The Return: A Novel (16 page)

“No. When I was in this area the first time, Chole took me around and taught me the names of all the plants and animals. Let’s take a walk through the woods.”

They walked along the path toward the bulldozer, Marder pointing out the various trees: the gumbo-limbo, the manzanita, the
jicaro,
or calabash, the
acalote
pine. The land rose slowly, and soon the vegetation became mere scrub and they were looking down a cliff at a perfect oval of sand that capped the island’s northern point.

“Let’s go,” said Skelly, and began to pick his way down the crumbly rocks. Marder followed him reluctantly, but there was a reasonably accessible path. They climbed over rocks and waded briefly and soon they had reached the island’s main beach. They stared at the glittering Pacific for a while and listened to the thump of its surf. “A nice beach,” said Skelly. “A nice break too. I should have brought my board.”

“Yeah, it’s a terrific beach—the whitest sand for miles.” Marder stooped and let some of his property sieve through his fingers. “It’s practically pure quartzite—that’s why they call it Diamond Beach. If we walk south for a little while, we should be able to see the harbor breakwater and the mouth of the river.”

He set off, walking on the damp sand. Marder had always liked the sea. He liked it in all seasons and had always taken his family on seaside holidays, renting houses on Long Island or the Jersey Shore in summer and taking occasional winter trips to the DR and Antigua. He and his wife used to laugh about this, the whole personals-ad cliché about loving long walks on the beach, but they did; they took long walks on the beach, she often stooping to pick up things mottled or faded by the sea and keeping them on a particular shelf in their office. The first of them must have come from this very beach—not this particular island but farther south, on Playa Diamante proper. Without warning, Marder was seized with a blast of emotional pain so strong that it clouded his sight and he stumbled. He would have fallen had not Skelly grasped him by the arm.

“You okay, buddy?”

“Yeah. I had a stitch in time. A flashback, if you want to call it that. I was walking on the beach with Chole, but it was now—I mean, I was with her but I knew the future, that I was … that she was going to die. Shit!” He shuddered like a horse. “You ever get flashbacks, Skelly?”

“Only nightmares,” said the other, but did not expand. Instead, he pointed ahead to where they could see the tip of the long breakwater, with the red-lit channel marker, and beyond it the greeny-brown stain made by the outflow of the Rio Viridiana.

“There’s your boat basin,” said Skelly, pointing. “Like you said, it’s a nice location for running drugs. Quiet little port, a boat channel, good communications inland. It tends to explain the torso in the plaza and raises once again the question of why you chose to spend your golden years in the middle of what looks like a narco war. Would you care to illuminate?”

“Not really,” said Marder. “There should be a set of stairs just ahead.” They continued walking, found the stairs, and climbed them to find themselves on the lower of the two terraces that lay beneath the house. This was lined with young mango trees, bearing green fruit, and there was a hammock slung between two of them. From the south side of the terrace they could see where someone (perhaps the late Guzmán) had built a pair of docks and dredged out a tiny bay to make a miniature marina. There were no boats in it.

“We should get a boat,” said Skelly. “There’s supposed to be terrific game fishing off this coast. And also…”

“What also?”

“To be frank, we’re basically on an island with only one way off. I like to be in places with two ways out, or more.”

“Okay, find us a boat. I like boats too.”

“Not a sailboat, Marder. Something with legs.”

“Hey, get a guided-missile frigate. Whatever will reduce your paranoia.”

*   *   *

They strolled back across the terrace. Upon the adobe walls that rimmed this on the ocean side, posts had been implanted and heavy wire strung between them to act as a support for bougainvillea and trumpet vines, although these had not flourished. The wiring on one side was completely bare.

Skelly twanged a wire. “We could hang cards on this and shoot. Since there’s no golf course.”

“Yeah, we could have a rematch of the Moon River Invitational.”

“I’ve got cards. When I win, will you tell me what the fuck we’re doing here?”

“When you win,” said Marder.

Skelly went off and came back with a deck of cards and a basket of clothespins. “The señora had all the necessities,” he said, and attached a row of cards to the wire strand that faced the sea.

“Too bad if anyone’s on the beach when we shoot,” said Marder.

“Fuck ’em. It’s a private beach. And it’s Mexico. Want a round now?”

“I think it’s siesta time,” said Marder. “You’ve waited forty years for this; it’ll keep.”

