Atticus (17 page)

“¿Habla usted inglés?”

“A little.”

A half dozen things flew through his mind, but he remembered the call was made on
lunes
. “Would you be able to tell me if you had any wakes or funerals a week ago? Monday?”

“You are?”

“A friend of mine died,” he said.

She sighed, but obliged him. A page was turned and she read, “Álvarez, Ellacuría, Hijuelos, Martínez, Ortiz.”

“Carmen
Martínez?”

She hesitated and got back to the page.
“Sí, señor.”

“Muchas gracias,”
he said, and hung up. Atticus dialed the Mexico City number just above Cipiano's. Wednesday, he remembered; four minutes. He heard a faint, official male voice—had he said American Embassy? Atticus
plugged his right ear with a finger as he inquired,
“¿Quién es?”
Who is this?

The official heard his accent and asked him,
“¿Hablainglés?”

“A little,” he said.

A Brooklyn voice officially informed him, “You have the passport section.”

Atticus stalled by saying, “I was afraid I had the wrong number.”

“Your question?”

Wildly guessing, he asked, “Wondered if you had that passport ready for Scott Cody?”

“Was it Cody?”

“Really appreciate it.”

“Hold on, sir,” the man said.

Atticus waited half a minute.

“We do,” the man said.

Atticus thanked the official and got off the phone. Was it Reinhardt who was flying to Germany? Was he trying to go there as his son for some reason? Had he hunted high and low in the house before he found out how to get another passport? Atticus got up from the bed, and then the phone rang insistently.
That'll be Rosa
, he thought. He held the zippered portfolio under his left arm as he locked the hotel room behind him. In the hallway he saw a heavy maid heave a white cart full of towels and bedding from a freight elevator, and he took it to the first floor, getting there just as Rosa was heading upstairs.

*
     
*
     
*

Then there was nothing to do but go back to the house. The front door was open for the fresh air, and María was furiously hammering an old-fashioned steam iron on handkerchiefs at the dining room table.
“Buenos días, señor,'
she said.
“¿Cómo está usted?”

In English he told her, “I have no idea what's going on.”

She smiled.
“Bueno.”

Exhausted, he got a Coca-Cola from the refrigerator and went out to the first-floor terrace.
What next?
he thought, and had no answer. A flock of seagulls fought and screeched over food thrown from the kitchen of the Maya. A hundred yards out a whining speedboat fanned right and spanked along the chop of a trawler, and farther out a freighter warped from view in the heat waves of the eastern horizon. Atticus thought of the choices Reinhardt would have if he wanted to hide out in Mexico: fishing boats, a tent in the forest, waterless shacks in the
barrio
you could rent for nine dollars a month.

Was the phone ringing? He stiffly turned, but the window glass offered nothing but a reflection of himself and what was behind him. He held the cold Coca-Cola can to his forehead. Kids were playing volleyball and running into the sea. White sailboats heeled in the wind farther north.

The pool door slid open. María was standing there with both hands on it.
“Teléfono, señor,”
she called.

Atticus went back inside and she tilted her head toward the flashing green light on the answering machine.
“Es urgente,”
she said.

Atticus got to it and pushed the rewind button, heard
the reels spin to a halt, and pushed playback. Again he heard a soft, foreign, male voice saying,
“Hola
, Scott. Are you at the fiesta with Renata? Have a fantastic time—”

María shifted her ironing and frowned at a familiar voice on the machine. Reinhardt. Atticus hit the pause button.
“¿Lo conoce?”
You know him?

She flushed and said, “
Sí
.”

“¿Cuál es su aspecto?”
What is his aspect?

“Rubio.”
Blond. She thought further.
“Guapo.”
Handsome.
“Pero no me hace buena impresión.”
But she didn't like him.

He hunted the term for height.
“¿Cuál es su altura?”

She shrugged. “
Como usted.
” Like you.

“¿Usted lo ver aquí? ¿En la casa?”
You see him here? In the house?

“
Sí
.”

“¿Con mi hijo?”
With my son?

“Una vez.”
Once.

“¿Sabe su nombre?”
You know his name?

