Puerto Vallarta packed a lot of nostalgia for me as I grew older and the town became younger in appearance. Its golden age was really around 1964, the time of Night of the Iguana, and many were the golden days I had spent there then. Now all the people I had once known had either died or moved on. South of the town lay the village of Conchas Chinas, where that film was shot, its old hotels sitting on top of cliffs that plunged down into a petrol-blue sea. It was in 1958, I believe, that I came here with Mona Kotzen, a girl I picked up in Los Angeles while working on the Smithson case. She must have been twenty-three at that time, a marvel I met in Whitley Heights while talking to her father, and I carried her off in my godly chariot to the rocky coves where the waves beat on the precipices all night long. What had we said to each other during those nights? They must have been important and beautiful things, but now I couldn’t remember what they had been. The words, like Mona, had melted into the ether. But the hotel and the owner, whom I had befriended years before, was still there. Danny Combes, with colorful-motif shirts and a broken nose, and the bright eyes of the ones who will never die easily.
I took a room overlooking the cove and the little private beach, the cliffs covered with shining organ pipe cactus from where local boys launched themselves into the air for a lovely moment before shooting downward into the surf with knives between their teeth, like kingfishers, purely for the pleasure of guests. They had done that in the old days, too. Marimba wafted up from the hotel bar. The sun set behind spear-like agaves as I had dinner on my balcony.
The rich have their secretive mansions around Puerto Vallarta and down the coast in places like Costa Careyes and Tenacatita. Houses as beautiful as anything in Provence and set into a coast not unlike the Côte d’Azur. The owners come up to Puerto to eat at the elegant restaurants, even though it’s a long drive each way. Many of them stayed the night at Conchas Chinas.
It was an hour’s work to ascertain that Black’s yacht was moored at the Paradiso marina in Nuevo Vallarta north of the center, and that he came into town every night with his girl to have dinner on the rooftop terrace of Chez Elena. At nine I walked up to the marina in a navy blazer with brass buttons in the hopes of catching him on the yacht, and the boys there told me that there was in fact a small party going on in the Deep Blue Devil that evening. They pointed out the yacht and I walked around the marina with my cane, struggling a little because the arthritic cramps that sometimes plagued me had returned. When I was opposite the gangplank I saw that it was not a party at all but just a middle-aged man with a Mexican girl and a boat’s captain of sorts in a cream-colored uniform. The middle-aged man—Black, I assumed—had a sunburned pirate’s face with a ridiculous dyed goatee and eyebrows painted on with a calligrapher’s brush. The man fighting the signs of aging always has a touch of sinister vaudeville about him. But his threads were impeccable. The three of them were playing cards at a glass table with a bottle of Jav’s rum and listening to Bob Dylan. Black was in a V-necked Yale sweater with a white shirt underneath and crisp whites with dark-blue Sperry boat shoes. There was, in fact, something lifted out of the Official Preppy Handbook about him, as if Lisa Birnbach had had something like his figure in mind as she instructed our decade on how to do the look right. It wasn’t what I had expected, but then I wasn’t sure what I was expecting in the first place. The scene was sedate and gentlemanly, with an air of ancient reasonableness. There was even a liquor cabinet stationed politely by the table, with shakers and long mixing spoons and obviously expensive glassware. The three looked up together as I appeared at the foot of their gangplank, and out of nowhere, summoned by a general sense of alarm, a butler appeared and called down in a Filipino accent, “Yes, sir?”
The girl tittered, perhaps as I was a little overdressed for the occasion, and the middle-aged man whom I took to be Black rose from his chair and stepped to the edge of the boat to get a better look at me. Suddenly he smiled.
“Ahoy there. Do we know you?”
I made my case, making it as affably as I could, and pretended to be a friend of Zinn’s rather than someone investigating him. Again, my name did not ring any rusty bells.
Black turned to his companions.
“He says he’s a friend of Donald’s.”
The girl was skeptical. “Really?”
Black turned back to me.
“You came here all alone without calling? That’s rather odd of you. Personally I don’t mind. Would you care to come aboard for a drink?”
The butler helped me up the gangplank, my legs feeling the stress. It was a handsome yacht, a multimillion-dollar affair, a Knight & Carver Riviera, if I wasn’t mistaken. When I was seated with them, Black asked the butler to make me a Campari and soda since that was what they were drinking, and he asked me the inevitable questions about myself and Zinn—did we know each other from San Diego? I said I’d known him from years ago and since I happened to be on my way to Acapulco I thought I’d find out how he died. It had saddened me to hear the news.
“Same for us all,” he sighed. “I heard while I was in Manzanillo. You can imagine—”
“So you weren’t traveling together?”
“What an idea. No, he was on his own as far as I know. It’s quite a wild place, Caleta. It was one of Donald’s hideouts. Of course we drop anchor there ourselves sometimes, usually in the winter. It’s a nice little bay and the bars on the beach are sweet. You can swim in from the yacht.”
“Then I wonder how he got there last July?”
“Oh, he hitched a ride on one of the yachts going down there. It’s a big party scene at this time of year. They swim in from the yachts all boozed up—well, you can see how accidents happen.”
“It seems a little foolish.”
