A Game for the Living (24 page)

Theodore walked back to the Malecón and stood near the warehouses, watching a couple of sandalled longshoremen rolling barrel-sized coils of copper wire from the dock into a warehouse. He walked on, looking for Ramón's figure in the bright dusk.

“
Joven
!
” he called to a young man approaching, who was licking an ice-stick.

The young man strolled towards Theodore, no doubt thinking he wanted to ask a direction.

“Listen—you have not possibly heard where Salvador Infante is in this town, have you?” Theodore asked.

The boy's shining brown eyes widened very slightly, innocently.

“Two hundred pesos, if you have an idea,” Theodore said. “I am a friend of his, not the police.”

The boy's eyes lingered momentarily on Theodore's expensive wristwatch, and came up to meet Theodore's eyes. He shrugged. “Don't ask me, señor. I heard he was here—”

“You don't know anyone who knows? Two hundred pesos if you tell me that. I have the money with me. No questions asked.”

He turned his round, dark head to look behind him. “I don't know, señor. I am sorry.” And he seemed really sorry, because no one at all was around them, or watching them.

Theodore nodded. “
Gracias.
”

They walked on their separate ways. He caught sight of Ramón at last, not on the Malecón, but across the Costera from it, walking very slowly, his jacket over one shoulder. When Theodore approached him, he said he had been waiting half an hour.

“I've been hanging around here only because if you hadn't found me, you'd have called the police or something wild like that!” Ramón's eyes were wild now, and bloodshot.

“It took me a few minutes to find a hotel room, Ramón. Here's the key. The name is on it—Hotel Tres Reyes, way down.”

“I don't need a hotel, Teo.”

“Keep the key, anyway. I can get in when I go back, but you may not be able to without the key.”

Ramón thrust the key back at him. “Thank you, Teo,” he said with gentleness in his voice, but none in his face, and walked on a few steps.

Theodore caught up with him. “Where now, Ramón?”

The problem was solved by Ramón's suddenly collapsing. People gathered round, murmuring about the sun's rays, tequila, the low altitude, but Theodore knew it was none of these things. A couple of boys, of the kind Ramón had been approaching all afternoon, helped Theodore lift his limp figure into a taxi, and one of them laid Ramón's jacket over him with a hand as slender and gentle as a girl's.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Ramón was able to walk into the Hotel Tres Reyes when they reached it, though he did not seem to know where he was. Theodore got him to lie down and sent for orange juice and hot tea. Obediently, Ramón sipped at both tea and the orange juice, while Theodore sat uneasily on the other bed, listening to the waves' restless swish on the beach below their terrace. They were on the second floor of the hotel. Next to them was a suite with kitchenette, occupied now by a couple with a baby that sometimes cried at night; and for this the usual price of the room would be lowered ten pesos, the manager had told Theodore. The baby was already starting to cry, and the breeze that blew through their open terrace door brought also the sounds of a refrigerator door being opened and closed, the clatter of a pan, and the cooing efforts of the woman to get the baby to hush. Theodore sighed, depressed by the transistorizes and the vagueness of his and Ramón's position now. What if Salvador Infante had already got himself killed and was floating in the Pacific at this moment, never to be found except by sharks?

Theodore took a shower with the bathroom door open, so that he could hear if Ramón stirred or left the room, Ramón was sitting up when he came in again. Theodore proposed a shower for him, but Ramón shook his head.

“It'll refresh you—for this evening,” Theodore said. “You'll want to go out again, won't you?”

This inspired Ramón to move. Theodore adjusted the shower at a tepid temperature for him and advised him not to touch the taps, since they worked backward and the hot water was scalding. Ramón emerged from the shower a few moments later, his black hair wet and combed down, buttoning his blue shirt.

“What do you say to a nap?” Theodore asked. “Everybody'll be having dinner until ten or so—”

“Only in the hotels,” Ramón said. “You said the boy wouldn't be in a hotel, he'd be on the streets.”

There was no denying this.

Ramón put his jacket on. “Not that you have to go with me,” he added.

