It was by then only nine o’clock. With the day ahead of me, I decided to take the same walk along the harbor wall back to the palapas, where I was hoping to see old Nestor fishing. He was. Before us the bay held at its center the newly arrived yacht, a large Broward flying an American flag, and a faint music traveled across the water to us from its decks, where two white women sunned themselves in visors. Nestor stood in exactly the same spot with his bucket of bait, and as I sat down on the sea wall beside him, he asked me if I had slept badly or well.
“I stayed up all night. I couldn’t remember the words to ‘Little Rabbit Foo Foo.’ ”
He said it was the ghosts in all the houses. He, too, had slept badly, and so did everyone else. Many dealers had been executed in the ruins, on the headlands, on the lonely tracks going up into the hills. They were shot by other dealers or by the federales themselves, who were free to do so if no one saw them. The bodies showed up in the basements of the abandoned houses or in the long grass fully exposed to the sun. Telltale clouds of butterflies marked the spots. The whole place had a stench of casual death. Across it lay a web of gossip and fear and rumor, and the wise ones kept their peace with themselves. The only way to break into this web was by means of a quiet propina.
I made our conversation turn until Señor Zinn was its center. Then I admitted—in a hushed way that suggested that only he also knew—that I was there to find out if Señor Zinn had drowned or died another way. After all, I said, the police had been far from the first ones on the scene. Didn’t he himself come there early every morning—even at dawn?
I pulled out a huge banknote from my wallet and curled it into my hand so that we both knew how things would now proceed. He glanced along the seawall and down to the beach and, seeing that it was empty, made a flick of the eyes that gave the assent.
“Don’t come any closer to me,” he said. “Look away and talk in a normal voice.”
I did exactly as I was told.
“Were you there that day?”
“I came down at six. The body was there, but there was someone else as well. It was a man I know. He fishes around here, but he has a house in the interior where he lives. I saw him turn the body over and go through the pockets. After that he left. He won’t be back here for a long time.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t tell you why. You’ll have to find him yourself.”
I reached out, passed the note into his hand, and watched his face change complexion. He said the man lived in a small town called Nueva Italia on the road inland that went toward Pátzcuaro. Everyone called him Rubio Pez, but obviously it wasn’t his real name. He had a house there, and when the fishing dried up he hid out sometimes for months at a time. No one knew much about him. If I asked around I would find him, and when I did I could tell him Nestor sent me. If I paid Rubio well he might tell me what he had found and why he had gone into hiding. But I should be careful going after him. He wouldn’t know who I was and he might overreact. It was a small town in the desert and there would be no one to help me.
“Is it really worth it?” he said at last.
“If he was the person who found Señor Zinn, it is.”
“I am sure it was him.”
I turned to the yacht, swan-like in the agate bay, and I asked him who it belonged to. He shrugged.
“Never seen that one before. They say it’s an American group from Los Angeles. Film people maybe.”
“Did they swim ashore yet?”
But he didn’t answer—the Yankees didn’t concern him. Their music didn’t reach into his mind. I spent the better part of an hour with Nestor and still he said nothing more. There was no reason to talk if you’d already said what you wanted to say.
Nueva Italia lay some miles inland in a semidesert, its houses baked into submission. In the stillness of high noon my footfall was the only sound heard outside the town’s Western Union pickup, the Caseta Telefónica Luna, where I asked about Rubio Pez and was told that he came in once a week to pick up money. I hadn’t lost my touch. The woman even knew where he lived, in a shack north of town in a place called the Presa de Infiernillo. I went back out into the glare with a small hand-drawn map courtesy of a ten-dollar bill while swallows scattered around me, perfectly free in a free world, and behind their sound there was the great silence of a desert.
On either side of the northbound road, the land opened up into plains covered with saguaros, upon which sat an army of blackbirds. The map had marked the turnoff of a dirt road that swung at right angles to the main one, and I drove along it for five miles.
There were no shacks out there except his, and it clung like a desperate barnacle to the top of a bluff infested with the same birds. Perhaps they were waiting for the lone occupant to die. I parked the car a hundred yards from his door and took out my shikomizue sword-cane from the back seat. The wind kicked up a blinding dust as I struggled uphill to the shack. It was made of a mixture of wood, aluminum, and blue plastic. I called out his name and said in Spanish that Nestor had sent me. There was no answer, but the front door flapped open. Then I noticed something move far off out in the saguaros. Someone was standing among the giant cactus, watching me, and it was surely Rubio. I turned and went down a gully toward him, still calling his name.
