Atticus (22 page)

I fortified myself with whiskey from Reinhardt's glass and frowned at myself in the Cinemascope of the dining room mirror. My face was white, the life flushed from it. My eyes were scary, yelling
Don't cross me.
Even I shied from them. I found inkblots of blood on the front of my white oxford shirt and I got it half off when I freaked at the sudden noise of the telephone, fierce as a bayonet that ringing. My hand went for it, hesitated, and finally let it ring, four times, five. Was it Renata or someone else? (
Well, you see I'm kind of busy now. I have to hide a guy's body.
) Wrestling out of the shirt, I took it out the kitchen door to the green garbage container, pushing it beneath the trash already there, then got into a hot, gray Stanford T-shirt that was falling with my clothes in the dryer. Emptying the full load
into his green plastic basket and pitching Reinhardt's wet clothes into the dryer, I found his handwriting on a notepad that hung next to the kitchen phone, a Mexico City number that I found the presence of mind to dial.

A female voice told me in Spanish that it was the American Express Travel Office. I got out my wallet and flipped it open as I asked if she spoke English.

“Yes, sir.”

My Colorado driver's license was missing, too. I got the picture. “Uh, I just put in a reservation for a flight but I think I may have screwed up and given you the numbers from my corporate card.”

“Your name, sir?”

“Cody, last name; first name, Scott.”

“Momentito.”
I heard her tapping and scrolling. I was frenetic and hair-rakingly jazzed, functioning at the high speed of cocaine and kicking the kitchen drawers with my knee until she finally said, “Lufthansa to Frankfurt?”

“Sí.”

She read the numbers.

“Oh, good,” I said.
“Perfecto.
And where can I find the tickets again?”

“Same place,” she said. “Our office in Resurrección.”

“Muchas gracias, señora.”

“De nada.”

I hung up the telephone and flicked off the house lights as I hurried out to the hallway and took a full breath or two before I found the courage to get down there beside him and force my hand inside his trouser pockets. I found his
wallet, but my American Express card and Colorado license weren't in it. I felt like hitting him in the head. I hunted inside his front trouser pockets. Empty. I fumed for half a minute, sitting back on my heels, and then heard Reinhardt telling me about his horrible hotel room on El Camino Real, full of Europeans, he'd said, and I presumed it was a
posada
called El Marinero, the sailor. I left him in the hallway and locked the front door and got into the Volkswagen. I tuned the car radio to a Texas station that found its way to Resurrección late at night, hearing fools on a talk show as I drove to Boystown and searched El Camino Real for El Marinero.

The night manager was hulking over the high front desk, his elbows holding down the bloodily illustrated pages of a wrestling magazine. “I have forgotten my key,” I said, and he looked up with a frown that was halfway between boredom and suspicion.

“Your name?”

“Reinhardt Schmidt.”

He held his gaze on me for a long time, as if he were trying to grow an idea,
Say, something fishy's going on here,
but then he sighed and got the key for number 13 from its pigeonhole and went back to his magazine as I gingerly ascended the staircase, my hand faintly squeaking along the handrail, as cool, I figured, as Ray Milland in
Dial M for Murder.
We were not completely in touch with our feelings.

And then I was inside Reinhardt's room. I felt doomed by the hoard he'd filled it with in the weeks of his hopeless cure. Wonder bread and Coca-Cola and Oreo cookies, a hot plate and a case of Campbell's soup, a high tower of foreign
crime paperbacks, a box full of sunglasses with price tags on them, his floor littered with photos and contact sheets and Kodak film cartons. I was too harried for time to do more than haul out his green suitcase and fill it with a good portion of his clothes and fancier things. His film and proofs I heaped in a box that had been shipped there from Holland, and I stowed the box in the hallway to get later. In the bathroom I found a plastic sack from the
farmacia,
and I filled it with all the elixirs and pills that tumbled from behind the mirror of the medicine cabinet.

Would the hotel call in the police if Reinhardt was missing? I phoned the front desk and told the night manager in English that I was Reinhardt Schmidt and that I'd be sightseeing further inland for a while but wanted to keep the room. I heard him rummage around and get the hotel bill. “Of course, Mr. Smeet,” he said. “And do you still want to pays on your Visa cart?”

