By two that day I was in Guanajuato in a cheap hotel, tall and narrow, on a street called Cantarranas, the singing frogs. I got a room on the very top floor, so high that the city itself seemed far below me, a city unlike anything I knew: a place shoehorned into a narrow ravine. Its lights and white houses made me think of Bethlehem in long-ago books. At sundown I went down into the streets and had dinner. Through the squares and alleys, students in black capes and masks went in bands strumming mandolins, serenading opportunistically, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the Linders having their weekend dinners here.
It was past nine by the time I hailed a taxi and asked him to take me out to the address on the slip of paper. He didn’t know it, but he said he would find it without fail and that was good enough for me. It was only a mile out of town, into the mining hills that had once made Madrid the silver capital of Europe. Roads winding into the darkness where the houses of the wealthy stood in isolate grandeur.
The taxi left me at the foot of a sweeping drive flanked with cypresses. He asked me how long I’d be staying and if he should wait. I said he could park for an hour or two out of sight, if he didn’t mind; the pay would be good.
I went up the drive. Halfway to a low but capacious hacienda-style villa I heard chatter, music, the terrible noise of merriment and party making. This was not what I had expected. It was too shabby to intrude on a party without a change of clothes. With my bandaged arm, I looked already like a man waiting for the hospital ward from which he wouldn’t be leaving. But on the drive itself servants suddenly appeared with welcoming torches and little silk masks with elastic bands. It was a masked affair and the disguises were given out to all arrivals. Just as they saw me, another car drew up at the end of the drive and a party of four got out and followed me toward the house. I decided to tag along with them. They were Americans, two elderly couples in ghastly finery. I have a way of getting on with the ghosts of the past. Did they know Paul and Dolores? Why no, they’d never met them. They’d been invited by mutual friends in San Miguel. The American club in the Central Highlands was wealthy and large. Every year new members appeared, retirees anxious to start a new life, and they were buying all the lovely haciendas in the hills. The Reagan years had been good to them. I introduced myself as Barry Waldstein and we came to a grand columned porch with the masks fixed to our sweating faces. They were Aztec themed, gods and goddesses we didn’t know but that made us look like psychotics in the context of butlers holding out flutes.
A house in the hills, servants and tapestries: so this was what the ambitious fantasma had managed to procure with his haul. It was as impressive as it was baffling. Its proprietor had been running around on buses just to shake off an old hand like me, while all the time he could have hidden out here and I would not have found him easily. I suddenly realized, then, that I was the only threat to his wonderful new life. Maybe no one else there knew how his chandeliers had been paid for. He was a man on the run; but you’d never know it on that Friday night.
The party spilled out into a magnificent Spanish garden with a tile fountain and more cypress trees, where bars were set up next to a buffet of silver tureens. The crowd was large enough that I could blend in and disappear. I felt the pulse of drugs making their way around the rooms, the quiet drugs of the respectable and the rich that are discreetly laid over the usual cocktails and shots of liquor—and indeed there were two tables devoted solely to mescal and tequila served in artful forms, Italian shot glasses and saucers of pink salt. The men were going at it, roaring with satisfaction and swaying slightly as their nerves began to lose control. Soon a jazz band started up and cocaine appeared nonchalantly on the tables in the remoter rooms inside, spread out over eighteenth-century tables and sucked up by teenagers and fossils alike.
Now I saw how useful the masks must be for the hosts. It was hard to find them, and who knew if they were even there at all. The lights were on in the hacienda’s second floor. Perhaps they were up there watching us.
I went into the garden, where a vortex of beautiful women, Americans and locals, swirled together to the strange music of Tina Turner. Between the cypresses, lawns rolled down into the dark, and here and there people lay with paper trays of cake and champagne flutes looking up at the stars. They looked like candy wrappers that had been tossed aside by a giant child. For a moment I wondered where I was, and why I had come, and yet the shots were there to enjoy as well as canapés and empanadas. I went through the crowd looking for Donald and yet I didn’t find him.
I went from room to room. Some of them were painted pink and blue, with trompe-l’oeil marble panels and bookcases that had clearly been there a lot longer than the new owners. I asked around. But was he called Donald or Paul? I tried “Señor Linder” and some said they had seen him earlier giving a speech to his guests.
On one of the long corridors that connected the various parts of the house, its walls hung with modern paintings, a man came up to me and cried, “Norman!” He grabbed my arm, half spinning me around, and behind him appeared a woman who was clearly with him. They were drunk and the masks had begun to slip on their faces. They asked me if I had seen Linder.
“He’s around somewhere,” I said.
“It’s a pain, the way he asks us here and then disappears. What do you think of the house?”
“It’s a palace.”
“No kidding,” the woman said.
“What happened to your arm?”
“Lawn mower accident.”
