The youth arrived like a peasant, hitching a ride on the flatbed of a rusty pickup truck to the end of the driveway—two bales of straw, a goat, and an iPod, his travelling companions.
The guards watched him walk the last half-mile in, shouldering his rucksack and trudging between the citrus trees, his feet kicking up the dirt into the shimmer of the hot dry air. They took lazy beads on him with their rifles, and joked with each other about whether they should shoot him before he reached the main gates, just to relieve the boredom.
It was only when he drew nearer that they recognised his face, despite the simple clothes, and they shivered at the thought that they had even contemplated killing Manuel de Marquez’s son, just for sport.
They had the gates opened before he’d reached them and he walked straight through without acknowledgement or thanks, as though it had never occurred to him that things would be otherwise. He demanded to be taken to his father and had barely skirted the two bullet-proof Mercedes parked near the fountain before old Enrique hurried out to greet him, taking the youth’s hand in both his own and gripping it fiercely, his rheumy eyes filling.
“Julio!” he said. “We feared you would be too late.”
“The old bastard’s still alive then?”
Enrique tried to look shocked but couldn’t quite bring it off. “Your father is dying,” he said, quietly, as though afraid of being overheard.
Julio laughed and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “He’s been dying for years. Why the hurry now?”
“He’s near the end. I think he has been hanging on, waiting for your return.”
The youth shook his head. “More likely that he’s bargaining with the devil over the terms of his admission.”
“The priest is with him.”
Julio turned in sardonic surprise as the pair mounted the front steps.
“You’ve managed to find another man of God who will stand his blasphemy?”
Enrique shrugged. “Priests,” he said. “It is their calling.”
Julio’s amusement backed and died. “For any that try to save the soul of my father,” he said, icy, “it’s more like a penance.”
***
They had placed the old man in a room on the ground floor, where it was cooler in the heat of the daytime. Mats had been laid on the tiles outside the door, so that the footsteps of those passing would not disturb him. The bodyguard at the doorway nodded to Enrique and roughly took Julio’s rucksack from his shoulder, dropping it onto an antique table and burrowing through the contents with his huge hands, like a mole tunnelling into soft earth. When he could find nothing that resembled a weapon, he handed it back and jerked his head for them to continue. Enrique stepped back with a small smile, an incline of his head that said, You’re on your own. Good luck! and Julio pushed open the door.
Manuel de Marquez had withered in the weeks since his son had last seen him, and the smell in the dimness of the room was of a body already fallen into decay, forced to keep functioning by an iron will and a meanness of spirit that would have dismayed any but those who knew him well.
Already he had outlasted the most optimistic prognosis. Some said it was purely out of spite. But they said it in whispers, with one eye cast over their shoulder, even so.
For no-one could argue the fact that Manuel de Marquez was an evil man. He’d made a life’s work of it. There were rumours that he’d shot the doctor who had first diagnosed the cancer and such was his reputation that no-one doubted it might be so. Even now, dying, he had one bodyguard outside the room and another within, standing in the corner opposite the doorway like a column of rock. Julio had known Angel since he was a child and had never seen the man smile.
As he entered, de Marquez opened one yellowed eye and focused on his only son, ignoring the murmuring of the elderly priest on the far side of the bed. The man never paused in his incantations, the familiar Latin phrases threading past his lips as easily as the beads of the rosary slid between his gnarled fingers.
“So, you’ve come to watch me die, have you?” de Marquez said. The voice was clogged, rasping, every syllable dragged up from the depths of sodden lungs before it could be jettisoned into the musty air.
“I’ve come for truth, if you can still remember what that is,” Julio said, and the old man saw the echo of his wife in the young man’s haughty dignity. “The truth about my mother.”
The old man closed his eyes briefly. “She left,” he said. “Twenty years ago. She left and never came back. Never thought about her husband or her son again.”
“How can you be so sure?”
De Marquez gave a hollow laugh, gasping as his breath staggered in his throat because of it. “Do you see her here, in this room? Weeping by my bedside? No. She was faithless as a whore. I should have known it from the day I married her.”
The youth paced, quick jerky steps of anger, to the shuttered window by the priest’s chair, and back to the doorway. The old man shut his eyes again, as if just to watch the movement was too tiring. He heard the boy stop, the slight grate of his boots on the tiles as he turned.
“So why did you marry her?” Julio asked and the humility in the tone made de Marquez stay the harsh retort that had formed ready on his tongue. He weighed the possibilities with care, a man who had made it his business to never apologise and never explain. He opened his eyes and stared at his son and wondered if, in some corner of his soul, he owed the boy the full story.
No, probably not.
