hands on his full stomach. “Did you know, when we used to drive into these places they’d greet us with brass bands an’ confetti—confetti, Tommy, real bits of paper they’d ripped up from somewhere.”

“Yes, Slim told me.”

“They’d throw them over us like it was rice on the church steps, and we’d just got married all over again. You shoulda heard her laugh those times, Tommy. She’d get out of the car an’ walk into these little towns with her blond hair and a shimmery white dress. They’d go mad for her.”

He patted his stomach again, looking a little sad. The people he’d been talking to so enthusiastically drifting discreetly away from the table, headed back to their work as the worst heat of the day slowly relented. Leaving them to their talk.

“Maybe I could get her to come back out and tour around with me again,” he said speculatively. “Those were the days. No cares, not tied down to anything. It was like a permanent honeymoon.”

Someone dropped a coin into the new-looking jukebox in the corner, and to Tom’s surprise what came up was not the sound of a mariachi band but a slow, plaintive number.

“The ‘Muchero,’” Charlie said, then burped sadly. He reached out to grip Tom’s arm, muttering, “Where is she now, where is she now?”

“In Acapulco, Charlie. That’s why we’re headed there.”

“You know she used to love to play this song,” he said, ignoring him. “This, and the ‘Lisboa Antigua’—all those sad songs. That was her music phase. She learned to play guitar, an’ started bringing all her musician friends back from the cafés. I would lie in our bed lookin’ at the ceiling, an’ listen to her sing all these old tunes. She thought I was asleep, but of course I wasn’t.”

Charlie looked directly at him then, and for some reason Tom felt a chill go through him.

“I never was asleep,” he said.

“How d’ya mean?” Tom asked.

“Oh, nothin’, nothin’ really,” he said, waving off the question and looking aside. “Only that’s how maybe all this started. D’ya remember that time when I was mayor, and the intruder got into Gracie Mansion?”

“Yes. Of course,” Tom said, a small, hard lump forming in his stomach.

“I woke up at six in the morning, an’ there he was, sittin’ on the side of our bed. Perfectly ordinary-lookin’ fella, wearin’ glasses and a sweater.”

“I remember.”

“He asked me, ‘Are you O’Kane?’ So thinkin’ faster than I ever did on the stump, I told him, ‘No, but I’ll take you to him.’ And you know, the funny thing was, all I could think of right then was my fear that he’d killed poor old Joe Previtel, the overnight guard at the mansion.”

“Sure.” Tom stared down at the tiled floor of the pulquería, unable to look his brother in the face anymore.

“Well, as it turned out, he hadn’t, a course. I put on my robe an’ took the lad down to the kitchen to get some coffee, an’ once down there I was able to buzz the guard booth. Turned out he’d penetrated our crack security team through the ingenious method of climbing over the iron fence an’ comin’ around the back entrance. Might’ve walked off with half the heirlooms of New York City, if he’d had a mind to.”

“They took him off to Bellevue, didn’t they?”

“Yes, the poor lad. His one statement was, he’d only wanted to talk with me for a few minutes to discuss juvenile delinquency. God knows, he was probably the most reasonable petitioner I saw durin’ all my time as mayor. Just wanted a few minutes of my opinion, as opposed to the keys to the City treasury.”

He looked at Tom again, his face almost beseeching now, and Tom felt compelled to look back.

“But the thing I never understood, the thing I didn’t think about at all until much later, was why I was worried about Joe Previtel—and not my wife. And why she wasn’t in my bed.”

Tom could only sit there, not trusting himself to say a thing—trying not to betray any emotion at all.

“And then, you know, she came in, with all the excitement and the cops runnin’ all around,” Charlie said contemplatively. “I remembered she’d been out late to some benefit gala or another, an’ she come in still wearin’ the dress she’d had on the night before, and in her bare feet, holding her shoes in her hand. She said she’d got in a while before, but hadn’t felt like sleeping and had just been out wanderin’ the grounds. And it was a miracle, I thought, that she hadn’t encountered this young lunatic climbing his way over our stout iron fence, but then it’s a big grounds, and as he had demonstrated, he could certainly move about with great stealth an’ quiet, this young madman of ours, who had already evaded the best of our police force.”