But Theodore got up, put his own jacket on, and went with Ramón out of the door. It was ten minutes to seven. The futility of it made Theodore feel tired, and Ramón's energetic pace on the sidewalk increased his sense of flagging.

They went to the plaza, ablaze with lights now, though the sun had still not set. Here were hundreds of faces to look at, and they paused at the open-front bars and restaurants, and Ramón walked into some alone. People looked at him, and Theodore noticed some whispering and pointing. Ramón seemed as unconcerned as if he walked through a forest of trees. They continued up the Costera to the little thatch-roofed restaurant where he and Ramón and Lelia had often come to eat when they tired of their hotel food. The twelve or so tables were visible from the sidewalk, and all were occupied; but Infante was not there.

There were the back streets, scores of them, lighted as much by the occasional tiny food counters with one table and chair in front of them as by the infrequent street lamps. Somewhere they heard a guitar. Theodore looked over his shoulder, sure that they were being followed.

“Ramón,” Theodore said, touching Ramón's arm to stop him. Theodore turned round to face the tall boy, who hesitated in a frightened way as if he were going to turn and run. “
Buenas tardes,
” Theodore said, walking towards him. “You have something to say?”

The boy advanced timidly. He was ugly and stupid-looking, about nineteen. “You were—asking on the Malecón today about Infante?” he asked quietly, though the sidewalk where they stood was deserted.

“
Sí,
” Theodore said. “Do you know where he is?”

A blank, frightened stare. “I, no, señor. But maybe somebody else does.”

“Who?” Ramón said.

“Do you want a few pesos first? Do you really know anything?” Theodore asked.

“I know
something,
” the boy said defensively. “Maybe worth—a hundred pesos?”

Theodore hesitated, thinking that if he really knew anything, he would have made the price higher. “What is it? We'll pay you.” He put his left hand inside his jacket, as if to draw out a wallet.

“Another man was asking for Infante on the Malecón this afternoon,” the boy said quickly. “He got into a boat. I saw where the boat went.”

Theodore pulled out his wallet, turning himself slightly lest the boy suddenly snatch the whole wallet from his hands. “Now what's the rest of it?” Theodore asked with the hundred-peso note ready in his hand. He replaced his wallet.

“The boat went towards Pie de la Cuesta,” the boy said.

It was a village on a promontory, some twelve miles north. “You're sure the boat went there?”

“
Sí
. I don't know if it stopped there, but it went in that direction.”

“And who was the man?”

A shrug. “A man. This high.” He indicated a height shorter than his own.

“A
policía
?” asked Ramón.

“I don't know.” The boy looked at the hundred-peso note.

“At what time?”

“Around five—maybe six,” the boy said, his face serious.

Theodore thrust the money at him, and the boy took it. “Have you seen Infante?”

“I? No, señor.”

“Whose boat is it that took the man?” asked Ramón.

“A man called Esteban. His boat is—I forget the name—a red boat. No sail. A motor-launch.”

“Did Esteban come back? Would he be tied up at the dock now?” Theodore asked.

“I don't know, señor,” said the boy with a shrug, his information at an end.

“
Gracias,
” Theodore said automatically, and, as if dismissed, the boy turned and ran to the nearest corner and disappeared around it.

Their search for the red motor-launch proved fruitless. The two or three skippers whom they asked on the Malecón did not even acknowledge that they knew a man called Esteban with a red boat. Theodore thought from the manner of one of them that he was lying and did know of Esteban, but what could he do about it?

“I would like to go on to Pie de la Cuesta,” Ramón said.

Theodore tried to dissuade him. It was a primitive place, nothing but a strip of sand with some natives' huts and two or three very simple
pensions
on it, and it would be too dark to see anything tonight, but Ramón would not be deterred. They got a taxi to take them for sixty pesos, there and back.

