On my bed at the Cantarranas I opened the suitcase and counted out the money until it matched exactly the sum we had agreed on at the Las Hadas. She had kept her word and she must have been glad to buy me off once and for all. I went to a tailor near the hotel later in the evening and ordered two suits, a summer one and a dark one, along with a handsome shoulder bag, and then went to Tasca de los Santos for a long dinner of fabada and beer in the shadow of a sherbet-orange church. I spent most of the evening there alone, faced with the inevitable prospect of finally returning home, where I would have to look retirement, and therefore slow decline, in the eyes. Here I was alive and on the make, not yet senile and not yet shelved. But there was only curiosity and it was not enough.
When I came back to the Cantarranas at twelve, the man at the night desk explained that someone had been to the hotel to see me, but that I had not been there and he had turned him away. If I was expecting visitors, it would be better to inform him beforehand and he could relay their messages to me.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” I said.
“But the gentleman was expecting you.”
It wasn’t quite the same thing, was it?
I told him to call me if my visitor returned. From there I went up to my room, locked the door, and laid a chair against the handle. Then I went to the window, opened it, and sat on the ledge with a glass of Sauza, waiting for my visitor.
But no one came and I lay on the bed, drifting into sleep. The shrill ring of the telephone woke me. I went back to the window with the lights off and saw the visitor emerge into the street, step back from the building, and look up at my window. I recognized him at once, like a specter from a distant dream. It was the man who liked tops, as I had imagined. But I had never really discovered who he was exactly and who was sending him hither and thither, or even why. But now it finally dawned on me that he was working for himself, as we all are in the end. He had figured out a way to make some easy money. I drew back before he saw me. He walked across the street and dove into a small cantina at the corner. He had likely been hiding there all the time. I went back to the bed, picked up the cane, and opened the blade a little.
This time he crossed back to the hotel half an hour later and the phone did not ring. I lifted the chair from the door and opened it slightly and then turned off the light and sat on the bed.
His footsteps came up the creaky old stairs and then along the equally decrepit corridor of the top floor. When he was halfway along it, he sensed that something was wrong and stopped. He had seen the door slightly ajar and the darkness inside the room. Nevertheless he had come that far. As he approached the door and his shadow fell across the threshold, I spoke, without alarm: “Come in, it’s a party of two.”
He pushed in the door quickly with his foot and the arc of light from the corridor revealed me seated on the bed and the unmistakable premonition of disaster carried in my good hand. He took a step back and swung out of view and I almost unsheathed the blade the whole way, but drawing blood would have awakened all the old ladies who like to call the authorities.
“It’s a funny way to meet again,” he said from the corridor.
“Why don’t you come in?”
He thought about it, and then stepped into the room with the ginger steps of a ballerina.
“Want to sit and have a drink?”
“I’ll stay like I am if it’s all the same to you.”
“Suit yourself. They’re your feet.”
The suitcase was laid against the wall on the far side of the bed. He said he had come for that and he didn’t want anything else from me.
“You came at the wrong time, Topper. I was about to go to bed and have dreams about Rita Hayworth. It’s a shame you showed up. You’re going away empty-handed tonight and in the morning I’ll have my usual breakfast. It’ll be swell all round.”
“Says who?”
“It’d be a silly thing to knock me out and try to get out of here. I’ve paid off the guys downstairs and they’d remember you in a heartbeat. So relax. Wipe that sweat off your face. You’re too much of a lug for your own good. I wish you’d sit down and we can play cards. No? Like I said, suit yourself.”
The sweat was indeed dripping off him. It fell to the floor and spattered the side of his shoe. The room was boiling. But suddenly he relented, as if he had done the math in his head and the sums didn’t pan out. A cockeyed smile and the schoolboy in him resurfaced.
“Whatever,” he said. “We’ll do a deal if you like. You can put that stupid samurai sword away. You’re not as smart as you think you are.”
“Is that right? I was thinking that myself. Well, anyway. Instead of another sordid squabble come for breakfast tomorrow at El Canastillo de Flores. You know it. I’ll be there at nine and we can throw insults over eggs.”
“Breakfast?”
“Yeah, you’ve heard of it? We can discuss our business like grown-ups.”
He snorted in disbelief and yet it was a civilized proposition for him. Maybe he wasn’t used to those.