“Sí, gracias.”

Without feeling, he said, “Thanks is for you.”

Then I was out of there, flipping the door handle sign so no maid would disturb the place and skidding the Holland box and Reinhardt's full suitcase down the hallway. At first I thought I'd toss it all in the barrio,
Your prayers have been answered,
freebies from heaven, but I was afraid I'd be seen by the up-all-nights there, and so I heaved the suitcase and box inside the car and headed back to the house.

And I got frightened because the front door wouldn't force open more than an inch at first. I felt Reinhardt was there and fully alive and fighting me for the keep of the
house, but I firmed my effort until I was inside and found his body had rolled against the front door in some zombie move, his face looking up at me from the hallway floor in a fractured way, half of it as red and tortured as a scream, half as familiar and at peace as a head on a sofa pillow.

I hurried up to my room, hung Reinhardt's clothes among my own, and tucked his green suitcase away in the closet of the guest bedroom. I forgot to hunt my passport and visa. I took Reinhardt's medicines and the
farmacia
sack downstairs, tossed his medicines into the green garbage container, then put his whiskey glass and the full green Jameson's bottle in the sack. I frankly thought I was cooking, no flies on me, my footprints wiped away by the tide.

I finally ransacked the box that was full of his photos and contact sheets, finding pictures of myself running in gym shorts, filling Renata's wineglass with a
vino tinto,
holding a match to a cigar on the terrace, getting into my Volkswagen outside Printers Inc—fifty shots, maybe more; Reinhardt watching me from afar, waiting for his chance, and getting it, as he knew he would. I failed to find the photographs of the Volkswagen on the highway, the fender and windshield damage, whatever it was that he'd hoped to use against me, but I presumed they were in his stash somewhere and I hauled it outside and far down the hill to the Maya, where I heaved the full box into a green Dumpster behind the hotel's kitchen.

Then I ran back up to the house, where I hoisted a folded and off-putting rug and flicked off the lights in the house and got Reinhardt into the Volkswagen somehow.
Such waltzing is not easy. I have no memory of it really, only of walking away from the half-opened passenger door and the yellow glow of the dome light just above the hideousness of his face and finding his sitting there satisfactory, a fine composition, just a guy waiting in the night. I walked back to turn up the Volkswagen's radio, heard the first minute of news, and jolted shut the door. And then I finicked around the first floor of the house again, found the shotgun in the hallway, hit the lights, and walked out.

I headed out to the jungle, my hands holding hard on to the wheel, fearing that if I lifted them I'd fly away with the jim-jams, half my head in some funky horror movie with the formerly dead just biding his time to have his terrible revenge, the half I'll simply call less insane feeling sympathy for Reinhardt and trying to gain some points in Heaven by insisting that it was a work of mercy to honorably bury the dead. I was harnessed to that: Hide the guy in the rug, heave him into a pit, tamp down the fertile earth with a garden spade.
Reinhardt Schmidt, you say? Oh, he disappeared long ago.

I parked at the foot of the hill, got the shotgun, and killed the engine but kept the Volkswagen's headlights on so I could find the path. Whine of insects. Ticking engine. And no other sounds but those of undulant waves softly achieving the shore. I flicked on the ceiling lights in the studio and sought to put on some music, failing to notice that I hit the REC button on my Radiola tape player, failing, too, to notice the silence of its furtive recording as I fell into habits that now seem absurd: limbering brushes in a turpentine jar, hanging an unfinished canvas on the easel,
squeezing out a few paints on my hand palette, heating water for coffee. I have no memory of fitting the filter into the funnel, but I did it, measuring out the hazelnut and watching with nary a flinch, non compos mentis, until the water finally tumbled into a boil. I filled the funnel and finally went for him.

Eduardo's kids were there at the foot of the hill, walking through the headlight beams and getting up on the Volkswagen's running board to peer at Reinhardt. His face was turned away from them so that he must have seemed unhurt, just resting, and the blackness, the familiar car, his blond hair, and our faint resemblance were enough that I heard a teenaged girl named Elba say in a hushed voice,
“Cotziba,”
Lord Artist, and then the kids got down to the ground again and Elba silenced them as they hurried away.