The long spit of land was beautiful by starlight with its earth-shaking surf, its nodding coconut palms silhouetted in black against the sea. Ramón himself walked into all the
pensions
and talk to proprietors and sweep-up boys, all of whom Theodore saw shake their heads in denial. And they stared at Ramón as he walked back to the taxi. Ramón also asked at a few huts. By candle-light and the light of dying charcoal fires, Theodore saw these ragged, barefoot people shake their heads also. Theodore had a growing feeling that the boy to whom he had paid the hundred pesos had made the story up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Theodore awakened before Ramón and lay in his bed reviewing the futilities of the evening before. The cha-cha-cha night spots, so dark it would have been hard to recognize an old friend in them, the over-sweet
tequilas limonadas
tasted and left at at least six hotel bars, the terrace of El Mirador, where he had almost lost Ramón in the crowd. Ramón had paced the floor after they had come back to the hotel. The last Theodore remembered was Ramón sitting in the armchair by the door, holding his head. Now Theodore was afraid to stir lest he waken Ramón from the sleep that he needed so much. It was nine-twenty. The baby next-door was babbling out on the terrace, and the mother sang softly in the kitchen. A faint clatter of breakfast came from the hotel's kitchen below.

The sudden, triple impact of a falling skillet roused Theodore from a doze. Ramón groaned and lifted his head.

“Morning, Ramón,” Theodore said quietly. He knew Ramón would not want to go back to sleep, so he picked up the telephone and asked the operator to call the
juzgado,
the jail.

The
jefe,
whose name was Julio, would not be in until ten, Theodore was told. Theodore asked for news of Infante.

“
Nada,
señor.”

“No rumor that he is around Pie de la Cuesta?”

“No, señor,” replied the young, sober voice, which sounded as uninterested as the voices of most of the clerks Theodore had spoken to at Sauzas's headquarters.

Theodore thanked him and hung up. He thought of calling Sauzas again, but this, too, seemed futile. While Ramón was in the bathroom, he called his house in Mexico, D.F. Inocenza reported only one telephone call, from Sra. Hidalgo.

“No message,” Inocenza said cheerfully.

Theodore asked about Ramón's bird.

“I released him, señor, as I was told. After an hour or so, he flew in an open window! Isn't that a miracle? I had every window in the house open and he flew in one! Tell the señor he went back in his cage himself!”

Theodore told Ramón this when he came out of the bathroom.

“Back in the cage himself!” Ramón repeated incredulously. He gave a hopeless laugh. “Pepe and I—I suppose we both want to be prisoners!” But he looked pleased, nevertheless.

By eleven, they had got shaves and some breakfast on the plaza. Theodore bought the
Excelsior
and
El Universal,
which said briefly that the “nation-wide search” for Infante still went on, with concentration in Guadalajara and Acapulco. The pompousness of the statement struck Theodore as funny; he had not seen one sign in Acapulco that an intensive search was going on.

He went into a plaza restaurant to ring up Sauzas. Ramón was going to wait for him across the Costera.

As usual, they thought Sauzas was in the building, but they had to look for him. Theodore lit a cigarette, and it was nearly gone, and he had had to tell the operator several times not to disconnect him, when Sauzas came on.

“No, there is no news, I'm sorry to say,” Sauzas said in a discouraged tone, “but I have not had the report from Acapulco this morning. That means they haven't anything to report.”

“Señor Capitán, do you think there is any possibility that Infante is in Acapulco after all the publicity?”

“Umph. What can I say? We can be logical and say no, and then be wrong.”

“I'll try to persuade Ramón to leave. We've walked the town over and there's nothing. Except one rumor last night that a man looking for Infante got on a red boat belonging to someone called Esteban, and they went in the direction of Pie de la Cuesta.”

“Who told you?” Sauzas asked calmly, and Theodore told him. “Have you seen such a red boat? Or Esteban? Did you get a description of the man who took the boat?”

“Unfortunately not, except his height, about like Ramón's,” Theodore replied, and felt most amateurish about his sleuthing.

“Hm-m. Well, I can report that Arturo Baldin was also approached, by telephone, about the muffler nearly three weeks ago. He had not thought it important enough to mention to anybody—” Sauzas's voice trailed off. “And your friend Carlos Hidalgo is not back yet. We have asked in every jail here, thinking he might have been locked up for drunkenness. His wife is very distressed.”

“This is two days now?”

“Yes.”

Theodore did not know what to say about it.