Suddenly the man gave me a second look.
“Say, wait a minute—”
I moved off and they decided to laugh it off.
“I could have sworn that was Norman,” the man bawled.
“Leave him be, Roman.”
The woman stared after me but I was gone, back into the smoke and the crush of bodies. I came out into the main hallway and it was curiously deserted but for the maids and waiters who had obviously been hired only for the evening. From there a grand spiral staircase rose to the second floor like something from Gone with the Wind. No one minded me going up it. The corridors here were hushed and the rooms still submerged in their privacy. I looked behind myself down at the hall and noticed one of the waiters staring up at me in confusion. I put a finger to my lips and he melted away. The inoffensive fossil look gets me off a number of hooks these days. I plunged into the first corridor and saw that there were lights under the doors. If anyone stopped me I’d say I was drunk and looking for the bathroom. Soon I could hear voices behind the doors. A man and a woman talking. Their tempers were rising, the man was already shouting. There was the resounding sound of a smack to the face. The woman sobbed. The man shouted a few vile things. He stormed about. Suddenly one of the doors snapped open and a masked male head popped into the corridor’s darkness and the eyes revealed by the slits glittered with a mixture of fathomless anger and disequilibrium.
“Who’s there?” he barked, and saw only me tottering with an outstretched hand (I had left the cane downstairs with the staff). A woman appeared behind him and asked who and what it was.
“Do I know you?” the man barked again.
“I was looking for the bathroom,” I said.
The man turned back into the room and his tone was acid.
“He says he’s looking for the john. No, he’s not drunk.”
“But I am,” I corrected him.
He gave me a second look and the purple mask he was wearing seemed to shine brighter with its silver sequins.
“There’s one at the other end of the landing, old sport. Don’t fall down the stairs on the way.”
“I’ll show him,” the woman said, and I recognized her voice at once.
“No, leave him be. It doesn’t have to be a humiliation.”
“I can go.”
“Shut up, and sit down. I’m not in the mood for a conference.”
“I’ll find it,” I said, muffling my own voice and retreating back to the stairs. The woman stepped out into the corridor and watched me go. My voice, she must have recognized my voice. But they were also tipsy, their voices slurred and slippery. They had the high-wire arrogance of the intoxicated.
I went back down the stairs and waited in the garden. So I had found them alone in their bedroom where they were probably doing lines of coke by themselves. I no longer had my miniature camera, of course, but I went from room to room then, making a mental inventory of everything in them. Antique furniture, rugs, mirrors, modern paintings, glassware, jade Indian art, the loots of continents and centuries assembled hastily by amateurs. It was a palace filled by magpies.
It was a little after ten, and so in their terms the night was still young. I decided to ask a young lady to dance, and seeing my crippled arm and tattered shoes she accepted. Sexual noblesse oblige. We waltzed on the lawn and the hours went by. The stars, however, still held their positions.
It was not yet midnight when I went back into the house, found a bathroom to lock myself in, and took off the mask. My face had turned red underneath it. I ripped off the elastic band, then went back out into the hallway and collared one of the waiters. Showing him the broken mask, I asked for a replacement.
The new one was dark green and gave me a fresh look, and I ventured out again a new man. In the main salon, a crowd gathered around a grand piano and there the mask from the room upstairs, easily recognizable, was seated to play. He was belting out some Artie Shaw number which I recognized, and it was only a few bars in that I realized it was “Blues in the Night.” But how was it that he knew it as well and could play it so comfortably? I sat down to listen and began to feel cold all over. From across the room, the player looked tall and slim, athletic almost, a suave impersonator from someone else’s nightmare. Why was he playing music from the forties? Then I remembered that he was almost the same age as I was, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t. I got up and went out into the garden. A few minutes later he came out as well, surrounded by a gaggle of women. They hadn’t noticed me seated in a gazebo and went to the pool that lay adjacent to a terrace and sat down on the grass around it. I waited until they had settled down, then quietly joined them. There was no sign of the wife. The man who appeared to be our host lay sprawled among his beauties, smoking from a cigarette holder and exposing the black socks he wore under his slippers. And here was the astonishing thing: they were dark-blue velvet Alberts with gold crown embroideries, just like the doctor’s. Linder wore them, however, with greater effect and they seemed to work as certificates of his success. I sat down behind him, unnoticed at first, and observed the white hair that the elastic strap of his mask traversed. I was sure it was Donald. But then, the fantasma had nothing solid about him. He was made of air. Nevertheless, sensing my presence, he turned suddenly and smiled. He hadn’t even seen me; it was a fish sensing another fish using its lateral line. He leaned forward and as he did I could see his chin below the mask; it had the tense set of the cruel and feckless. He was onto me, and in some way he didn’t mind. Perhaps it was even more of a game to him than it was to me.