I got up and walked slowly to the door, ceremonially opening it wider for him, and he waited for a minute or two weighing his considerable options, then walked back down the corridor to the stairwell. From there, he said, “You won’t get to keep any of it. It’s mine.” But I didn’t want it anyway, since it had the stamp of bad luck and evil spirits.
When he had descended to the floor below I came out and stood at the head of the stairs. I called down to him.
“In public, you’ll be nicer.”
He said nothing, but I knew he’d come the next morning. He carried on descending into the lobby and I went to bed and dreamt of Arctic seals being hunted on ice floes by pods of orcas, the chair still tilted against the door handle.
Just before Carnival the skies held hints of antimony and silver dust. It was a light that made me feel as if I had downed a quick glass of champagne every time I exited from the shadows of the hotel and strode into the street. The heat of spring swept down from the barren ravines around the city. That morning it was the same.
At daybreak I took half the money out of the suitcase and put it under the mattress. I got to El Canastillo de Flores early with the suitcase and ordered my usual café de olla with churros and then, to cap them off, a little shot of brandy to perk me up for a testy meeting. Past a certain age, a single shot at breakfast has no effect. I told the waiter to bring over two plates of huevos rancheros as soon as my guest arrived and a side of mole. Then I sat at an outside table and watched the flowers grow centimeter by centimeter in the flower beds of the Plaza de la Paz, waiting for Topper to come lumbering down to meet his fate. It was right next door to where I had eaten dinner the night before, with the same view of a female statue mounted upon a strange stone sphere. The orange-sherbet cathedral with its dramatic dark lines was now lit by the sun and the doors were open. Here Topper came with his leg dragging, something I hadn’t noticed the night before.
He looked more handsome and more worn down than the last time we had met, and he didn’t look as if he would resort to a kitchen knife if we got into a dispute about the Peace of Westphalia or the proper way to poach eggs in apple cider vinegar. He wore a tracksuit, though, and it made him look more suspicious than he needed to.
“I see you had a good sleep,” I said, and he didn’t say anything when I offered him coffee.
“I sleep the same every night.”
“I’ll bet you do. It’s strange to see you in the morning light. You look almost normal.”
“So do you. Are you buying me breakfast?”
“It’s all ordered. This is a nice place to talk, isn’t it?”
He looked around the square and the dark-red domes of the church next to us.
“It’s a helluva country, all right.”
I asked him where he was from. California, of course.
“We must be distant relatives, then. Are you still working for Donald? I wish I could talk you out of it.”
He shrugged. I thought for a second that he was trying to smile but couldn’t, and that was an interesting dilemma for a man’s face.
“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Feels like in this country everyone’s out for himself.”
“That they are, cowboy.”
“I like the way they do their eggs, though.”
“Would you like a shot of brandy?”
He accepted and the ice seemed then to thaw between us. I reached down and placed the suitcase by his legs. I explained that I had an idea. I’d give him half the money and he would forget me and go his own way. On top of that, he would tell me more about his employers. It was a reasonable proposition, I said. He got a reasonable payoff and I got to be left alone. I wasn’t out for money anyway. I just wanted to know where the Linders were headed next.
He looked at me in astonishment.
“You’re giving me the money?”
“It’s the easiest way out for me,” I said. “She paid me off, and now I’m paying you off. It’s worth it to me. I think you should take it and then we should go our separate ways. What do you say? I’d say that was a fair deal for you. You can go to Acapulco and waste some more of your life. You can do whatever you want. Just leave me alone and pretend you never saw me. I have a feeling you’re not working for them now.”
“You got me there.”
He reached down and tested the weight of the suitcase.
“You just made a small fortune over breakfast,” I said cheerfully. “Shall we call it a deal?”
He reached into his tracksuit pocket, took out his little top, and spun it on the tabletop while the waiters watched us. He spun it three times and then said, “All right, you got a deal.”
“But I want to ask a few questions first.”
I asked him if he had known the real Paul Linder. He shook his head and his little pale eyes regained their husky vigor for some reason. He had worked on the yacht the Zinns once owned and he had been in Caleta de Campos on that day. They had sold it in Panama and all the evidence of what had happened there had therefore passed into unknown hands. But what had happened? Topper ate his eggs with a single fork, and I saw that his whole good arm shook a little while the hand in the sling was clenched tight. He had been on board that night, he said, but had been sleeping. The other crewmen had told him that there had been a lot of drinking late at night and the bosses had been abusive to the employees. I asked him if he had helped take Linder’s body onto the beach. He pocketed the top again, smiled, and lifted a finger: I was not to ask about things like that. He hadn’t seen anything. I said that he didn’t have to tell me if he didn’t want to. It was just that I’d heard Donald was a sadist of sorts and apt to his lose his temper, if not his mind, at the slightest provocation.
