Mexico City, 1953
They left the pretty hillside town, with its beautiful old churches and its small, well-scrubbed houses, at first light. Tom behind the wheel of the Bentley now. The air already fragrant and springlike, the lost green world of the Borda Gardens inviting and romantic behind its crumbling walls.
“You have to ask yourself,” Tom said, shaking his head. “Why would anyone ever leave such a place?”
“A better question is, why would anyone come in the first place?” Slim said from the passenger seat.
She sat with her head back against the top of the seat and her lips painted a bright red and not quite closed, as if she were just waiting for someone to kiss her, though he suspected that in fact she was merely hungover. He assumed she was sleeping when she didn’t move her head to look at all the gorgeous scenery. But then she spoke, without opening her eyes or moving her head.
“So. When are you going to have this little talk with your brother?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and shrugged. “Soon as I can, I guess.”
“I see.” She pulled off the dark glasses, blinking in the morning sunlight, her eyes looking sad and the skin around them strangely pale and smooth. “He’ll hate me forever, you know. You, too, but mostly me.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Sure you don’t.”
She put the glasses back on her face, and her head back on the seat.
“That’s because you’re a man. But if you were a woman, you’d know. Men always find a way to forgive each other. It’s the woman they blame, when it’s all said and done.”
“Charlie would take you back in a second.”
“No, he won’t. Not after this.”
There was a short silence between them, punctuated only by the rhythmic rubber whoomp of the tires over the edges of the concrete sections that made up the highway. They were moving back onto one of the roads named for the fugitive president. The pavement flat and white in the sun, laid out across the fissures in the wide green valley not unlike like the flat, obscene tongue of highway he had seen emerging from the blasted neighborhoods of the Bronx.
“What will you do, d’ya think?” he asked, suddenly solicitous of her. She picked her head up again, looking at him for a long moment over the top of the sunglasses, as if she were going to say something but thought better of it.
“I don’t know,” she said flatly, staring straight ahead through the windshield. “Stay down here for a while, maybe. I don’t know that there’s too much for me back in the States, save for a great many people I don’t want to see, and who don’t want to see me.”
She leaned slowly back again.
“Then again, there’s nothing for me here, either. That makes it even.”
“Seriously,” he said, glancing over at her from the blinding gleam of the highway, broken only by the occasional metal grillwork propelling itself at him at a crazy speed. Another bus packed to the rafters, with its radio blaring, and its chickens, and the little shrine of girlie photos and saints’ cards in front of the wheel. Always going full blast as they passed, the brown-faced children with bad teeth and the faces of angels leaning out the window, leering and laughing, waving and sticking out their tongues.
“Seriously,” he said. “What do you think you’ll do?”
“There are people who might do something for me—”
“Melchior? Princeton?” he said, suddenly, irrationally jealous again.
“—but there’s always a price to be paid for that,” she finished, pushing up her sunglasses and looking at him balefully. “Goddamnit, Tom. I know I’ve had the morals of an alley cat. You don’t have anything to say on that score, even if you are planning to confess.”
“Sorry.”
“There were some people, back in Acapulco, from this British airline. They thought maybe I could do some customer-relations work, something like that. Can’t you just picture me in a little blue airline uniform? All the mamacitas will be so pleased.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that, Slim.”
“Ah, but it does,” she told him. “It does until my name clears, or my looks go, whichever comes first. Until nobody cares, or nobody cares to remember. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you want to give it another go. It’s not too late, you know.”
She was looking at him seriously, he knew from the tone of her voice, without looking back at her.
“But it is,” he said, his voice a croak after an hour of driving. Hoping she didn’t mistake the dust for emotion. “It was too late—it was wrong—from the moment it started.”
“That’s why the big confession? Call me a moral idiot, but I still don’t see why it was wrong. Two people, wanting each other—”
“Because it was just a desire,” he said almost viciously, looking back at her again. “Because that’s all it was. Because it’s no different from anything the Big Crowd here, or the Big Crowd back in New York get up to. They do what they want, they take what they want, and they wreck the rest, but it’s only a desire. An impulse. Something they need at that moment. For the money, or the ego, or the prestige, or maybe just to stop the buzzing in their heads. They like to wrap it up in the name of progress, or the future, or the way of the world. But it’s still just what they want, and they don’t care even if it means the death of a good man.”
“Or a bad one,” Slim said, looking back steadily at him.
“Or a bad one, then. It’s still not right, and I won’t pretend it is. I won’t pretend what I want is good, just because I want it,” he said, adding, almost apologetically: “Not even for you.”
To his surprise she said nothing, only put her dark glasses back in place and looked out through the bug-freckled windshield.
They marked their course by the twin volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the Raging Man and the Sleeping Woman, as seen from the other side now, their white peaks growing closer and closer. By midday they were approaching Cortés’s pass, and he dutifully asked Slim if she wanted to stop for some lunch, but she just shook her head. Tom steering the car up and over and down toward the city, thinking to himself that these were probably the last few minutes they would ever spend alone together, and neither one of them had a damned thing left to say.