That was when it hit me: just trade places, let Reinhardt be me, be my sundog. I'd find a new life and kill off my failures, my history of ruin, the high hum that played behind my blood tango with chance and mystery. It seemed so easy and necessary. I haven't felt so free since I was four.

I put the key in the ignition of my Harley-Davidson, as if I'd gone out there on it, and I opened the door on the Volkswagen's passenger's side and pulled Reinhardt to me, holding him in a hard embrace as I fought my way up the hill to the charnel house. Where I arranged Reinhardt in the torn green wingback chair and snugged his right thumb inside the shotgun's trigger guard before angling its stock to the floor and letting it fall aside. My little science project. Then I took the shotgun outside and fired it at the moon. The hugeness
of that noise got to me until I heard, hard on its heels, the rat-a-tat of firecrackers in the jungle and I figured I'd simply become another merrymaker in the fiesta. I handker-chiefed the trigger housing with turpentine just in case the Mexican police tried to lift fingerprints from it—hardly likely—and then I held Reinhardt's hands to it, gumming up the metal, and arranged the shotgun on the floor. But his blood was trickling a fresh path along his throat, and I ascertained that his bloodstains were all wrong, hardening underneath his upper arm and back, finding the shank and welt of his Cole-Haan shoe. I fought his clothes and shoes off him and, as calm and confident as an undertaker, fitted him into blue jeans and a hot yellow shirt that were hanging in the closet. The Radiola got to the final inch of its winding tape and clunked off, but I was clueless about what that meant. Walked out to the high cliffs over the sea and flung his shoes out into the night; Reinhardt's clothes I hurriedly wadded up for burial in the forest. I tilted his head to the left as if it were jolted that way by the force of the shotgun blast and finished the mise-en-scène by putting my Swiss wristwatch on him and filching the pesos from both our wallets and tucking mine in his blue jeans. And for the first time I felt a twinge of guilt over the damage I'd be doing to my father and Renata. But I was too far down the road to do more than snatch a sheet of paper from my sketch pad and write on it with a felt-tip pen, “No one is to blame.” Hardly enough, I knew, not one of those things your father would read and think,
Wow, what a relief!,
but I signed the note anyway and I finally left the front door open and the coffee
heating on the hot plate as I skidded and fell down the hill, frankly hoping that the house would burn down or creatures would make havoc of Reinhardt, frustrating identification.

I have lost all sympathy, I know. Cold, fearful, reckless, full of self-pity, I was so free of taking responsibility for my actions that I seem hardly even there. If I was not, in fact, a murderer, it was because that term did not fully cover the awfulness of all that I'd done. Even then I knew I was not going to get away with it, but I was too far into the killed-himself bit to not try to finish it. I hauled the bloodstained rug and Reinhardt's clothes far into the forest, my flashlight flaring over the tails of hurrying things that I tried not to think about, and I finished the worst of my harrowing ordeal by burying the evidence with a garden spade that I then put in the car. I headed into Resurrección in the Volkswagen, not thinking of the hurt of a funeral for family and friends, only thinking of Scott and how he could flee the country and find a new life. I fell into the old patterns of childhood, holding it all in, confessing nothing to my father, hoping to bide my time in hiding like I used to in my upstairs room.
Maybe he won't notice.
Well, it was madness, I admit it, but rationality offered no upside return, it would give me nothing but grief. Even telling Renata was impossible. If she helped me in any way she'd be an accessory after the fact. She could be imprisoned even if I wasn't. And Renata was my only hope of finally pulling off the scam. So I halted in front of the public telephone near the
jardín
and dialed Renata's number. An office light was on in Printers
Inc. Stuart at his bookkeeping. A few policemen were laughing and smoking cigarettes in front of the
comisaría de policía.
I held my breath until Renata picked up.

“Hi,” I said. “Is it too late to talk?”

“It's one-fifteen. Are you able?”

“Sobered up,” I told her. Agitation and fright got me turning with the phone until I was staring across the gardens at the huge pink parish church. In its foundation was a former window that plywood was nailed over, but the plywood seemed framed with a filament of light, as if a forty-watt bulb were burning in the cellar. “I hear voices behind you,” I said.