He turned and climbed the broad stone steps that led to the upper terrace. There a pool shone with the aquamarine of advanced chemistry.

“Now that you’ve circumnavigated your kingdom,” said Skelly, “you look pleased.”

“I am pleased. It wasn’t what I expected to find, but it’s kind of neat. I don’t have to wait for my next life to be a feudal lord.”

“Yeah, but if you don’t have them move the latrines from where they are now, you’re going to have medieval levels of cholera. The subsurface flow has to be from the river, and the shitters are upstream from the well. In fact, you should put in a septic field if you want all those people to stay.”

“You know about this, do you?”

“Yeah, the army cross-trained me in field engineering. It’s part of the wonder of Special Forces.”

“Well, we’ll consider it
mañana,
as they like to say around here. First our nap.”

Skelly laughed and said that some rack time sounded good. After he’d gone, Marder contemplated his pool and thought about his daughter and wondered how she was getting on. This line being too painful, he had changed his wonderment toward the question of who was maintaining a pool in an empty house so well when he heard young voices and saw the two Montez children trotting across the far side of the terrace.

“Hey, kids,” Marder called out. “Who takes care of the pool? Do you have a service?”

The children stopped and stared at him. The girl, Epifania, said, “No, sir. We do it ourselves. We take the leaves out and put in chemicals, and Bonifacio makes the machine work when it breaks. But it only broke twice.”

“We don’t swim in it,” said the boy.

“Not even when no one is looking?”

“No,” said the boy fiercely. “We swim in the sea only.”

They disappeared, whispering to each other.

As he walked back to the house, Marder heard a less innocent noise, a rattling in the bushes below the wall overlooking the lower terrace, and a gasping male voice. He peeked through an oleander and saw Lourdes in a clinch with a guy who had to be twenty-five. He was trying to get his hand into her pants and was kissing her neck, and she was laughing and fighting him off but not all that seriously. Marder walked down the steps, making noise. More shaking foliage, panicked whispers, and the sound of retreating people, fading around the side of the house. He’d have to deal with that situation but not just yet.

Marder went through the cool and echoing house to the room he had chosen. It was white-walled and full of light, with windows looking out at the sea. The bed was similarly huge, a brass item that looked antique, and the rest of the furnishings were Mexican provincial: light-colored, carved, painted, and distressed with dents and wormholes. It was the bedroom of a great
patrón
, or someone who wanted to be one. Marder felt that strange ambivalence once again: I shouldn’t be here, but here I am, the lord of a mansion and a village. He felt something working behind the scenes in his life, as if he were on a ship captained by a hidden stranger.

He unpacked his scant clothing and put his weapons in a wardrobe that locked with an antique brass key the size of a can opener. As he finished this task, he heard the sound of a car on the gravel road, coming closer. He left the room, walked around the gallery until he came to a window that looked down on the drive. A white SUV was pulling up in front of the house. He watched three men get out, walked back to his room, grabbed the Kimber pistol, stuck it uncomfortably in the small of his back, pulled on his linen jacket, and went downstairs.

He waited in the living room, leaning casually against the back of a couch. He wondered where Skelly was and wished that he were here for the coming interview with whoever had just arrived in the SUV. Someone pounded on the door, then flung it open. Through the open archway, Marder could see the three men, all as neat as Mormon missionaries: dark suits over open-necked shirts, short haircuts, shined shoes. They came toward him, one man in front, the others a little to the rear. They were looking around the room as if they wanted to buy the place, or had already bought it.

The leading man stopped in front of Marder, a little too close. He was dark skinned, shorter than Marder by almost a foot, but bulky. His face was pitted with old scars, and he had two blue teardrops tattooed at the corner of one eye. He folded his arms and glared at Marder.

Marder said, “Welcome to my house. What can I do for you gentlemen?”

The man said, “You can tell me who the fuck you are and what you’re doing here.”

“My name is Marder and I own this house. I intend to live here. And who are you?”

The man was shaking his head. “No, you don’t want to live here, man. This is not a healthy place for you to live. Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, that’s where you should live, with the other gringos.”

“I’m a gringo, true, but I’m also a citizen of Mexico. My wife was a Mexican and my whole family has joint citizenship. So thank you for the health warning, but I believe I’ll stay.”