“Yes,” Tom said listlessly.

“But I always wondered why I didn’t think first of her, when I woke up that morning.”

“Maybe,” Tom said slowly, “you just knew she could always take care of herself.”

“Maybe that was it!” Charlie laughed suddenly, startling Beneficio where he was still finishing his goat burritos at the end of the table. “She certainly could, you know. But it weighed on my mind, how I didn’t think of her first—and how I just expected that she had left my bed. So when she’d go out late to the cantinas and the dance halls with her music friends, I always made sure to stay awake till she got back, an’ keep my ears open.”

“Jesus, Charlie,” he said, sweating in the cool little pulquería, unsure if it was for himself or his brother. “You’ll drive yourself mad.”

“No, no, just the usual madness of an old man with a young wife. It was my own fault, for not keepin’ a better hold on her in the first place. But I could deny her nothing.”

“Who ever could?” Tom said, despite himself.

“She made things lively around the embassy; I can’t say I didn’t like it. We invited more Mexicans than Americans over to those big receptions she liked to throw. No ambassador had ever done that before, and it was very popular. The press loved her—at first. They called her La Embajatriz, even named her “Woman of the Year.”

“But then the older American expats started to complain. You know, the old oil an’ mining boys, and their wives. They wanted their quiet evenings back, playin’ canasta around the fire with the ambassador, and they had to be catered to. Slim couldn’t stomach that, and so they would complain straight to State, an’ then I would hear about it.”

“Is that why she’s out in Acapulco?”

Instead of answering, Charlie drained the last of the milky white nochote, then sat staring at the green glass.

“Amazing people. To make a drink like this out of maguey and cactus juice!”

Beneficio, his lunch finished, stood by Charlie’s side in his chauffeur’s uniform, hat tucked jauntily under one arm. Charlie nodded to him, and they rose and headed back out into the broiling sun.

The village was very quiet now, the only sound an occasional barking dog somewhere far away, its yelps halfhearted and surrendering gradually to the engulfing silence. Tom walked along making his legs go forward, not sure if he should feel like a relieved man or one still on his way to the gibbet.

“Ah, the civilized thing to do would be to settle in and nap away the rest of the afternoon heat,” Charlie remarked, dabbing at his red face with a handkerchief. “Really, the civilized thing to do would be to sleep here in perfect contentment, like this village has been doing for the past three hundred years. But that’s not for us, eh, Tommy?”

“No.”

“No, we’re Cortés. Or Balboa, pushing on to the sea. But sometimes you have to wonder, what in Christ’s name for?”

Back at the gas station, they found that the mechanic had washed and waxed the big Lincoln for them while they were at lunch, and now it gleamed like an obsidian blade in the sun. The mechanic and his dog standing next to it, the man beaming away at them, the dog looking haggard on its splayed legs.

“My God, what a generous people,” Charlie said, insisting in Spanish through all the man’s strenuous protests on paying handsomely for his work, and the gas, and the lunch.

“A visit like this, it could be half their income for the month, especially if it’s not the tourist season,” he said as they pulled away, waving back at the gas station owner and the village, which was quickly shrinking again to a dot in the immense and desolate landscape. “Yet somehow, they live within their means, unlike those of us who pass by.”

“You never answered my question,” Tom said. “Why’s she in Acapulco?”

“It was me who got her out there.” Charlie sighed. “I thought it best, with all the complaints from the expats. The Big Crowd adored her—they’d have her come out to spend weekends at their mansions, or on their yachts. She loved it, too. Golfing, water-skiing, swimming—she’d go all day. You know how she always liked the sports, Tommy.”

“Yes.”

The golden girl, finally reaching the empire of the Pacific.