“She was a great beauty,” he said, grudging. The gurgle in his chest marked the festering of his body, a sound like a blocked drain and just as rancid. “She bewitched me, cast a spell like no other. It was a kind of madness. I would have done anything to have her.” He made a rumble of self-disgust. “And in the end, when there was no other way, I grew desperate enough to put a ring on her finger.”
The boy paced again, over to the mumbling priest and back again, the bodyguard’s eyes never leaving him.
“And was she happy?”
“Happy!” de Marquez scorned. “What’s happy? For a while she was obedient and willing—what else is a wife? She had no family and I gave her family. Within a year she had fallen with child. She had a son. What more could I ask for?”
“What did you ask for?”
“Loyalty,” the old man said, his lip curling. “It was a busy time. We were building up our interests across the border. I was away a good deal.” He paused, gasping a little again, his breath hissing like steam. “She grew bored and then she grew secretive, and that’s when I knew.”
“Knew?”
“She had taken a lover.”
The words were ripped out of him, raw, and left to bleed between them in the stinking room.
“Where was your proof?” Julio demanded with the same lift of his chin that she had always used. How, de Marquez wondered, did you inherit a gesture from a parent you hadn’t seen for twenty years and could no doubt barely remember?
“She withdrew herself from me for a time, as though she couldn’t bear my touch. And she never had enough money. I gave her a generous allowance, but she always came back for more. Eventually, I had Angel follow her.”
Julio turned to glance at the silent bodyguard in the corner, but the big man showed no sign of reaction as his name was spoken. My mother, Julio thought, must have been blind not to have noticed such a tail. Perhaps by that time, she didn’t care…
“And Angel brought you your proof?” he said aloud, sceptical.
“She went to Ciudad Juárez and waited for a man who crossed the border from El Paso,” de Marquez said, his face coated with a slimy sweat that oozed from his pores. “He was young, handsome. The two embraced. They took a hotel room together and for the whole of that afternoon and all through the night they never left it. What more proof did I need?”
“So tell me, Father,” Julio said, coldly. “Did you kill her, or did you have Angel do it for you?”
For a moment the accusation spread across the room like a fishing net cast across the water, unfolding in flight and hanging suspended in the air. De Marquez stared. Even the priest stumbled over his words, frowning, as though he’d never had cause to falter before. Only the bodyguard remained totally impassive.
Then the net dropped, the moment passed, and de Marquez laughed, a sluicing wash of sound. He lifted one shrivelled hand from the sheet as if to admonish, only for it to flop back again, without strength.
“She came home, unharmed,” he said, but his eyes had turned sly.
“Not so the man she met,” Julio said. “He was found beaten to death in an alleyway, two days later, wasn’t he?”
His father allowed his paper-thin eyelids to flutter closed, hiding behind them. How could the boy know this?
“Is that where you’ve been all this time? Digging through the slums of Juárez? What did you hope to find there?”
But the youth ignored him, speaking instead to the silent bodyguard. “It was a shame you didn’t do some digging of your own, Angel,” Julio said softly, “before you murdered him.” He spun back to the old man lying in the bed. “His name was Julio, just like mine,” he said. “Ah yes, I see the surprise in your face, and the worry that, maybe, my mother took her lover sooner than you realised, hmm? That maybe I am not your son after all?” He snorted, tossed his head like one of the Andalusian horses de Marquez had kept before the sickness had wasted him too far to hold the reins.
“She chose the name,” de Marquez whispered, remembering, jaw clenched tight. “And every time she spoke it she must have been flaunting his name in front of me. The name of her—”
“Her brother,” Julio said.
De Marquez felt the jolt of it like a barb in his chest, flooding his failing heart, forcing the blood to cascade through his ruined vessels at a rate that could not be sustained. He gripped the bedclothes with his bony hands, overwhelmed by the roar of his own blood. Her brother?
“She had no family,” he said, but heard the doubt leaching through his voice as he spoke the words. “If she lied to me…”
“She believed them lost to her, but she never gave up hope.”
“So how were they so miraculously found?” the old man demanded, his voice like a whip. “You expect me to believe in fairy tales?”
“Her brother contacted her. He wrote a letter. He wanted to meet her, at the border. She sent him money.”
“Fabrication,” de Marquez snapped, but he was trembling badly. “Conjecture. She told me nothing of this.”
“She did not want to incur your anger, expose you to embarrassment, if their claims turned out to be false,” Julio said. He was very still now, almost poised, and his voice was low. “So she made her excuses to you and she travelled alone to Juárez and she met with him.”
“And they spent the night together in a hotel room,” de Marquez said, bitter. “That is not how brother and sister behave.”
“She wanted somewhere private where they could talk and not be disturbed,” Julio said. “They had much to talk about. They shared a room, yes, but not a bed.”
