38

What was it about the black cat, Asquith wondered, that had so aroused his desire to own it? And not only to own it, but to prize it, and hide it away where no one could see it and covet it in return.

Certainly its appearance had been remarkable enough. A cat carved, or chopped, out of black obsidian, it had been just the right size to carry without effort in the hands, even slippery hands, moist with the humidity of the jungle.

It had taken a long time to find the place, on a branch of land, a coral tumble the locals called “La Guadaña,” the scythe, an arc of land that sliced into the sea. The Yucatan had many such sights. It was an old, man-made hummock of rock yet unexcavated, tangled with the copper-scrub brush of jungle growth and the lairs of snakes, serpents that straightened underfoot and vanished, leaving the barest track. The place was a stew of lizards and the leaping punctuation of mosquito larvae in the foot-size pools between the chalky coral boulders.

Ham had not even wanted to struggle out there through the undergrowth. The two of them were having such a wonderful time, he argued, drinking and calling to the parrots that flung overhead. A few of the bright, metal-green birds were attracted to him. He had always understood animals, and they had always responded to his voice, his gifts of, in this case, bits of tortilla. From time to time the two travelers lurched into town to buy Lomotil at the Clinica Guadelupe, a place with green walls and green asphalt tiles and a green welcome mat with crisp new rubber stipples for the wiping of street mud from the shoes.

They found a man with a yellow-headed parrot that said, in English, “drop dead.” This man had worked for Americans in New Mexico, setting up microwave stations near Taos, and he was both amused by these two long-haired young men and eager to show them, for a price, “where the secrets are still lying for anyone to pick up.”

“If they’re so easy to find they would be found,” Speke had argued, cheerfully but with a certain lively force. “He’s tracking us off into the swamps of Quintana Roo to show us something made in Mexico City, or Korea.”

The beach life had been seductive. The village was both trashy and prosperous, a broad concrete and mud avenue of Valvoline signs and a burro with what looked like white eyeliner browsing under a bridge. The police in their blue and white pickup trucks had been unsmiling but friendly, once the two Americans established the fact that the owner of the abandoned boat yard did not mind their campfires. The truth was, the retired owner of the yard had sold all of his boats long before, and kept the white sand raked so that his pet grackle was the first creature to make tracks across the white beach each morning. The black bird had been beautiful in his dark plumage, but the urraca was not as dark and beautiful as the obsidian cat Speke and Asquith were to find.

The owner of the grackle made a steady profit selling the two Americans, and a few other international wanderers, tequila and Oso Negro gin destilada seca, but one day he encouraged the two to take the advice of the man who had built communications systems in the desert. “You dig,” he said. “Who knows what you might find? It’s not easy.”

Being told it was a challenge was all it took to engage the interest of Hamilton Speke, and they had hacked their way with those machetes which seemed at a glance too rusty to slash the ropelike brush. The steel was keen, quiet. Once there, stumbling up the ruined pyramid, they tied a hammock overhead, and cleared a camp with the blades, snakes unknotting and vanishing at the touch of their shadows.

Speke had always maintained that the locals had left it there, as a gift, implying that it was both wondrous and a fake, but it was like him to think such a thought. He always assumed that strangers liked him and were planning ways to give him a pleasing surprise, while Asquith knew that the world was populated with men and women who knew his kind at a glance. They had lived, it seemed, on booze and Bimbo brand donas, the little packaged doughnuts, some powdered with white sugar, some coated with chocolate frosting. The air was heavy, creamy, sweet, and after a while the mosquitoes would not sting through the coating of perspiration. Insects whispered, scuttled, fled. Sometimes Speke would sear a white-fleshed fish over a fire, and they lived the time both searching and pretending to search, both avid and not caring, until one day Speke climbed out of the virtually Etruscan rubble of the rocks and dropped the moss green statue in Asquith’s lap.

It looked lumpish, deformed, a monster made of jungle slime. Washed off, the green and coral white gave way to perfect black, rough-hewn, the glass carved into the scallop-shaped divots glass always leaves when it is crafted. They had their find, an idol, a little feline god.

A treasure. It was, Asquith had breathed as soon as he examined it, a fake. Speke was more cheerful, even manic. Fake or not, he had argued, it was theirs. And it might well be authentic. Hamilton had argued for a trip to Merida, or Mexico City, to have it verified, but Asquith had wanted to bury it somewhere nearby while they decided what to do with it, to keep it away from robbers, or from the whims of the things themselves, which so easily vanished or got lost. While he voiced doubts, it was clear that he wanted to believe that the cat was a genuine treasure. This had led to their great disagreement, after their wondrous celebration. It had led to the end of their friendship.

Speke stood before him now, and lifted his hand to take Asquith’s shoulder. Where is Maria? his eyes asked, and even though Asquith had told him the truth, Speke was slow to understand. “I’m not going to play your game, Timothy. I want you to tell me what you have done with her.”

My game, Asquith wanted to laugh. But that wouldn’t be fair. Because this was, in a way, a game, after all, as was most art. “She is out there,” he said. “Go look.”

