In the event, when I did open my eyes, I knew actually what to do. I shaved in the bedroom mirror immediately after rising, dressed in the lighter summer suit, and then went down to the lobby to settle up and get a coffee in the street. I had packed the small shoulder bag with my other suit and toiletries, and I left nothing behind in the Cantarranas. No one had noticed me arriving or leaving. I, too, was becoming a fantasma.
The sun had only been up for half an hour when I drove out of the city in a taxi and made my way back to the Linder mansion in the hills. This time I asked the driver to let me out at the bottom of the hill where the villa stood. In the woods, the cuckoos were roused and there was a faint and menacing hum of bees massing in the glades. As I walked slowly up the hill, I saw now that the villa was concealed behind tall trees on all sides. I rang the bell at the gate, but no one stirred and I noticed that the gate itself was not closed.
More than that, it was clear that the villa itself was deserted. I called out just in case, but I already knew that no one, not even a servant, would come running. The lawns were dotted with discarded bottles, and inside the porch was a sleeping cat that had probably been there long before the Americans arrived. I entered the house. The fittings were exactly as they had been before. So the rental had been furnished, complete with gilded mirrors and kilims. I came to the same stairwell that I had ascended a few nights earlier and looked up into its dusty gloom. The vagrants had simply waltzed out of town with their bags.
I sat on one of the steps and smoked for a while to think it over. Topper was probably correct: they had decamped to the big city thinking that no one would follow them now. It was flattering to think that it was all because of me, but I was following them now purely for the sake of pride. The worst of all human motives.
I wandered upstairs and to the same corridor that I had stumbled down that night. The doors along the corridor were all still open and the rooms filled with glasses from the party. It was as if they had simply woken up, packed lightly, and walked out of the house without a second thought. I went into the room in which they had been arguing; sheets were twisted across the floor and half-burned cigarettes scattered everywhere. I sat on their wide marital bed in the half-light of the drawn shutters and soon began to hear the birds outside in the garden sounding as if they had been excited by something. I tried to imagine them lying on that bed, scheming and making love, but I couldn’t conjure such a tender scene. As my gaze swept around the bed, I noticed something lying between it and the wall where the windows were. I jumped with a nasty surprise, thinking for a moment that it might be something alive. But it was an unusually large sack with the neck closed by a twist of wire, and whatever was inside it was not alive.
I thought for a moment that it must be the trash, a few effects they didn’t want to take along with them, but the contours were irregular and soft and I knew with a vile certainty that it was something human. I stepped back to the door and peered out into the landing, my heart racing faster than my pulse. There was no chance that anyone would come into the house now, but I thought about going back downstairs and locking the front door.
In the end I didn’t. I went to the sack and kneeled by it. Some kind of atavistic instinct kicks in when you are close to another human being who is suffering or crippled. I reached out and prodded the surface of the sack and it yielded a little. My first thought was that he had done it in the end. He had killed her. But as I began to freeze with horror I found that I couldn’t bring myself to untie the wire and see for myself. I was hit by a wave of nausea and went to the bathroom instead to see if there was any sign of a struggle. Sure enough, the floor was covered with dried blood, deep red over black-and-white squares, more Rothko than Pollock. In the basin lay a pair of clogged scissors with human hair trapped inside the blades.
I went back into the room and felt the first moments of a cold panic. I knew I should leave immediately, and shouldn’t have come in the first place, but I could not act for some reason. Then, as I dithered, the sack itself stirred very slightly, or I thought it did, and I went to the door with sweat pouring down my neck. When I got to the stairs I saw that the cat had come indoors and stood at the foot of the stairwell, looking up at me and licking her chops. There was a sense of imminent commotion. I went down the steps and across the hall, and when I was halfway across it there was a considerable noise at the front door. People had arrived. The door swung open, and I wondered what kind of judgment would come down upon my head.
Then I thought purely of escape. I darted into one of the rooms off the hallway, closed the door behind me as quietly as I could, and found myself inside a small salon with a grill-covered window and no escape into the garden. I would have tried to hide, but they were coming through the rooms one by one, snapping open the doors. I have nothing to hide, I thought. It wasn’t me and I could prove it. It was false and it wouldn’t wash, but there was a certain relief in sitting calmly at a table in the middle of the room and waiting.
It was a Mexican police unit with two detectives in jeans and short leather jackets. They burst into the room and there was an outcry, the men calling up to the others, one of the detectives, the senior one, rushing down to the room and striding through the door.
He was clearly surprised to see me. An old gringo with a cane and a shoulder bag. But it was my appearance that shocked him, not the fact that I was there. So it was a tip-off.
He asked me if I spoke Spanish.
“As you can see.”
He ordered the men out of the room and asked for my papers. I came out with an elaborate explanation as to why I didn’t have it on me. What, he then asked, was I doing in an abandoned house?
I told the truth. I’d been at a party and I’d returned to thank the hosts.
“What hosts?”
“The Linders.”
“Who are they?”
That was a long story and I didn’t tell it.
“Just some Americans I met.”
“Sit there and don’t move.”
He slammed the door shut behind him and then walked over to the table and sat opposite me.
He was a man of about forty-five, iron in the hair, small and chiseled and too fit. His name was Anguiano and I noticed that his hands were extremely clean, with perfectly cut and manicured nails. It isn’t always the case. He didn’t say anything for a few moments and then he crossed his legs and looked around the empty room. There was a look of faint disgust in his face.
“Did you go upstairs?” he said.
I said I’d stayed on the ground floor.
“Who is it in the sack? Do you know him?”
I asked if he’d got the pronoun correct, but he waved the question away, and now I could hear that they were poring through the whole house at a frenetic pace.
“Are you traveling alone?” he went on.
“I’m not married.”
“I didn’t ask you if you were married. I asked you if you were traveling alone.”
“So it seems.”
He then stood up, strode back to the door, and yanked it open. He shouted out into the turmoil and his team came running. He turned back and glared at me. They were taking me in and I was to do as they said. His men burst into the room and put on the cuffs. Outside in the hallway the sack had been brought down and the men stood around it holding their noses. Suspicion had fallen where it had to; the men were excitable and moralistic, as they often are. Dragged to my feet, I had the look of a criminal surprised, not agile enough to get away after using a pair of scissors to cut up another person. They hustled me outside and there were more men waiting in the road, the walkie-talkies bustling with chatter, the weapons sultry on hips. Down we went to the car, the little prison on wheels. The cat followed after us. Anguiano got into the back seat with me and we rolled off back to the city and a police station with a small room in a basement with a bed. There I was left with my shoulder bag while Anguiano went off to fill out the paperwork. I had made a mistake and yet it wasn’t the first mistake I had made, nor was it a fatal error.