Late in the afternoon the following day, as I lay in my room, I heard the front bell ring and the maid making her way quietly down the path to the gates. She had let in a visitor, I assumed, and from the window I could see a section of the path that snaked through the garden.
Down this path came a uniformed policeman. He took off his hat and tucked it under one arm. They went into the house and soon the sound of the male voices echoed up to my corridor. There was some polite laughter and a music of glasses. He only stayed about ten minutes, and at the end of his term he was escorted back up the garden path by the maid. A heavyset middle-aged official whom the doctor had obviously been socially lubricating for many years. A man likely easy to sway and charm, willing to share a shot and a bit of gossip. As the gate closed behind him I heard his car start up—a driver had been waiting for him—and a puff of road dust rose up slowly above the wall.
I was already thinking of getting out that morning. You always know when you are being held against your will, even if the people doing it are nice as nuns. It wasn’t a strong sense of duty toward my clients; I no longer much believed in their indignation or the worthiness of their cause. All I felt now was a need to confront the Zinns and make them pay for their arrogance. It was the arrogance of the age, it seemed to me, the insolence of easy money, and a little bit of vengeance would do them both good. The thought of it suddenly made me feel better. A kick in the teeth, a comeuppance was what they needed, and tracking them down from now on would be pure pleasure. May you watch the bodies of your enemies float past you on the river.
I went down for a walk in the garden and to my surprise couldn’t find the doctor anywhere. I wandered as far as the back wall, behind which the mountains rose into a sky that made me think of the high-altitude atmosphere over Mexico City back in the days when the air was clear. The air seven thousand feet up that makes Popocatépetl seem closer than it is.
At dusk the maid found me still sitting in the garden. She was sly and discreet now that money had changed hands between us.
“We had a visit earlier,” she said, after offering to bring me some tea. “A state policeman whom El Doctor plays cards with on Sunday nights. They talked about you.”
“I’ll bet they did.”
“But nothing will happen. Relax.”
She seemed to be wondering what I would do. Jump over the wall—dance flamenco…
“You and El Doctor will eat outside at six. Do you want to go for a swim? You’ll have to keep your arm dry.”
“If I do, I’ll drown.”
At dinner the doctor was in a wheelchair for some reason, and although he complained about his decaying legs he was in good spirits and ready to tease me with his new information.
“You’ll be interested to know,” he said with some baffling grandness, “that the car you are looking for has been traced to an owner in San Miguel de Allende. I suppose you’d like to know what the owner’s name is?”
Jesús Aguayo. He was domiciled in a small town near San Miguel called Atotonilco el Grande.
“I can’t say who he is, but this is who the car belongs to. I wouldn’t advise you to go looking for it, though.”
“It’s very good advice.”
“The police, I’m afraid, have gotten wind of what happened down in Cuastecomates. I am going to have to ask you to stay in the house for a few days while we sort it out. I can’t be party to a crime while it’s being investigated, can I? There’s no need to get excited. You can stay here and get better while it’s being looked into.”
This was bad news, but I kept a lid on my alarm. It was a form of house arrest, then, but there was no one to enforce it but the maid. I had done well to bribe her and bring her over to my side.
“It’s very kind of you. I’m feeling better already.”
“You’re a very curious man, Waldstein. What kind of name is that, anyway? Are you German?”
“I might have been in a previous life.”
“Oh, that might have been unpleasant. You should go to a clairvoyant.”
“It has crossed my mind.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re so tough?”
We ate on and the subject was gradually dropped. But now I had to rethink. I needed to hunt down Jesús Aguayo and I needed to do it slyly. I played chess with the doctor after dinner and the hours went by in quiet talk about gardens and investments and some of our old cases. He brought up the latter and I told him, on the spur of the moment, that every case felt, in some ways, like a fairy tale. A story being concocted by a higher power that sucked one in, forcing one to obey its demented laws. The maid then wheeled him out to a terrace at the back of the garden and we sat there in a summer house smoking cigars and looking down at a primeval landscape of manzanilla oaks and trees I didn’t know spread across canyons and thorned hillsides. There was so sign of a road or of the sea. We took our coffee there and the doctor apologized for asking me not to leave the house. As I could see, he added, there would be nowhere for me to go anyway, and now I understood why he had brought me to that spot. He explained mildly that a dirt track went to the bottom of the mountain and it was about five miles on rough stones. The local people walked it, but I was not a local person.
“I wonder what you meant by saying every case was a fairy tale,” he said. “You mean it didn’t seem real?”
“Each one felt like a story being told by someone else. It’s a wild feeling one gets. One thing leads to another, but later you can’t remember how it all pieced together.”
“Does it make any sense being here now?”
“None.”
He let his chuckle play out for all it was worth.
Soon he had fallen asleep again. The maid came silently across the lawns with a metal lantern with a candle inside it. She set it down on the stone garden table before us and gathered up the emptied glasses and the extinguished cigars. I asked her if he fell asleep like this every night. She said he was getting ready for death, and that she added a little sedative to his drink every night to ease him into sleep. Almost immediately, moths began to swirl around the lantern and from behind them she looked down at me with a cold indecision. She began to smile. Since her employer was now unconscious I asked her about the policeman’s visit. Oh, she said, she had listened to the whole thing from the kitchen while they were sharing a fino.
The cop had told Quiñones that the quantity of blood at the scene of the abandoned house had aroused their interest, but not yet their solid suspicions. He had wanted to know who I was. “I have no idea,” El Doctor had said.
“So he’s a stranger who your man picked up from Dr. Abrego that night? And he had been found at the hotel in Cuastecomates?”
That was how they had talked.
“The policeman told the doctor to keep you here until he has dug around a bit. They think you are not telling the truth.”
“Is that right?”
I tried to sound as indignant as I could.
“That’s what they said,” she drawled.
“I think I should leave tonight, if I can. I can walk down the track—is it five miles?”
“A little less, but you’ll be able to manage it.” But she looked unsure.
“Is there a village where I can catch a bus tomorrow morning?”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to head down south to San Miguel de Allende.”
“Right at the road, they have buses that go to Ciudad Guzmán.”
It was then two hours before midnight. I said I would come down again from my room at two in the morning. The doctor would be in his nightly coma and she had all the keys to the property. I walked with her back to the house as she pushed the wheelchair ahead of her, and from the fortress came the calls of birds that I hadn’t heard during the day. I asked her what she did with her nights. She drank alone in the magnificent house and played jazz. She was saving up to go home with enough money to buy a shop. It was a plan, at least. It was more than I had. I went upstairs and dressed in my own clothes for the first time since arriving there, then waited for the appointed hour.
She came up to the room before that with my money and the cane from the safe, true to her word. In the kitchen she made me coffee and a sandwich for the road.
“What will you tell the doctor?”
“I’ll say you disappeared without a trace while I was sleeping.”
At two she took me up to the gate, unlocked it, and saw me out onto the rocky dirt road. I had nothing with me except money and the cane. I didn’t know what to say to her: it was a kindness that an old man wouldn’t forget. As I picked my way down the road, she stood at the gate watching me until I passed out of sight. It must have given her some kind of small satisfaction. Left alone with no bag, but without a shred of anxiety about it, I walked through the remainder of the night in a cool air, the yucca on the hills around me forming what looked like a vast nave of votive flowers. The sky was suddenly dramatized by a nervous, uncertain moonlight, by which the shapes of things became more and more unknown, and by its light I found the little road that led to the neighboring village.