“Señor Schiebelhut, you expect to be back in Mexico tonight?”

“I expect to, señor. I hope so.”

Theodore bought some Delicados at the cash booth of the restaurant, and walked out to find Ramón. He saw him sitting on a bench, facing the sea. Just before he reached him, Ramón got up and turned round and motioned for Theodore to keep a distance.

“I'll be back in a few minutes,” Ramón murmured to Theodore as he passed him. “Don't follow me.” Then he crossed half the Costera, waited on the island for the light, because the traffic was fast and heavy, then continued up one side of the plaza. Clearly, he was following someone he could see in the crowd.

Theodore crossed the Costera, too. As he reached the other side, he saw Ramón turn the next corner, to the right. Theodore approached the corner slowly. There was a camera shop on the corner, and diagonally through its two windows Theodore saw Ramón standing, looking or pretending to look into the window of the shop next door. His lips moved, then he pulled his note-case from his hip pocket, and Theodore saw a thin, nervous hand and bare wrist, the fingers impatient. Ramón took out the contents of the note-case and the fingers swept them out of Theodore's view. Theodore walked on slowly to the corner.

Ramón came towards him, motioning him back. Whoever Ramón had been talking to had disappeared in the crowd.

“I have some information,” Ramón said. “Infante is on a boat called the
Pepita,
whose skipper is Miguel Gutirrez. And there's a man called Alejandro down at the Malecón who might take us to him.”

“Who was that you spoke to?”

“A boy who approached me on the Costera—just before you arrived. Come on, Teo, walk faster! He said he didn't want his friends to see him talking to me, so I had to meet him on that corner.”

“What did you give him?”

“All I had. Seventy pesos. He wanted a hundred. This way, Teo!”

Ramón was optimistic, but he did not know what Alejandro looked like or the name of his boat, because the boy had not tarried long enough to tell him after he got his money. The sun throbbed hotly on Theodore's forehead. Ramón paused on the embankment near an old man who was coiling a line neatly at the prow of his boat.

“
Buenos dias.
You know a boatman here called Alejandro?” Ramón asked.

“Ale
jandro
?” the old man said gruffly in a tone of surprise. He stood up and pointed. “He ties up farther down.”

Theodore dragged his steps, debating whether to insist now that they take a police officer with them. Or was this another false lead, as vague and inconsequential as the Pie de la Cuesta clue?

“You don't want to come?” Ramón asked. “I'll go alone, then.”

“I do want to come. If the boy is really here, I want you to see him, and I want to see you when you do!”

Six or eight boats bobbed in the water, their prows pointed to the embankment, but only two men were in sight.

“Alejandro?” Ramón called to them.

Both men, on different boats, looked at him. One pointed to a dirty, empty-looking boat. “He sleeps,” the man said, cleared his throat with a long hawk like an unintelligible sentence, and spat over the side.

Ramón stooped at the boat they had indicated and pulled it closer to the embankment by its line. “Alejandro?
Alejandro?
”

The other two men were watching them, several yards away.

Theodore heard a groan from the boat's cabin, whose door was open, then a pair of dirty feet swung down from a bunk. As the prow almost touched the embankment, Ramón jumped down to the tiny quarter-deck. An unshaven face looked out at him, squinting.

“Who're you?”

“My name is Otero,” Ramón said quietly. “Señor, I want to go to the boat of Miguel Gutirrez. Will you take me? I am a friend.”

“Of Miguel's? I don't know you,” he mumbled suspiciously, still half asleep. He noticed Theodore on the wharf, and his face took on an alert, knowing look. “I don't know where Miguel is,
hombre.
I haven't seen him in three days. I don't need the
policía
on my boat. I've done nothing wrong.” He waved a hand to dismiss Ramón.

“I'm not the
policía
. I'm a friend—of Salvador Infante's. We are both his friends.”

The man looked around the wharf behind them. “You are not the
policía
?”

“Do I look like the filthy
policía
?”

Still stooping under his cabin door, Alejandro beckoned Ramón closer. “I might know where Miguel is. What'll you pay me if I take you?”

“Two hundred pesos.”