“You cannot possibly know—”
“I spoke to the maid who serviced the room—as he should have done,” Julio said, turning reproachful eyes on Angel. “When she walked in the next morning they were still talking together, she told me. The bed had not been slept in. My mother was weeping. ‘Look,’ she said to her. ‘I have found a brother, an uncle for my son.’ She never forgot the joy on my mother’s face.”
De Marquez swallowed, his throat suddenly arid as the desert, and did not trust himself to speak.
“So she came back here, to you, her heart filled with happiness. She had found her family. Her mother was long dead, but she at least had her brother, Julio; and her father was still alive. She had her proof—a locket, a picture of her father as a young man that had been worn by her mother, and now passed on, And what did you do?”
Julio stalked closer to the bedside and stared down at the wizened form of his father. For the first time, Angel moved forwards, his steps a quiet scrape on the tiles, like a giant rock being slid out of its position. Julio threw a contemptuous glance at him.
“You murdered her, in your jealousy. You didn’t listen to her explanation, did you? You struck her down.” He jerked his head towards Angel. “Did he help you hide her body? Do her bones lie at the bottom of a well somewhere, or is she here?” He stamped his heel on the tiles, making the old man start. “Eh, you look guilty, old man. She’s right here, isn’t she? Under the dirt floor of your wine cellar, perhaps? Even in death you hated to let her stray too far out of your sight.”
Silence fell like dusk. Even the priest had ceased to mutter his prayers.
“What’s done is done and cannot be undone,” de Marquez said, weary. He shrugged and met the piercing glare of his son’s gaze with the suspicion of a defiant smile hovering on his thin lips. “What else is it you want from me? Apology? Regrets? You won’t get them. If you wanted to send me to my grave tormented by what I’ve done, well the fate of my wife wasn’t the best or the worst of it, by any means. What do I care if he was her brother, after all? She still lied to me about where she was going. To me!” He paused, collected his breath and his temper only with enormous effort, and said, with calmer scorn, “She deserved to die.”
Julio erupted with a suddenness that surprised his father, jumping forwards, hands outstretched. The bodyguard, Angel, seemed to move much more slowly by comparison, but he reached the youth before he’d taken more than two strides, pinioning his arms, lifting him as though he was a child, swinging him towards the door.
De Marquez could still hear the boy cursing and struggling along the corridor outside, louder as the second bodyguard came to Angel’s aid.
The priest made a noise that sounded like a sigh. Slowly, as though his bones were hurting, he got to his feet and crossed the room to close the door quietly, dulling the sounds of the struggle, his prayer book and his rosary swinging from his fist.
De Marquez didn’t move except for the laboured rise and fall of his chest as he drew in shallow splashy breaths. There was a burning in his lungs now, a prickling to his vision, and a secret writhing fear that the end was close and he was not prepared to meet it.
“So, father, it seems you’ve heard my last confession, after all,” he said, wheezing, his eyes flitting over the man’s shabby cassock as he approached the bedside. “And are you prepared to grant me absolution.”
“The Lord rejoices over every sinner who repents, my son,” returned the priest.
***
By the time Angel had Julio calm enough to return, the priest was once again folded neatly into his chair by the shuttered window.
“The strain was too much for him, but he went quietly, in the end,” the priest said as they stared at the dead man. The bodyguard crossed himself.
The priest rose, was almost at the doorway before Julio asked him, “Tell me, father—did he find peace?”
Turning, the priest paused and then said, “As much as he was able to.”
***
A week after his father’s death, Julio de Marquez ordered the excavation of the wine cellars. The bones that were found there were of a woman in her late twenties. She had been shot, just once, through the back of her skull and buried naked save for an old tarnished silver locket, the chain still around her neck.
Enough money changed hands for the local authorities to turn a blind eye as Julio took the remains of his mother north, to El Paso, to a little churchyard near the Franklin Mountains where he finally laid her bones to rest alongside her own mother, and her murdered brother.
Afterwards, when the earth had been shovelled in onto the coffin and Julio stood alone by the graveside, looking down, he heard a voice behind him:
“Thank you for bringing her home, my son.”
Without turning, Julio said, “Was it worth it? Just to shorten his life perhaps by a few hours?”
“I believe in an eye for an eye. He took both son and daughter from me. It was only right that he should go before his time. Besides, if I hadn’t finished him off, you would have done so yourself, and what kind of a man would I be if I didn’t want to save my only grandson from eternal damnation?”
Julio turned at last, to see the man who’d been taken for a priest, now wearing a good suit and a black tie as a mark of his respect for the occasion.
“Besides anything else,” the old man said, dredging up a tired smile. “What does it matter? I’m damn near dead myself.”