Then they were back in the city, his concentration thankfully absorbed by the need to maneuver amidst all the careening trucks and the rickety buses, the little taxicabs still revving and screeching, still honking around him as loudly and impatiently as a swarm of bees. By the time he was able to pull up in front of the Hotel Prince and toss the keys of the Bentley to the doorman, the underarms and the back of his shirt were soaked through with sweat, but he knew it wasn’t due to the traffic.
They walked in together and took the little cage elevator up to his floor. She tried to laugh as they got in it, asking him, “Why am I nervous? Why should we be nervous—” but that was all she could get out. The broad back of the elevator operator, the same man who had helped him wrestle Charlie back up to his little penthouse adobe, hunching ever so slightly at each of their words.
She walked down the hall with him toward his room, her heels echoing loudly along the festive new linoleum. Pulling off her sunglasses in the cool near darkness and rubbing them nervously with a handkerchief.
“Goddamnit, Tom, can’t we just talk for a minute about what I’m going to say to him?”
“Say anything you want,” he told her as they paused outside his door, Tom rummaging in his pants pocket for the key. “But if you want to talk to him first, you’d better do it now.”
“Damnit, Tom, don’t you see that it should be us together?” she pleaded as he fiddled with the lock, frowning at it, since he was sure he had locked the top bolt before he left but found that it was open now. “It’s still there, what we had. You saw it for yourself the other night, or wasn’t that you with me?”
“That’s over—”
He swung open the door at last, the words dying in his throat. Ellie was sitting on the brightly colored, imitation-Mexican blanket that was his hotel bedspread. She was wearing an adorable blue traveling suit, with a little matching hat. The black metal table fan at his bedside table was gently blowing at the edge of her hair, and it occurred to him that he had never seen her look any lovelier. It occurred to him, too, that this might be the last time he would ever see her.
“Ellie!”
“So,” Slim said, holding her dark glasses defensively out in front of her—for once at a loss for words. Her face twisted as if she had just spilled a platter full of drinks on the floor.
“So,” Ellie said to her, standing up and straightening her blouse and the little matching jacket. “I hear you’re a real actress. Maybe you can manage an exit.”
“I’ll go up to El Ranchito, say goodbye to Charlie,” Slim said hurriedly, backing out the door, her eyes darting back and forth between the two of them. “I won’t stay long.”
“There you go,” Ellie told her.
Slim shut the door, the sound of her heels receding rapidly down the hall, while Tom tried to think of something to say.
“Ellie—” he started, then shook his head and sat down on the bed, next to where she had been. “Ellie, I’ve been a goddamned fool.”
“I knew that before I came down here,” she said drily, though he could hear the deeper hurt and anger in her voice. “So did Hogan. Why do you think he sent me?”
“I’m not talking about the case,” he said, looking up at her. Wanting to put his arms around her hips, to hold her to him. Wanting to say something that would make it right, though there was nothing he could say now and no holding that would do any of that. And the worst is yet to come, he thought.
“The last thing I ever wanted to do was to hurt you. And I’m sorry that I did, and it was damned stupid, and anyway it’s all over, done with for good,” he said, the words running on without him, like some bad movie melodrama, or even worse, something on TV. “And I know there’s nothing I can say to make you believe that, so I’m sorry, I’m so goddamned sorry, and all I want to do is make it up to you. That means more to me than the case, or my brother, or the whole rotten mess I’ve made of it.”
She looked at him from across the room, her face stolid, then impatient, then starting to crack with anger.
“Ah, goddamnit!” she said, putting a hand to her face. “Ah, goddamn, this is so damned predictable! All of your words, everything you did—the whole thing. I should’ve known it.”
She turned away from him, and her shoulders gave a small heave. He got up and went to her then, but she was already moving away from him, wiping at her face with her hand, the sob choked back. She shook his hands off her, turning to look at him dry-eyed.
“No, no. I’ll be damned if I’ll cry in your arms now!” she told him. “You came down here on a criminal investigation, or at least that was the official excuse. Is there anything left of it? Are you ready to pack it up and get out of here now?”
“No,” he told her, straightening up and meeting her gaze. His sadness and his shame still flicking through him like little steel slivers. “No—and yes. I think I know how to close it up now. Give me another couple of hours with my brother, and that should do it.”
“You’re really that close?” she said, her voice doubtful but intrigued, too, despite herself. He could hear it in her voice. “This isn’t just some desperate move to cover for yourself?”
“I think I know everything I need to know. I just need to hear something from him.”
“Yes? How are you going to get that?”
“By confessing,” he said, starting for the door, thinking again how lovely she looked as he passed her. Wondering if she would still be there when he got back, but not wanting to insult her by asking.
“It seems to be my day for it,” he said instead.