The hotel front desk was able to send up a guide to Mexico’s luxury hotels, and over the next two days I called all 207 of them in the top bracket. It was time consuming and clumsy, but I had the time and I had the money, and the town itself was a pleasant place to waste a few days. At each hotel I asked if I could please speak to a Mr. Paul Linder, and for the first 168 of them I was told that no such person was staying with them. Something told me that it was only a matter of time before a receptionist answered my request with a different reply. It was at the Hotel Morales in Guadalajara. When I asked for Señor Linder the receptionist said, without hesitating, “I think he checked out this morning. Let me verify for you.” A minute later she returned to the phone and asked who was calling.
“Señor Washington,” I said.
The second absence was longer than the first, and this time she said that Señor Linder was certainly not at the hotel now.
“Has he checked out?”
“Yes, Señor.”
“What a nuisance. How can I get a hold of him?”
“Is it urgent?”
“In a way it is. I don’t suppose you know where he has moved on to?”
She should have balked at a request like this, but it was a young girl, we were chatty and she forgot her hotel etiquette.
“Let me ask someone,” she said.
I opened the map on the bed while waiting for her to find out where he had gone, and opened a red marker.
The receptionist returned to the line. “We think he drove to a place called Mazamitla.”
“Is that a town nearby?”
“It’s a village in the mountains. It’s south of Lake Chapala.”
“Wait a minute—let me find it.”
With my glasses on, I did so. It was indeed a small village lost in the high hills with a single road leading to it. It was about a hundred miles from where I was sitting right then, and there were back roads that led to it from Pátzcuaro. An easy drive.
“Is there a hotel there?” I said.
“One or two. People go there for the waters.”
“The waters?”
“There are swimming cenotes in the forests there. They’re supposed to be healing.”
“Are they?”
“Yes, Señor.”
“Maybe he wasn’t feeling well,” I said.
There was a pause.
“He said he was feeling a little under the weather and I think our concierge recommended Mazamitla to him. It’s a popular destination.”
If he was driving down to Mazamitla from Guadalajara I calculated that it would take him almost as long as it would take me. It was then about ten in the morning. I went down to pay the bill and then returned to my room, where I spent half an hour dyeing my hair dark brown. It was the moment to adopt a disguise, to follow my prey more subtly and at a close distance. By now, accordingly, I had also grown a small trimmed mustache, which I colored with a lighter dye. The effect was disfiguring, but disguising. I looked like a grifter who likes the grift, a bum down on his luck. At midday I checked out of the hotel and drove north out of town toward a place called Zacapu, from where the westward route toward the great lake was fairly straightforward. When I was on it I relaxed a little and put Sinatra on the tape deck. My hands were sweating freely now and the predator in me had reawoken. Some of the juice of the glory days had come back with the music, and I remembered a thousand other road trips just like this one, voyages by moonlight during which I’d catch my eyes in the mirror and think, not bad, you jelly bean.
Clouds gathered overhead as I parked in the main square. There was not a soul in sight. Just a church with tiered towers infested with jungle birds. I saw a hotel nearby but decided to wait before going in and getting a room. It was likely that Zinn—now a harmless Señor Linder—was staying at the same hotel, though there was no rental car parked in the square other than mine. What had brought him here? Mazamitla was little more than a frontier outpost among the hills, indio to the core, a hamlet of old men like myself, of weary cats and a few dozen oil paintings of Father Hidalgo.
The hotel had an inner courtyard that had obviously once been a stables, the rooms laced with dark beams, with rough-hewn log railings along the first floor. It was run by a group of women who were probably related. I asked them if the hotel was really as empty as it looked and they said, with some surprise, “No, Señor, esta lleno.” But there were two free rooms and I took one of them. I asked if they had seen any Americans wandering around the village, and they replied that they hadn’t seen any at the hotel either. So it was possible that he wasn’t there at all.
That would be inconvenient. I waited in my new room while the rain hammered on the roof and then went back down to the square when it had abated a little. The church itself was closed, so I walked instead out to the edge of the forests, where the ladies had told me the path down to the cenote lay. I took my Minox camera with me, ready to turn a lucky moment into physical proof.
On the downward path I passed gangs of woodcutters toiling away in the glades. They were silent as they swung their oiled axes in clouds of shavings and gnats. Their donkeys were tethered to the pines and at the bottom lay the sleepy pools and, as I’d been told, a waterfall. As I struggled along with my cane, one of the woodcutters came up to me, a child of about twelve, and asked me if I wanted to pay him to help me.
