The only way the boy could have beaten the trolley to the Pantheon was by car. No Mexican boy in denims owns a car. He’s lucky if he owns a second pair of denims. Unless he has been hired by someone else, he certainly hasn’t the price of a taxi fare. The enigmatic shadow of Bill Halliday seemed very close.
I played with the idea of pushing through the bird-cages, giving the boy a sound spanking and sending him home. The gun didn’t bother me in this public place. And he was small enough to be thrown over my knee with one hand. That would probably have been the smartest thing to do. But I didn’t feel smart. I felt curious.
The knowledge that I had so short a time left in Mexico made me feel casual about the whole affair. If he wanted to follow me, okay. I was interested in knowing what he was after.
The boy was ignoring me. That was his brilliant idea of how to be a good shadow. Don’t look at a guy, and he doesn’t know you are there. I let him think I hadn’t noticed him, and drifted with the celebrants of the Day of the Dead towards the cemetery gates. In spite of myself, I was starting to think about Deborah Brand as I had thought of her in Yucatan—a frightened kid flying from some danger into a trap. If there was something in the boy’s following me, then there had been something in my theory about Deborah.
She had been a fugitive.
Were they trying to make a fugitive of me, too?
At the gates policemen were confiscating all food brought by the Indians and were checking it in a roped enclosure. The Department of Public Health must have passed an unimaginative law against feeding the dead. I moved inside. The front area of the cemetery was chill and formal with bombastic memorials to national heroes. A few tired flowers had been scattered on their illustrious tombs, but there they were receiving little attention. Everyone was streaming past to greet his own particular cherished corpse.
Behind the monuments the cemetery stretched as far as the eye could see. Under quiet shade trees and flowering oleanders thousands of modest graves drowsed in the early sunlight. The mild air smelt of dead leaves and sadness. But there was none of the cloistered serenity of a New England cemetery. The place was quivering with activity, loud with human voices and garish with flowers.
I started down one of the broad paths. A cement hole, like an open grave, at the path’s edge was filled with dirty water. A woman with a scarlet shawl and long Indian pigtails scooped out water in a kerosene can and splashed it over a nearby grave. A man, with a cigarette drooping from his lips, was repainting a name on a wooden cross. They worked in a casual, humdrum manner, just as they would have worked around their own houses.
I knew the boy was still following me, the way you do know those things, as if there was some area of sensitivity at the back of my neck. I didn’t look around, but I played with the question: Why? If Halliday was behind this, what did he want from me? If he had murdered Deborah, obviously she had been carrying something he wanted, some actual object or some information. Maybe after they’d killed her they hadn’t found it. Maybe because I’d been with her they thought I was her associate. Maybe they even thought she had given me this hypothetic thing.
I knew I wasn’t her associate, and I knew she hadn’t given me anything except a twenty-five-cent detective story. Murders weren’t committed for the ownership of a book. But Halliday hadn’t known that she’d given me nothing, and he hadn’t known either that the red pocket-book had sunk with Deborah in the cenote. Maybe he thought I’d picked it up and taken the “thing”—whatever it was—that had been in it. I thought of Deborah’s room key, too. She’d given it to me. If Halliday knew that, there was a pretty good reason for him to consider me as a highly implicated character.
There were quite a lot of angles to this. My interest was growing.
With Mexican patience, a woman was decorating a little picket-fence around a grave with pink carnations, snipping off individual heads and tying them to each upright.
I glanced over my shoulder. The boy in denims was padding leisurely after me. He still carried the burlap sack over his shoulder, but he had discarded the newspaper. In its place he was carrying an empty birdcage. I wondered whether the cage was another of his world-shattering ideas for camouflage, or whether he had just happened to need one and had seized the opportunity to buy it. He was beginning to get on my nerves. The pursuit was so brazen. I started to think of the gun.
And the sack, too. Somehow I didn’t like the sack.
I had reached a little square in which stood a stone building with a staircase winding up its façade. A path led through the graves to a door in the building’s side. A slat was broken out of the door, and a girl was stooping down peering into the interior.
My gaze settled on her in surprised recognition. Even from the back there was no mistaking those moulded ballet legs, the silver-fox cape and the tall Cossack cap.
As I approached she straightened from her inspection of the building’s interior and came down the path towards me. We met. The black wool lashes batted over her eyes. Then she looked at me again, and a great, warm smile broke her face.
“Ah, already I see you,” she said in English. Her voice was rich and heavy as a Russian cigarette. “You are the man in the cake place. You eat the dead bread, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “I noticed you, too.”
She was as pleasant a thing as anyone could want to meet in a cemetery. I saw I could use her, too. It would at least be a precautionary measure to confuse my hanger-on by acquiring a companion.
She brandished the arm with the fur circlet, indicating the cemetery as a whole. “You like it? Graves. Flowers. Corpses. Quaint, no? Pictureful.”
“Very.”
She pointed at the door through which she had been peering. “I look inside. There is a great slab. A door with hinges. I think it is—how you say?—crematoria. Slide in the corpse. Pouff. Burn him up.” She sighed. “You look. You think: One day she comes to me, too. Death. So sad.”