There was doubt in Speke’s eyes now. Anxiety was making him slow, and deliberate, the same feeling that caused some people to become frantic.

A jaguar god, Asquith mused now, as Speke stepped through the French windows of the Outer Office. It had almost certainly been authentic, he thought as he waited beside the desk, one of the many Mayan idols strewn in the jungle. The vegetation there was so ingrown and so infested that it healed over even famous monuments, closing in over parking lots and highways. It had long ago swallowed the remains of that symbol of their youth, and their friendship, the black god.

I always wanted to write a play, Asquith thought, about the two lost young men, so recently successful with Ham’s first songs that they could live in idleness and discovery like that in the heat. I wanted to write the play, or the screenplay, complete with music, that would convey the affection I had for Hamilton, and the wonder of finding such an astounding, rough-hewn miracle in the lime gray earth. This was going to be my crest-jewel, the tale that made up for years lost to illness, and to fear.

But, Asquith told himself, the tale had always been Ham’s—it had always belonged to the world of light. And I was wrong to ever imagine otherwise, to believe that I could claim even so much as an episode as my own.

Speke was out there in the woods now, and Asquith was waiting for him to make the discovery. Why hadn’t he seen her yet? She was not far from the Outer Office. Surely he had found her by now.

Asquith cut at the air with the poker, a fencer readying his thrust and cut. The iron hummed.

He eyed the poker. It seemed, just then, less a weapon than something magical, Aaron’s rod, a caduceus from which the snakes had fled. He made a sound, part cough, part laugh. Come back, he called to his old friend with his thoughts. Hamlet, mortally stung, will yet fight to his death.

Only please be quick, dear Hamilton. See her soon, make your discovery, and get all of this over with. The audience is hushed, hankies in hand. The ushers are frozen in place at the exits. All eyes are ours.

Be quick.

Speke saw trees. He saw a place of tree browns, tree grays. That was all. Where was Maria, he had asked, and Asquith had indicated that she was out here.

This was bad. This was a trick.

But as he failed to see her anywhere, he began to see that the living Maria was hiding. She must be. Dread stirred, and became relief. That was it—it was another part of the game, the rules of which kept multiplying and unfolding, the further dissemblance of Asquith, both Lazarus and magus.

Surely it would be all right. There would be limits to how evil Asquith had become. Speke had always believed in life, in the basic light within the core of even terrible events. “Maria?” he called softly, increasingly convinced that she was here, watching, waiting, Asquith’s sister but, at the same time, the wife and lover of Hamilton Speke.

Come out where I can see you.

That morning in Cozumel, the puddles chalk white from the hard rain on the coral soil, Asquith had taken Speke’s hand. They had been celebrating all night, drinking down their joy at discovering the obsidian cat.

Asquith had taken his hand. Held it, and, like a man lifting a glass to his lips, he had kissed Speke on his knuckle. The very knuckle burned, even now, the knuckle of the forefinger of his right hand. It had been plain in Asquith’s eyes: he expected to be kissed in return, there, on the lips.

The tiny frogs had scattered around them. There was so much life that unless you were very careful each footstep killed one of them. It was the impossible multitude, as well as their tininess, that had made them seem unreal. There were too many of them, he had thought, the way sometimes he stepped back from a television screen, struck by the thought: there are so many people.

There was so much life in the world. Speke rubbed his knuckle into the palm of his hand, a man trying to erase not his future, and not his past, but his own character. The little frogs had come out with the rain, and vanished with the heat, a kind of living smoke. The parrots had spiraled through the light, with cries like steel given the gift of joy. Iguanas had marched through the scrub like ugly aristocrats. The air itself had been an extended body, as warm as blood.

When Speke had responded by turning away, Asquith had strode into the excavated tumble of stones, stepped forth with the black cat and accused Speke of stealing. He stole Asquith’s time, and his affection, and all the while he was oblivious, knew only his own happiness, his own faith, his own belief that the world belonged to Hamilton Speke.

Asquith had lifted the black cat high into the sunlight, so high the glass god glittered.

And then it had all ended—all of it.

Maria, his prayers called, louder in his mind than any call could have been. Maria, please come out. The game is over. It was always going to be over soon, and it was always going to have a happy ending.

He heard them first, the living static that surrounds the wound, and feeds upon the blood. Even as he knew that Maria was hiding, or perhaps merely bound somewhere, clamped into silence, he began to hear the tiny songs, the keen of insect wings.

He put his hand out to a branch, grasped at it, and missed his hold. He found the branch again, and kept himself upright.

Time to come out, he called in his soul. Time to come home and be safe. He followed, step by step, the ceaseless thrumming of the flies.

Not like Clara, his inner shriek said. Not like Clara. It won’t be anything like what happened to Clara. You’ll see. It will be all right.

The roots, the stones, the scattered acorns, of course, and the clawed, worked-over grave. But there was nothing there to give him any concern. Everything is sun and air, he thought. There is nothing wrong. The light from the sky played on the sharp, cinnamon brown stones.

And then he saw her.