The man smiled and shook his head again. “No,
pendejo
, you don’t understand. There is too much lead in the environment here. If you stay you will definitely die.” With that he reached into his belt and pulled out a Glock pistol. He waved it under Marder’s nose. “You understand now,
coño
?”

“Yes,” said Marder. “You make yourself perfectly clear. You want me to leave.”

The man ran the muzzle of the pistol across Marder’s cheek and tapped it a couple of times. “Good,” he said. “You’re a sensible man.” He returned the pistol to his waistband. “I don’t want to see you around here again. If I do—”

But Marder did not find out what he would do, because from up above came the unmistakable and ever-interesting sound of a shell being jacked into the chamber of a shotgun.

They all looked up. Skelly was standing on the gallery, pointing a Browning BPS 12-gauge shotgun at the three visitors. He said in Spanish, “Sit down on the floor, gentlemen, and fold your hands on your heads.”

After a moment’s hesitation they did so, and Marder disarmed them of three identical Glock pistols. He felt as if he had been propelled out of his ordinary existence for sure now and forced down what would have become an hysterical giggle. Somehow he had been translated into Skelly’s life, and it was as unreal as Skelly would have felt had he been translated into a quiet room and given galleys to edit. And—this was the strangest part—Marder found it wonderful! He was cool, unfrightened. A thousand thrillers on the page and on the screen had taught him exactly how to act, what to say; the garment had been tailored by squadrons of hacks, and he slipped into it easily.

He stuck the three pistols in various pockets and said, “Gentlemen, we seem to have started out on the wrong foot. I didn’t realize you were so interested in pistol shooting. As a matter of fact, my colleague and I were just talking about having a little target practice. If you please, follow me.”

With that, he pointed toward the terrace doorway of the great room, Skelly came down from the balcony with his shotgun steady on the trio of gun thugs, and all of them marched out into the sunlight, past the pool, and down to the lower terrace. Marder dumped the Glocks on one of the metal umbrella tables, pulled their magazines, and cleared the chambers of each. He turned to the three men.

“I’ve given you my name,” he said. “Permit me to know yours.”

Pock-face was Santiago Crusellas. His associates were Tomas Gasco, a light heavyweight, sand-colored, with the brutal face of a Toltec idol, and Angel d’Ariés, a thin, boyish-looking man of about forty, with a sad, defeated look. Marder studied the face of this one for a good minute: high cheekbones, large tilted hazel eyes, a paler complexion than the other two. The man shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. Marder asked, “Are you related to Don Esteban de Haro d’Ariés?”

A pause. “My father.”

“A man known for his probity and generosity, I believe.”

“Did you know him?” said d’Ariés, a small light appearing in the dull eyes.

“A long time ago and not as well as I should have,” said Marder, and then clapped his hands. “Well, let us begin!” he said, and pulled the Kimber out. Skelly had arranged the four sevens from his deck on the wire. Marder took up a stance at a convenient crack in the pavement, twenty feet or so from the target, and with seven spaced shots blew the pips out of the seven of hearts. He put his pistol down on the table and handed Crusellas a Glock and a magazine. Behind them, Skelly raised his Browning.

Crusellas loaded his pistol and blasted away, missing entirely several times, but, having fifteen bullets to play with, he managed to shred the bottom of the seven of clubs, leaving the upper two pips unharmed. Marder went to the wire and removed the two targets. He looked at the seven of clubs and shook his head, then pulled out a pen and scribbled on the seven of hearts. He dropped both cards into Crusellas’s breast pocket.

“You need to practice more, my friend, unless you confine your shooting to assassination at very short range,” Marder said. “Tell me, who is the chief of the plaza these days?”

“Servando Gomez,” answered Crusellas.

“Well, you can tell Señor Gomez that we’ve had a meeting. Tell him, if you would, that you didn’t find another stupid gringo you could frighten away or perhaps dispose of as you disposed of the unfortunate Guzmán. Tell him I’m a dangerous fellow. And tell him I mean him no harm—I’m not a rival of any sort but perhaps an ally. Tell him also that I have dangerous friends, like, for example, the gentleman with the shotgun. Also tell him that I would be happy to visit him at any time, to discuss matters of mutual interest. My number is on my card, so to speak. And I believe I’ll take that pistol back from you now. I’m sure you have others.”