She couldn’t have looked more alive. I had never seen anyone so burstingly full of vitality and vitamins.
I said: “There’s the Russian coming out in you.”
The great eyes rolled. “You tell I am Russian? How you tell?”
“How can I tell the Kremlin’s Russian?”
She laughed, and it was like a bell ringing in a Rimsky-Korsakov opera. “Ah, so you think this of me? I am the big, old, tired Russian monument.”
She was young and very luscious, and she knew it. That, I thought, was why she laughed. Because it was nice to be young and beautiful and pretend to be crazy about death.
I didn’t have to encourage her to stay with me. Completely unselfconscious, she slipped her hand through my arm and suggested:
“You come with me, yes? To be alone I hate. Bored, bored, bored, all the time bored. Together we see the pretty people fix their tombs.”
The silver-fox cape brushed against my shoulder. It reeked of tuberoses. I glanced back. The boy with the sack and the bird-cage was still stubbornly following.
A large family, dressed in deepest mourning, was collected stiffly around a very small grave. Near them a lonely woman was kneeling in front of a grave where four white candles, decorated with white satin ribbons, gleamed palely in the sunlight.
The girl leaned closer against me, and her red lips parted in a ripe smile. “You tell me your name? It is fool to walk with the man and not to know the name.”
“I’m Peter Duluth.”
“And me. I’m Vera Garcia.”
“A Spanish name?”
“Only my husband.” She gesticulated with the furry arm. “I am ballet-dancer. A great artiste of the ballet. The critics they say that I work, work, work and become more better than this Markova and this Danilova. I am much younger than these old women.”
So my diagnosis of her profession was right. I wondered if there ever had been a young ballerina who wasn’t a thousand times better than all the great stars rolled together?
“I guess Mr. Hurok’s just pestering you with cables,” I said.
“Me? Pester me?” Her eyes flashed. “He had better not to try. The ballet—by me it stinks. All the time the foot on the bar, up in the air, up on the toe, down. Tired, always tired.” She slouched her shoulders to indicate extreme exhaustion. “No fun.” Her face lighted. “Two years ago we come here, the ballet, to Mexico. And here is this man. This politico. He is old, old and rich. So rich! And he wishes me for his wife. He gives me everything, he says. The house here, the house in Acapulco.” She shrugged. “The dance? The critics? I should worry me of the critics. I marry.”
Two small, very dirty children, were playing tag around a group of graves, and one of them let out with a piercing: Hyoh, Silvaire. Vera Garcia’s eyes were darting everywhere, not missing a trick.
I said: “And you’re happy with your old husband?”
“Happy? All the time I am happy, happy.”
“He’s good to you?”
“He is dead. Three months from the marriage he dies. Pouff. From oldness.” She nuzzled against me. “Now I am a widow. And rich, rich. The rich widow.”
“That’s cozy,” I said.
“Cozy?” She reflected. “What is this, cozy?”
“Nice,” I said.
She nodded naïve agreement. “Yes, very nice.” She pointed crudely with her thumb over her silver-foxed shoulder towards the area of elegant tombs. “To-day I bring flowers to the grave of the poor old man. Over there it is. The great marble thing with an angel. Many, many tuberoses I bring, and lilies. I pile them on the grave. Pretty? So pretty. You think he smell the flowers, that poor old man? Always he hate it, the smell of tuberoses and lilies.”
Uninhibited joy of life poured out of her like heat from a fire. She was a wonderful remedy for the gloom of the cemetery.
But she didn’t solve the problem of Junior with the light-blue jeans. Now I had something better to do. He was beginning to pall. Every now and then, as unobtrusively as possible, I glanced behind us. He was still following. Once when I looked, Vera imitative as a monkey, looked back, too. Several minutes later when I paused, ostensibly to study a grave, she said suddenly:
“You worry, yes? All the time he comes after us, this boy with the cage of the bird.”
I was surprised at her acuteness. I wasn’t going to confide what little I knew of the truth to her, but I could hardly deny a pursuit as obvious as his.
“Seems that way,” I said.
“Ah, these Mexicans.” The grey-black eyes flashed ominously. “I fix.”
She swirled round and swept towards the boy. When she reached him she poured out a flow of words from which he visibly cowered. Once he waved the bird-cage half-heartedly, but Vera Garcia shook her fist at him with Russian abandon, and he turned tail, scurrying away through the graves.
She came back to me, her high bosom falling and rising with indignation. “The cage of the bird!” she exclaimed. “He say he follow us to sell the cage of the bird. What are we, I ask? Two parrots that we need the cage of the bird?” She linked her arm through mine, throwing up her ravishing smile. “When I am mad, I am terrible. I scare him. He is frightened, frightened.”
I was impressed by her show of ferocity, but I didn’t, for a moment, imagine that I’d seen the last of Junior.
For a while we wandered through the graves, and then suddenly she said:
“Of the dead I am bored. From here I go to Los Remedios—to the shrine of the Lady of the Miracles. Every year I go to ask for the poor old man my husband a beautiful angel in heaven. Outside I have the car. You come, yes? Together to the Shrine of the Remedies.”