“Hah!” But he was considering it, mumbling something, scratching his crotch reflectively with a pinching movement. “
Do' cien pesos
. A fine proposition and I'm supposed to risk my life—Besides, did I even say I knew where he was?”

“I'm not a
policía, hombre
! Look. I'm not armed.”

The man glanced at Ramón's trouser pockets, then pressed the pockets of the jacket over Ramón's arm. He beckoned to Theodore. Theodore stepped down on the quarter-deck and submitted to the same searching. “Six hundred,” Alejandro said calmly, fixing Theodore with one eye. “In advance.”

“You'll get it. We want to see Infante first,” Theodore said, and Alejandro shook his head, looked away and spat. “If you don't think I'll pay you at the end of the trip, let's just call it off, and there you are out six hundred pesos already!” Theodore said. “Think of that! Don't be stupid. How soon will you see six hundred pesos again?”

The man started to tell him how soon, and left off in disgust. But he was starting to move, lifting the cover off his little engine in the cabin. “Ah, that drunken brat,” he mumbled.

Ramón untied the line from the ring in the wharf. As the boat began to move, Alejandro took a long look around the wharf, and even waved to someone.

They headed for the straits of the bay. Alejandro mumbled that if anyone asked them where they were going, they were going to Puerto Marques to see the fine hotel from the sea, and he chuckled tiredly and mirthlessly, rubbing his hands on his greasy shorts. They rounded one of the two projections of land that sheltered the bay, and turned south. On their right now spread the immensity of the Pacific, empty except for a tanker almost at the horizon. Theodore kept his eyes along the shore edge. Two or three little boats sailed near the land.

“How much farther?” Ramón asked.

Alejandro waved a hand, lifted his filthy cap and scratched in his graying black hair. “Long ways. Long past Marques.”

“Is the boat out in the sea or tied up?”

“You will see.”

“What color is the boat?”

“Ai! Questions!” Alejandro said, as if he were talking with a child.

Alejandro nodded to shore and announced Puerto Marques. The town looked far away, set back deeply in a notch of the shore. The motor chugged on. Ramón crouched at the prow, gazing ahead at the warm, fuzzy horizon. No little boats were in sight now. Theodore glanced at Alejandro. His coarse, square face was baked a red-brown, like a brick, and had as little expression. He looked dishonest, and that was all. Theodore suspected that he would keep going for perhaps half an hour, stop and say that the
Pepita
must have gone somewhere else, demand his six hundred pesos, and possibly take them back to the Malecón, but probably not.

Alejandro turned the boat slightly shoreward and even slowed the motor. Three little sail-boats were anchored near the land. But slowly they passed all these, at too great a distance for Theodore to read their names. Then they drew so close to shore Theodore could distinguish clumps of green coconuts at the tops of some of the trees. The land looked wild and pathless. They left the three little boats far behind. Then, behind a jutting of rock, Theodore saw the blue or grey end of a small boat.

“That's it?” he asked.

Alejandro nodded calmly. He gave the rocks a wide berth. The little pale blue boat sat quite still on the sea, its barren mast motionless. Alejandro stood up and cupped his hands to his mouth. “
Oiga! Miguel!
” he yelled, with a smile.

A long, silent minute passed. Then a door on the
Pepita
opened.

“
Dos amigos!
” Alejandro shouted. “
.
.
.
amigos,
” the shore echoed.

There was an unintelligible reply from the
Pepita,
and a man in a light blue shirt of almost the same color as the boat, with brown face and arms, put his hands on the low rail and leaned towards them. “Alejandro? Who's with you?”

“Friends of the boy. Shut your face,” said Alejandro. He idled his motor now and gazed nonchalantly around the deserted shore.

Miguel was leaning into his cabin door. He looked unsteady on his feet. Then he stepped back from the door, and Theodore saw the head and the frail shoulders of Infante, a look of surprise on his face. The boy said something to the man and made a nervous movement as if he were about to duck back into the cabin.

Ramón was standing in the prow. “Tell him I'm a friend!” he yelled to the
Pepita's
skipper. “Ramón Otero!”