The girl was eyeing me up, cool and unconvinced. I had the feeling she had seen through me at once. The eyes were a dark Castilian green, like coins sunk in old water.
“You’re driving?” Black said cheerfully. “Splendid way to go. I should try it myself someday. They say the roads at night are getting violent, though. There are certain stretches you should stay off past nine o’clock.”
“Oh?”
“Kidnappings and all that. It’s a disagreeable fact of life. Stick to daytime driving, if I were you.”
“Even dusk,” the girl finally said.
Her name was Elvira, the accent American as it turned out.
“At first,” I said, “I thought Donald had been kidnapped. I admit it was the first thing that sprang to mind. He had enough enemies down there, I suspect, they could easily have kidnapped him and held him for some ransom. I wouldn’t have been surprised at all. It’s such a pity—he was a lovely man. Wasn’t he, Elvira?”
“He was a rake, let’s face it.”
Black laughed.
“They’re so cruel when we’re dead. When we’re alive, too, come to think of it. But he was a bit of a rake. So was I once upon a time. How about you, Mr. Marlowe?”
“You’ve got me there.”
“It’s the blind judging the blind, then. There’s nothing wrong with being a bit of a rake. It didn’t get him killed at least.”
But that, I thought, was an open question.
“Unfortunately, Marlowe, a fair number of aging white men die here every year. It’s a sort of yearly harvest. When you consider why they’re here, it’s not surprising. They come for a thrill and they find it. That’s all I can say.”
“It’s pretty dismal,” I lied.
“It’s what it is. You have to wonder if it’s what they’re hoping for deep down. You have to die somewhere, so why not here? I’d say it’s a pretty fine place to die, all things considered.”
“I can’t think of anywhere more beautiful. Capri, maybe. But who can afford to die there?”
He lifted his glass to toast the departed Zinn.
“To Donald, may he rake the Elysian Fields!”
The butler served some small tortas and I asked about the American scene on the coast. The world of tanned men in big-shouldered jackets with a taste for cigars, of marlin hunters and whore mongerers on the lam on the cancerous Tropic.
“They come and go,” Black went on. “We all need something in this world, we all come from places where we can’t get them. I wouldn’t live in the United States if you paid me by the minute. Can you imagine ending up in a hospital there? Can you imagine trying to pay for a night of sensualidad? After a certain point you get tired of angry adolescents. You get tired of five hours’ sleep a night and endless white noise. Then you run for the border. When I see the thousands running in the opposite direction, I am reminded of certain facts of human nature that are not encouraging. But you have to make your peace with the world and find your place to die. In the meantime, you can just push the envelope a little.”
“I don’t know—no matter how much you push the envelope it’ll still be stationary.”
“Still,” he went on in a different tone, “you seem awfully curious about our mutual friend. And are you just, as they say, passing through?”
“That’s about the long and short of it.”
I glanced at my watch—the classic move—and uttered a ritual sigh. Time to be moving on. I stirred and the butler sprang forward to help me up. But Black waved him away for a moment.
“We’re sailing down to Manzanillo ourselves,” he said calmly. “You’re welcome to join us if you like. We can even sail on past Caleta—what do you think?”
There was a note of threat in the invitation, like a clenched hand inside a very pretty glove.
“Thank you for your offer, but I don’t like yachts—I get claustrophobia.”
“Very well. Sam, could you help Mr. Marlowe down the gangplank? It looks like that stick of his will get in the way.”
I gave them an old-fashioned bow and I was aware suddenly of the sweat glistening all over my face and the effect it must be giving in the light of the sickly yellow lamps on the deck.
“You’re shaking,” Black said as the butler ushered me toward the gangplank. “I admit our Sam makes a strong Campari and soda. But even so—”
“Are you all right?” the girl asked.
“I’m on my way,” I answered, and wished them a hasta la vuelta.
I picked up my cane as if simultaneously sweeping a cape and got back onto my weary pegs. My exit was grand enough.
On terra firma the butler gave me an anxious look.
“Do you know how to get back to town?” he asked.
But the question seemed to conceal a different one—it was a curious coded warning to leave as quickly as possible and to not come back. I wanted to thank him for it and in the end he walked me back to the car.
“He’s a curious guy, your boss,” I said on the way. “Does he eat live scorpions for breakfast? I was just curious.”
“Just croissants.”
“I’m taken aback. Are you really sailing to Manzanillo tomorrow?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, give them all my fond regards.”
“And you have a safe trip, sir.”
As it went I stayed another night at the Conchas Chinas and during the day I sniffed around in town asking after Donald Zinn. But he was the man-who-never-was. Come dusk I took my drink on my balcony and watched the boys plunge into the cove below like little Tarzans, and I reflected that they must be the grandchildren of the boys I had first seen here in 1958. Time was cruel, and it was me who had changed for the worse. It was my hands that shook as they reached for the salt pot. Maybe Black was right and the Tropic was the honeypot that sucked all the flies in and drowned them in honey, and for that matter Zinn and I were not so different. Men on the lam, pathetic crumbs with long pasts worth forgetting. Zinn had just found his exit and a way to provide for his young widow: it wasn’t so dishonorable when you thought about it twice.