“So I think of his wife as an abused woman. Would you say that was accurate?”
“What’s it to you?”
“It’s not much, but I’m interested to know all the same.”
“It’s not far off. We were all hired in Mazatlán that summer, three of us, and we had to take an oath of secrecy. He was Donald back then, before he became Paul, but we were all told it was because of tax and the feds. We were offered shares of the profits, so we didn’t mind. I suppose you want to know why I changed my mind?”
“I couldn’t care less, but tell me anyway.”
“Well, if you feel that way about it I’ll keep it to myself. Let’s just say Donald is not only a thieving bastard but nasty to his wife. You can’t stay with him forever and I don’t think she will. I saw him hit her a few times. You know how those ones are. If he hits his woman, he’ll do worse to his underlings. Sooner or later he stabs you in the dorsal. He finds new people as he goes along because he has the money. But no one stays for long. By the way, what happened before—it wasn’t my idea, of course. I know you know that. It was a stupid idea to begin with.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“I’ll let you find that out for yourself. It hardly matters now anyway.” He glanced down at his watch and his eyes went shifty and scattershot. “I should probably be going. I suppose I should thank you—it turned out better than I expected.”
“It’s filthy lucre and bad luck, but enjoy it.”
What he couldn’t understand, he added, was that information seemed more valuable to me than hard cash. It didn’t make any sense at all, but why should he care if it made any sense or not?
“That’s it, Einstein,” I said. “You don’t have to care. But I had one last question.”
I said that I wanted to know where the couple would head if and when they took off from Guanajuato. They wouldn’t be on the road as wealthy vagrants forever. They had to be heading somewhere, a place where they could settle down. Didn’t he know?
“Those two? Who could say. They’re gypsies. They’ve always been a con team together—it’s all a facade. It’s not really a marriage. So I think they’ll just keep rolling from con to con. That’s how it is with them. They just want to have fun and not have to pay for it. They’re drifters.”
“I can’t believe it’s as childish as that.”
“It’s not my hell, Señor. I’d rather take the dollars and head for the exit down that street. It’s been very nice having breakfast with you. But if you wanted to look for them after today, or after tomorrow, I would go down to Mexico City. They can lie low in a big city much more easily and there’s a hotel that Donald loves called the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México. Why you’d want to run into them again, I can’t imagine. It wouldn’t be what I would do.”
“Maybe not.”
There was something that stuck in my craw. It was unfinished business, and my guest wouldn’t understand it in a million years.
“I’ll sleep on it,” I said. “If I’m feeling unlucky I’ll go and pay them a visit.”
He got up and I knew that I would never see him again, this man whom I had shored against my ruins.
“If you see them,” he said before melting away, “tell him from me that his money has malaria on it but I like it anyway. He’ll probably offer to pay you to kill me. Hasta la muerte, pendejo.”
I finished my breakfast alone and then walked back to the hotel in a much better mood. In the evening the tailored suits I had ordered were ready and I wore one of them to a little restaurant at the end of the street, where I eventually played checkers with the owner and offered him a Cohiba that I had bought earlier in the day.
For the first time in years, I felt that I was on vacation and that I had made no decisions about what I would do when my eyes opened the following day. There are times to run and there are times to pursue. Every animal knows the difference and when the moment comes to do one or the other. I found myself alone in the streets with the caped troubadours and their mandolins. Wandering, wandering, and mumbling the words camino, camino. The young looked at me the way you would a piece of cardboard tossed down a street on the wind. Wreckage with eyes and a pulse. The wounded animal dragging itself back to a tree it knows, a patch of shade where it can die in peace. The hotel stairs seemed to go up and up for miles; a hand made of wax guided me by tracing a line on the filthy wall. Was I drunk again? My dreams were of ships in gales, decks swept by relentless waves, and the threat of being lost at sea. Waters rushed past me and the ship heaved and sank; the bottom of the ocean clamored with falling coins, glasses and sextants, and cocktail shakers. And there I drifted down among them until I came to rest upon a vast bed of silver sand and fell asleep like a capsized bosun filled with water and salt.