That seemed to me like an excellent idea. Once again it killed two birds. I’d see more of Vera and, if I handled the exit from the cemetery satisfactorily, I should see the end of Junior.
I guided Vera down a narrow, shrub-lined path back towards the main gates. If possible, she talked more than Mrs. Snood, and as we strolled, she was lost in a flow of weird, emphatic English. When we reached the open arena around the Monument of Heroes I kept my eyes peeled for Junior. But he was nowhere in sight.
There was still no sign of him as I eased Vera out into the anonymous crowd beyond the cemetery gates. We wended our way through flowers and pigs and beer-parlours to Vera’s parked car. It was a glossy new station wagon coupe, and I remembered that I had noticed it parked that morning on the Calle Londres. Just as she was climbing in, Vera Garcia saw the ferris wheel in the carnival ground.
“Oh, the big wheel. I am crazy for the big wheel. Up, up in the air. We go to the wheel? We…” The great lashes dropped piously. “No. Comes first the poor old man, my husband.”
She backed recklessly, and headed the station wagon away through a complication of babies and dogs. I kept down low in my seat, but before we left I glanced back.
There was no sign of Junior.
I felt relief and an exaggerated affection for my new friend. She was just what I had thought her—a feather-pated ballerina—but she wasn’t spoiled. In spite of the frou-frou there was a rustic solidity. She was fresh and appetizing as a glass of raw milk begged at a farmhouse door.
Once out on the main highway she drove with suicidal abandon through the barren countryside, where grey, dusty mountains edged the horizon. I listened contentedly to her babble of chatter until at length a great bleak church loomed on a hill. In front of it, supported on a high stone column, was a huge painted crown.
“Ah, the crown of the Lady of Los Remedios,” said she. “Already we are here. I make the good time, no? I drive the car well, yes?”
“Like a jet-propulsion plane,” I said.
She asked: “What is it, this jet-propulsion?”
“Fast,” I said.
Although I had never visited Los Remedios, I’d heard about it. It is one of Mexico’s most revered shrines. Vera parked on the outskirts of the inevitable market, and we moved into the spacious church square. Indians were streaming into the huge cathedral through piles of pottery and heaped, sizzling spare-ribs. The squeaky sound of a reed organ trailed out, warring with the juke-boxes on the market.
We went into the church, which was tall and penumbrous, with a foam of flowers at the altar. No service was in progress, but the church was crowded. All the benches were occupied. Groups of men, women and children knelt in the aisle lost in prayer or staring, wide-eyed, at richly clad saints in candle-lit niches.
Vera Garcia whispered: “The shrine is in the back.”
We went down the aisle and through an archway into a chamber beyond. It was vivid with the costumes of Indian pilgrims from all states. They were crowding, waiting their turn, at the foot of a stone stairway which led up to the shrine which contained the little miraculous figure of the Lady. The figure is believed to have come from Spain with Cortes, and its subsequent history, coloured by legend, has built up for it a mighty reputation of power.
On the walls were hundreds of naïve paintings which had been sent in gratitude by the recipients of miracles. They showed the accidents or diseases which the Lady had mercifully neutralized—bloody automobile crashes, green, sickly babies in cribs, gaunt cripples with crutches.
“I go to say please for the poor old man,” breathed Vera. She smiled me her dazzling secular smile, and then proceeded reverently to take her place in the line of waiting pilgrims.
An open door beyond showed an iron balcony which looked down on a sun-splashed patio. There was, I knew, a disused Franciscan convent attached to the back of the church. Leaving Vera to her devotions, I stepped out on to the balcony. A passage led into the convent. No one was there. The massive, deserted solitude was pleasant. I went idly down the passage. It turned twice, with empty, cell-like chambers on either side. I came to a great nail-studded door which looked Moorish. It was half open. I went through it.
I found myself in a large storeroom filled with ecclesiastical objects which had either been discarded or were waiting to be repaired. Old confessionals, benches, dark sombre canvases and broken plaster saints were huddled dustily together. Sunlight slid through a high, barred window. A fly droned lazily.
I paused to inspect a three-foot plaster figure of a monk which stood on an old refectory table close to the door. I didn’t know who he was. But he had real hair and a real cassock of coarse brown cloth. One of his arms had been broken off, perhaps by revolutionary soldiers or perhaps by the carelessness of a dusting-woman. The other arm was stretched towards me as if in benediction.
I stooped to study the monk’s hand. As I did so, I was conscious of a faint sound behind me. I turned. Instantly there was a glitter of metal in the sunlight, and before I could straighten I felt the violent impact of a blow on my temple.
I staggered. But I could still see. For a split second of exaggerated clarity I gazed at the figure of a boy in denims, young, pretty, like a flower. His eyes, watching me, were as expressionless as an image’s.
He was holding a revolver by its muzzle. Under his other arm was something else. What was it?
A sack? A burlap sack?
I tried to step towards him, but everything started to blur. I twisted back in an attempt to cling to the refectory table for support. My hand groped and missed. I was dimly conscious of the plaster monk’s arm thrust out towards me with its dead plaster fingers. I felt myself falling.
Then everything blacked out.