5.

MARY CYR MARRIED TWICE AND WAS DIVORCED ONCE, WIDOWED once before she was twenty-seven. Her first husband was the man who took all he could from her, and beat her twice mercilessly, a man who John went looking for with his service revolver when he found out. Her second husband was a man of eighty-five who reminded her of someone. And with her luck she was able to outlive him. So at twenty-seven she was a widow.

Her third and as yet final husband was a boy named Lucien—a fisherman from Neguac who she forgot somewhere in Spain. In fact he too was dead.

There were terrible fights in the family over whom she married and why she was getting married, and what she was to do with her life. Lawyers alternately hounded and protected her.

John had been hired as her bodyguard. The trouble was—he believed that she had married the first man to get back at him. And he felt that though she had said many times that she didn’t want to act in any way but virtuous and find love—he felt she would do something very dangerous and she would do it to prove to him that she was free. Whatever freedom she had was to come at a terrible price and be used in curious ways against her. She could be violent too, and John knew from experience how violence worked in the human heart.

“I want you to find out who killed Bobby for me—if you do, I will say nice things about you,” she wrote John once, after not being in contact with him for two years. “I will even mention you to Princess Diana—and as you know, she lives in a castle and has a whole hush of boyfriends—”

But he could not tell her who killed Bobby, her son, because she herself had a hand in it. Of course he knew it was an accident—but what would that matter now? It was as if all her life she was making a mad dash toward the horrid jail cell in the withering Mexican heat. And now she had found it.

He sat on a bench inside the roadway leading to the villa, and looked toward the L-shaped pool and some lounge chairs covered in dead leaves in the blazing afternoon.

There was a faint smell of some Mexican flower and farther away a haze, and the smell of diesel and the thud, thud of a jackhammer on the roadway, which she too must have been able to hear in her cell.


A Russian couple sat by the one functioning pool. A German man and his wife lay on lounge chairs at their little villa, which overlooked the second pool, filled with a foot-round puddle of dirty water and a small tide of dead leaves. He walked over to talk to the Russians for a moment, and asked if they remembered her and Victor, the boy.

“Oh, the American,” the Russian man said.

“Canadian.”

“Ah. The Canadian. She seemed happy—why would she do it?”

“Well, who said she did it?”

“Everyone—even in Cancún, we were there two days ago—they say it too. All the papers say the evidence is incontrovertible,” the Russian advised. “Though he did errands for other people too.” He scratched his stomach and looked about, and yawned. There was the smell of burning leaves somewhere, and a lizard sunned itself on a rock.

The German shaded his eyes when John approached him. He smiled and said to his wife: “Kanadisch.”

John spoke to them a moment. It wasn’t at all as if he had any authority here, and he knew it. But the German man and his Dutch wife were pleasant to him, and aware of this as a special case.

Yes, the German said he remembered Victor. He came to the resort every day with the little boy—his brother. But he had no idea what had happened. There was another boy, named Ángel Gloton, who seemed to protect them. They were good friends.

“Ángel Gloton?” John said.

“Yes.” The German nodded

The woman asked:

“Haben sie dich den korper sehen lassen?”

“Have they let you to see the body?” her husband translated.

That was a very strange question, John thought.

“No, not at all,” John said.

The woman looked cautiously at her husband.

“Meine Frau ist Ärztin,” the man said. “My wife is a doctor—she is interested.”

They explained that she was the first to see the body. The manager of the resort ran to her and asked her to come to Mary Cyr’s villa because he knew she was a doctor. She saw the body for about five minutes, but then the police came and asked her to leave.

“It is all silly,” the German said. He shrugged. “It seems far-fetched, to say the least.”

“What does?”

“Well, they say it was arsenic,” the wife said, shifting into English, which was a little unnerving.

“He was beaten for some money, perhaps. Or something. But no one gave him arsenic—he had bruises just around his neck—but the room was dark and I wasn’t in there long.”

“Still, we think that would be easy to prove—and then once we prove it, she can go home,” the German said.

“He was grabbed and hit?” John asked.

“You would know in a second—yes—by someone larger than that woman. Anyway, I am sure Miss Cyr couldn’t have been able to do that to him.”

John nodded.

They both looked at him with wide, knowing eyes.

“I see,” John said.

“But,” the Dutchwoman said cautiously, “you have to be prepared for what the authorities can do here.” Then she looked at him. “Het is andere wereld.”

“It’s another world,” the German translated.