She must have thought she'd said too much. She folded a handkerchief.

Atticus hit the button again and Reinhardt went on, “I hate plays, plus in addition I have laundry to do. Don't worry, I have my own key. Shall we meet at the Bancomex at ten tomorrow?”

Wednesday night. The one-minute phone call from his hotel. Right after that was a tone, and Renata's voice saying, “Hey? If you're still around, we're having a cast party at Stuart's. Wanna come? See ya.”

And then it was Stuart. At first he spoke a fluent Spanish that was intended for María, saying the message was urgent, and then he said in English, “We've had a spot of good fortune, Atticus. Your son Frank seems to have friends in high places. We've gotten permission to exhume and ship the remains. What luck. Shall I see you at the cemetery? Eleven o'clock. Awfully sorry about the rush.”

It was then ten minutes till. Atticus hurried out of the house, got on the motorcycle again, and headed down the hill to the
centro.
But he wasn't certain where the cemetery was; he recalled that it was west of the
zona turística
and far into the
barrio
, but when he got onto El Camino he knew that was wrong, and he gave up on Avenida de la Independencia after a few blocks. A giant supermarket in a foreign part of the town had a public telephone outside. Atticus cruised the Harley-Davidson close to it, cut the engine, and rocked it up on its kickstand.

He was about to telephone Cipiano's when he saw Stuart's beggar outside the market with his hand full of coins, frontally confronting the shoppers and offering them his prayers. And Atticus was transfixed, because Stuart's beggar had on the gray Stanford T-shirt his son was wearing at Christmas.

Stuart's beggar caught sight of Atticus and for half a minute pretended he hadn't, his frank brown eyes trailing away from the cattleman's as he gave it some thought. Then Hector piously tilted forward on his crutches, heading toward the
centro
, his one
huarache
dragging the ground with a hushing sound. Atticus followed him from afar,
strolling up Calle Veracruz a half a block behind him, past some gumball-colored shops, past a girl squatting by a red Radio Flyer, selling a wooden platter of pork ribs with hot chili sauce and the pepper of flies. A flock of sparrows flushed wildly out of a tree, then flew as one to a rooftop. Atticus watched a gray cat reach far down the tree trunk and softly fall to the earth and slink toward a hedge with its tail fluffed. Heat made the walk a job; there were side streets only one car wide that were without roof shade or breeze or human beings, where the scents were of woodstoves and slaughterhouses and the air seemed hotly physical. A butcher's shop, a
carnicería
, kept wild pigs on ropes in a side yard, and fowl were scrawking inside a chicken coop. At the
lavandería
four women happily talked as they thrashed their sopping clothes on flat rocks. Atticus lost Hector just around a corner, and then caught up to him in the shade of a fortune-teller's green awning with lettering on it that said
Adivino.
And then he saw from a fresh angle the green laurel trees of the
jardín
, the six- and seven-year-old shoeshine boys, the Printers Inc bookstore, the
comisaría de policía
, the soaped American cars being rinsed with pump water.

Stuart's beggar was clobbering forward on his crutches around the side of the great parish church, past people sitting against its high walls and handrails with straw baskets for alms in their laps. Atticus then saw Hector tilted against the church and waiting for him beside a gray wooden door that he held open with his right hand. Atticus skeptically passed him and went inside, going down a ladder of ship's treads with his right hand sliding along the rail, and he
stooped under the huge floor joists of the apse to peer into a huge, nighted cellar that was roomed into sleeping compartments, with green tarpaulins or the plastic that sofas are packaged in weighted to the floor with rocks. Great urns and pews and painted altar screens were stacked up in a gray velvet dust and a little girl in a dirty green dress was carrying water in a plastic bucket.

Entering the cellar, Atticus just missed a sleeping old grandmother curled up on some torn surplices, quietly tending her misery as if it were nothing more than a tired child. Beyond a junkyard of one-legged chairs and wrought-iron candlesticks was a dark alley that the girl walked along until she got to a fat man on a four-wheeled dolly whose torso ended at his waist. Maybe twenty people were cloistered in that great cellar space. A pregnant girl crouched over a soup bowl and scooped up its sauce with a tortilla. Two frail old men with limbs like kindling lay on their serapes, playing dominoes.