At almost the same moment a shot rang out and the air above my right shoulder shuddered and caused my reflexes to recoil downward. But I kept cool and didn’t overreact. A confrontation was the last thing I wanted. I called out again.
“I’ll meet you at the house,” I called out.
I turned back, exposing myself to a shot, and made my way to the shack. When I got there he was right behind me, a man older even than me, white stubbled, and with a look of wild fear in his eyes. He was armed with a shotgun and was not out there to kill rabbits. An ancient mariner lost on dry land and about to snap his cap. I could see at once that he was harmless. But men filled with fear are often the least harmless. I decided to go easy on him and come over all smiles and charm.
“You’re a terrible shot,” I said.
“No, I never miss.”
So he had mistaken me for the one who would someday come to kill him.
“Shall we go inside?” I said.
He wasn’t sure. He held the shotgun against his hip and looked me over. Finally he ushered me in through the door into his pathetic den, out of the dazzling sun.
It was filled with tackle, buoys, dried fish on lines, and knives. I told him who I was, and how much I would pay, even though it must have occurred to him that the easiest thing to do would be to shoot me, take it anyway, and bury me later in the arroyos.
But he was a gentle old-timer and not up for any real madness.
“Sit down,” he said, lowered the gun, and laid it up.
I placed the money on the table between us and was frank. I wanted to know all about the man he had found on the beach in Caleta de Campos and what he had found on him. I told him I knew he had come here to hide and that none of it was his fault after all. I admitted I was from the insurance company and therefore on the right side of the law, as he would be if he told me everything.
“Whose law?” he asked.
It was a fair question.
“Well, the Americans, anyway,” I said.
“It won’t help here.”
“The money will.”
It was about a thousand dollars.
He eyed it, slowly relenting, and then I told him that no one would know it was from me. He was safe.
“You’re a fisherman?”
He said he worked the coast at certain times of the year.
“You must see all the yachts that come and go. I heard they were mostly return visitors.”
“They are.”
“They’re buying drugs, aren’t they?”
He could sit on the sea wall and watch the small boats plying their trade between the beach and the yachts. The rich and the poor united by Acapulco Gold. That morning, however, he was preparing his boat to go hunting lobster. He was on the beach at 3 a.m., and there had been a small storm earlier in the evening. The sky was clear and the moon shone brightly.
“There was a big yacht in the bay and the lights were on.”
“Was there a party on board?”
“Nothing of the sort. There didn’t seem to be anyone there. After an hour I noticed the man washed up in the surf. I went down to see who it was.”
“Señor Zinn?”
“Not at all. I went down to look at him and I saw it was a dead gringo filled with water, and I dragged him up onto the sand.”
The man had been dead for an hour, he thought, although he was no expert in things like that. He was in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, and had a gold chain around his neck. A man in his sixties maybe, with thin limbs and close-cropped white hair and tattoos on his arms. Since the palapas were long closed, he was alone there with this body, and he admitted that he went through the pockets to see what he could find. He wasn’t trying to steal. He just wanted to know who it was. He looked over to the yacht and made the obvious connection, but there was no one on deck, and although the lights were on there was no other sign of life. He found a waterproofed packet in the shirt’s chest pocket with ID, a credit card, and some cash. They were all dry. He knew something was awry and that these items might be useful or valuable down the line. He asked me if he had been wrong to think that. I told him he had used his wits and used them quickly. But why, I said, had there been ID or a credit card there at all? He must have just carried it around with him all the time, as people do.
“Then you have it here,” I said.
“The credit card, I didn’t take. I didn’t take the ID either. I knew it would be trouble. I left those. I took the cash—I admit that. I thought they wouldn’t miss it. They couldn’t prove it hadn’t been lost in the sea.”
“So you hid all the way up here because of the money you stole?”
“No, Señor.”
For a moment the wind battering his walls was louder than the sound of his own breathing, and his eyes took leave of their sockets. No, he said again, he hadn’t taken anything except the cash, but he had looked at the ID carefully and indeed it was Señor Zinn, but he was sure the man in that small photo was not the man on the beach. It was a different face, a different person entirely. He was so sure of it he decided to go to the police up on the road and tell them, which is what he did. But he waited awhile first. He said he sat on the beach and tried to think what he should do. Then, as he sat there in the dark, the yacht’s lights went off and it began to move off toward open sea. In a few moments the yacht was gone. He got up and walked slowly up the road. Still he hesitated. No one but him had seen the body, but he was worried about the cash he had taken. It was possible that the soldiers at the roadblock would search him and find the two hundred dollars and then things would take an ugly turn. Nevertheless, he went. It was still dark when he approached four men at the roadblock and told them what he had found. They asked him to take them to the spot and he did. When they arrived there they made him wait by the palapas while they examined the body, turning it over with flashlights and talking among themselves. I asked him if he had mentioned to them the discrepancy between the ID and the real face, and he said he had not. He waited for them to notice it themselves.