“In between there’d be lunch with daiquiris at two, an’ mariachis at five, an’ cocktails at seven, an’ dinner and dancing from nine until who damned well knew when.”

His brother’s face looked suddenly fearful, his chin wobbling slightly.

“I couldn’t keep up, ya see, Tommy. I went out there a few weekends with her, an’ I thought it was gonna kill me. I’d fall asleep at lunch, snorin’ away like some damned old man, everybody smiling at me when I woke up! I begged off after that, told them I had official business. I let her go stay out there with Parada, and Melchior Perusquia, who’s a friend of mine, we do a little business together, he must’ve built ninety percent of Acapulco, an’ I figured it would be all right.”

He gave a little bitter laugh and cocked his head.

“Next thing I know, she’s in the papers bein’ squired all about by this hotel heir—some Princeton grad, if you can believe it! Must be twenty years younger than me, the son of a bitch—”

“All right, Charlie, I get it.”

Charlie settled back in his seat, looking drained.

“That was the end of it, then,” he said, in a dull, flat voice. “I called her up and asked her to come back to town. She refused, point-blank. I asked her if she was in love with him, an’ she just laughed at me. An’ then all the papers picked it up, an’ the next thing you know, it was a big scandal. Thank God we were near the end of our ambassadorship by then, or the New York papers would’ve laid that on me head, too. But it was a humiliating thing, Tommy, still made me a laughingstock.”

He put his face in his hands then, and his shoulders shook, and Tom wondered if he was actually crying. He didn’t say a thing, because there was nothing to say, and so he sat back in his seat and looked away to give his brother what privacy there was in the back seat of a car, talking about the infidelity of his wife.

They were rising again into more mountains. But now the entire landscape was beginning to transform itself back into something lush and fecund, and more tropical. The road was not even finished here. There was just a layer of bedrock laid down, the one sign he saw that paid tribute to el presidente lying broken along the shoulder. The Lincoln twisted along the gravelly mess like a snake, delving down through deep green gorges, through valleys with orange and green and red parrots sailing back and forth between towering trees.

He was about to look over to see how Charlie was doing, but then he heard a noise, and to his surprise he saw that his brother was asleep again, after all the burritos and nochote, his face as calm and untroubled as an infant’s in repose. He found himself beginning to nod, too, in the rain-forest humidity. The scenery passed in a daze—not quite a dream, but not quite real, either. And in the dream he was with Slim again in the little boat off Hobe Sound, cruising slowly through the inland waterways. The same lush, green vista, dappled with sun through the tall, ancient trees, the two of them watching it all pass as they stood silently next to each other. Tom trying not to admit to himself how aware he was of the brush of her arm against his, her breath against his neck, her tanned legs in their white shorts . . .

 

He came awake just as they swung around the last bend down the mountain, and the great arc of Acapulco Bay and town opened up before them. The beach below them like a crescent moon that had been pulled down to the earth, gleaming white and spotless, and a sea that was a startling bright, cerulean blue—colors he had never seen before in nature, in any part of the world he knew. There was not a cloud in the sky, just beginning to give over to evening, and he was sure that he had never seen anything so brazenly beautiful.

Yet he could also see the cranes again. There were at least half a dozen hotels going up, slabs of white and beige layered one on top of the other all along the rim of the beach. Many more, obviously brand-new mansions stuck chock-a-block in the hills, lavender and white and aquamarine, littered with pillars and white plaster statues of cherubs and naiads at play beside swimming pools the size of football fields.

“It’d be lovely,” he said, “if you could just get rid of the people.”

“I know, but it’s progress. This is part of the New World, too,” Charlie said. “Where men can pull themselves up outta nothing.”

“Yes, but I’m beginning to wonder if that’s enough of an excuse for all the terrible things we do,” Tom said, and pointed to the largest, most ostentatious mansion of all, a massive white building jutting out from the Indian laurels on the cliffside like a hawk’s beak.

“That’s Perusquia’s place,” Charlie answered in a small voice. “That’s where she is.”