Atticus frowned as he walked among them, his head turning right and left, looking for a further clue that would help him find the murderer of his son. And he stopped at a flattened cardboard box with the name Hotpoint on it. Whoever slept there kept a spiral notebook and pen beside the folded blanket that was his pillow. Atticus walked over to it and knelt there and flipped the pages to see a familiar handwriting.

And the light changed as though a window was blocked and he heard a voice say, “Will you forgive me?”

Atticus turned to see his son.

Went native in Mexico for a while and made a friend of a shaman named Eduardo. Woke up coughing one morning in my shanty and found Eduardo inches away from my face and gently blowing cigar smoke at me. “Are you ready?” he asked in Spanish. And I looked out at three serious Mayans with wild black hair and filthy hand-sewn shirts that fell as far as their knees. Everything in them was saying how essential I was. So I walked behind them through a forest as green as Gauguin's Tahiti, honoring their habit of silence as we hooked off and onto paths seemingly without reason. We'd go ahead for half a mile and rest for five minutes, then hike for a hundred yards and rest for half an hour. It was impossible to predict when we'd stop, and harder still to tell how long the pause would be. I finally heard the boom and shush of the sea and held my hands up to shade my eyes from the flare of harsh sunshine and salt white sand. Finding the harbor was the whole point of the trip, but the Mayans halted
again just inside the forest instead of going out to the water. I couldn't figure out their hesitation, and I asked Eduardo in Spanish why we were stopping. Eduardo looked at me like I was a toddler. And then he told me with infinite patience, “We are waiting for our spirits to catch up.”

I have a flat board on my knees for a desk, and on it my Scribe spiral notebook—
Hecho en Mexico por Kimberly Clark
in Naucalpan—is opened to the first page. My pen is an “EF uni-ball Micro,” with a fine point and blue ink. I have no idea whom I'm writing this for. We are waiting for our spirits to catch up.

I first met Reinhardt Schmidt just after I got back from Colorado. I was sane as Atticus then. And cool. Wearing shades and waltzing through the great open-air market in Resurrección. It was a hot and crowded tent city that was as loud as a kindergarten playground and filled with hard-up people selling handicrafts, fabulous fruits and vegetables, plucked chickens with the heads still attached, items fresh from the trash. You did not see many
norteamericanos
there, but you did find bargains of the hijacked, five-finger discount,
What the hell do I do with this?
kind: Gillette razors, Goodyear snow tires still wrapped in tan paper, floppy discs that sold for a nickel apiece, a guy in headphones sitting on the trunk of a green Chevrolet that held nothing but Salem cigarettes. Reinhardt called it his duty-free shop.

I felt a hand fall faint as a butterfly on my forearm, and I looked down at a kid holding up a bottle of Jameson's
Irish whiskey while his other hand waited like a tray for his pesos.
“Aquí,”
he said. Here. And he was surprised when I told him nah.
“¡Es para usted!”
It is for Your Grace. And then he tried English. “We gave you our special price.”

And then I heard a voice just beside me say as he handed the kid his pesos, “We seem to be the same person.”

Reinhardt Schmidt did, in fact, look like me but was far more the kind of handsome, fine-boned, fashion-model blonde that seems fit to be a flight steward for Lufthansa. His age was forty or younger—he never said—but he was an inch or two shorter, fifteen pounds lighter, a fast-twitch, friendly, full-of-energy type in fancy sunglasses, a formal white tuxedo shirt with its sleeves folded high as his elbows, green fatigue trousers from some foreign legion, and feet that were miserably without shoes but did have ankle bracelets. A hand-sized flash camera was hanging from a frayed cord around his neck.

The kid took a moment to look from face to face, as if he was flummoxed, and then to touch his own hair in explanation.
“Rubio,”
he said.

Reinhardt looked at me and I translated, “Blond.” And then I told the kid, “
Mi gemelo malvado
.” My evil twin.

The kid smiled and handed Reinhardt the whiskey and then hurried to his father's booth.