I had an idea. I gave him a dollar and asked him to go down to the cenote and see if anyone was swimming there. I sat against a tree and waited for him to return. When he did, he said that there was an old man alone in the pool swimming in his underwear. A gringo? Perhaps, the boy said. I said I would wait here for the man to come up on the path and let him go. There was only one path. But an hour passed and no one came up the path as I’d expected. The rain had stopped when I reluctantly gave up and went back to the village. I felt almost a fool. The same boy followed me up there, as if I were a possible source of more dollar notes, and he told me that people sometimes camped out down by the pools instead of staying at the hotels. I went into the church, now open and overflowing with white lilies and old ladies, and he followed me. But as we came into the nave, I saw that among the old ladies was a white man in a windbreaker sitting in the front pew with his back to us, apparently lost in his own thoughts.
“Es el!” the boy said, pointing, and slipped away again.
Instead of approaching him there, since a church is no place to make a scene, I went back outside and waited in the square. When the gringo exited from the church he was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and ambled across the square and into one of the streets that rose away from it. I followed him and soon the two of us were alone in the alleys, the cats scattering around us.
He was about my height but more stooped, inconspicuous in his windbreaker and baggy pants, and he seemed to know where he was going. I hung back, and eventually he turned into a doorway and entered a house.
I took a photograph both of his back and of the door, then went back to the hotel. I was still not sure whether it was Zinn. I could afford to tail him for a while until I was and had all the photographs I needed, at which point I could probably just fly back to San Diego and have done with it. I slept calmly at the hotel that night and got up early in order to eat my huevos rancheros in the courtyard with the ladies, who told me that the rain was going to continue all day.
From the hotel I could see everyone crossing the zócalo, the town square, and so it was a good vantage point, but by midmorning the old man of the night before had not reappeared. I went around the streets again looking for a car that might be his, but there was nothing. Then it occurred to me that there was also a local bus stop and there a few people were waiting in the rain for the next bus to arrive. Across from it a few men sat at a cantina; I asked them if they had seen an old gringo get on one of the buses that morning. Sure enough, they had. The previous bus that had left for Tuxpan two hours before.
I suddenly realized that he was trying to shake me, that he knew all about my call to the Hotel Morales and had taken off on a bus to make his trail go cold. Whoever he was, he might not know that I had followed him to Mazamitla, but he knew that someone was looking for Paul Linder.
I arrived in Tuxpan in the early afternoon. The weather had completely changed: a hot sun beat down on the Nevado de Colima volcano in the distance. The road passed by the silver mine, the hard hats walking home from their shifts along its edges. The corn milpas stood with a motionless attentiveness, glistening and juvenile, as if the plants had grown overnight. Here and there were men in tall hats, walking slowly down the lines of corn. A pale cloud clung to the tip of the Nevado, equally motionless and new. At Tuxpan’s center stood a worn-down stone cross not unlike a Celtic cross in a village in Ireland, covered with what looked like runes. The cantinas were closed. A fair wind ruffled the dogs. In the town park there was a Volcano Eruption Warning board set up in the middle, with three color-coded alerts. That day the Nevado was “mildly active.” To one side, a line of abandoned train cars lay rusting on their tracks, a horizontal slum. Again, I was confused by a random stop in a random place. Zinn could as easily have hopped onto another bus from here.
I asked at the café by the cross. Yes, there was a bus that ran down to Colima and it had already left. The next one arrived in an hour.
Had he already taken it? I sat by the cross and watched the indios in the milpas slipping in and out of view and the miners plodding along the road. A man changing buses in places like this—it was a ruse and nothing else. The boys playing among the nettles were happy to let me know that an old white man had gotten off the bus from Mazamitla and carried on toward Colima. We gringos stick out and are easy to remember. I asked if he was carrying a bag. They said he was empty handed.
I went back to the car and found it surrounded by a crowd of small boys marveling at it. They scattered when they saw me, and I realized that there must be something terrible in my appearance, a ferocity I couldn’t see myself when I looked into a mirror. All the same, I drove slowly down to Colima through slumbering villages, and it was late afternoon when I rolled into a city that looked as if it had been built at about the same time as Havana.
I felt slightly delirious by now. The town’s cream-colored buildings struck me as airy whimsies built after many an earthquake. I parked by the gardens occupying the center of the zócalo and strode into the biggest hotel on the square, a place called the Cebolla. It was colonial and full of swagger and salutations. I liked it at once. A place of lanterns on chains and dozing habitués perched on sofas. I took a room on a hunch and then asked about Señor Linder. Yes, they confirmed, he was staying at the hotel. This was not brilliance on my part; there was only one decent hotel in the area. I even found out his room number on the floor above mine.
I then went back outside with a habanero and sat for a beer at the hotel terrace bar, where the mosquitoes were just getting started. My hands were shaking, and they hadn’t shaken like that for some time, but by the time night fell a feeling of calm had returned. The air was filled with the whistling of pintails and soon a brass band started up in the park. I went for a walk in that park and saw that there were little signs on the grass that read No pise al pasto. For some reason they made me laugh. You can come to our town as an imposter, but don’t tread on our grass.