But they did not.
They called out on their radios, and he thought about the money in his back pocket. They could easily search him and arrest him for theft and for tampering. But for a while they seemed to forget he was even there. At last, though, one of them came over to where he was sitting in the sand and asked him if Rubio knew who the dead gringo was or if he had taken anything from the body. With a straight face he answered that he didn’t know the guy and that he hadn’t taken anything from him.
“If we search and find dollars, we’ll take you out, you understand that, right?”
Rubio held his ground.
I said, “You only took the dollars?”
He nodded, but then he added, “Well, there was something else. But nothing valuable.”
He said that while he was going through the dead man’s pockets he had found a slip of paper in one of the back pockets of the shorts. It had not been protected from the water and so it was sodden.
He got up and walked to his kitchen and pulled a book out of the cabinet there. It was a telephone book. Returning to the table, he opened it and I saw inside a small piece of paper, a receipt from an ATM machine. He had pressed and dried it and now it was almost legible. I picked it up and put on my glasses. It was dated from June of the previous year, in the town of Colima. It showed an amount drawn from the machine and the name of the cardholder who had withdrawn it: Paul A. Linder. The letters had almost faded away, but they were still decipherable.
I looked up to Rubio, and I saw at once that all the meager guile in his eyes had drained away.
“Paul A. Linder?” I said.
“That’s what it says.”
“You didn’t show this to the soldiers?”
“No. I had a feeling that I shouldn’t.”
“So then what happened?”
“The soldier took me back to the road.”
When they got there, he told Rubio to disappear and never come back. The soldier knew Rubio had taken the money from the dead man, but he didn’t care—it was a way of getting rid of him. Rubio had walked down to the coconut grove behind the beach where he kept his motorbike and had driven south without waiting. It was still not yet dawn. He had not gone back since, and thought that his silence might be more important than he had once realized. So he kept his shotgun loaded and only went into Nueva Italia every couple of weeks to buy supplies. And now I had appeared and paid him a thousand dollars for a slip of paper from an ATM machine. He was on the brink of seeing the funny side of it.
“Mr. Linder,” I said, “was the man dead on the beach at three in the morning?”
“He might be.” Rubio shrugged. “He must be.”
But there was no “must.”
It was possible even that Rubio had misunderstood everything himself and that I had just paid him for nothing.
“Either way,” I said, “you never saw that guy before at Caleta de Campos?”
“I never saw either of them.”
“Zinn and Linder. Two German names. That’s kind of amusing, isn’t it?”
“If you say so.”
I left the money on the table and blundered my way back through the door and into the blinding light and dust. He didn’t follow me, or call out a farewell. I imagine he just sat there until all sound of me had receded, and then reached out to the roll of banknotes tied with a rubber band. His windfall had come after all, just as he had planned. I went back to the car and felt ashamed that I’d thought I’d need to use force against a sap like him. It was he who needed bullets, not me.
A mile from his shack I stopped and got out again. I wanted to see if he had come out to watch me leave, and so he had. I waved, and he turned back to the gloom of his shack. Back on the narrow road that wound its way north I stopped yet again and looked at the map. I realized I had no idea what to do now. Go back to the coast or press onward. It had to be the latter: whoever had abandoned his ID on a body in Caleta de Campos would never go back to the scene.
He would go in the opposite direction, inland, and maybe on this same road, though there were others. Had he passed this same lake surrounded by burned hills? By afternoon’s end I was in Pátzcuaro, in a comfortable hotel on the town’s main square, courtesy of Pacific Mutual. As dusk fell I went down to the lake and took a boat across to the island called Janitzio. I walked around it on the path that circles the whole island, passing under drying fishing nets and stopping to eat the fried fish of the lake they eat there. Pescado blanco. They look like little monsters. In this way I was thinking all the while, and yet I hadn’t thought enough to find a way out of the forest of signs. It was sitting here, however, and watching the lights come on along the mainland, that I had the idea that Paul A. Linder was still, so to speak, alive and well. Zinn had now become Linder and was walking the earth with his former employee’s name, a simple transfer that Zinn could use for a while until I caught up with him. He had slipped into his new identity so easily, and in a country where he was a foreigner anyway, that only I had noticed it. But he himself must have suddenly had the feeling that another man was walking over his grave.