The Return: A Novel (17 page)

Crusellas handed over his empty Glock, a look of dull hatred on his face. Marder took his Kimber and tapped the man lightly on the cheek with it, then made a shooing motion, and after a moment the three men turned and walked away. They heard the front door slam and a car start up and drive off.

“That was very impressive, Marder,” said Skelly. “A dangerous man. And here all the time I thought you were a candy-ass book editor. You know, those guys’ll be back.”

“I’m sure. That’s why it’s good that I have dangerous friends.” He smiled at Skelly and then they both laughed.

7

Returning to the house, Marder heard a sound that he had not heard in a long while, a delicate clapping, like the applause of a single child: a woman making tortillas in the traditional way. Instantly, twenty years slipped away and he was back in his office at home, listening to the
pat-pat-pat
from the kitchen. A ridiculous activity in New York, where there were abundant Mexican groceries and very good tortillas available in plastic packages, but sometimes Chole had to slip back into what she called “deep Mexico” and make tortillas from corn
masa
she mixed herself, to be eaten with a
mole
of thirty ingredients, also made from scratch. Not always a pleasant time for Marder, these sojourns into
México profundo.
Sometimes it would be fiesta, sometimes a breakdown, tears and recriminations directed at him, the author of her long exile. Tears dropping into the
masa
.

And now as he listened, the same noise: sobs, barely stifled. Marder went into the kitchen, half-fearing that there would be no one there, that his brain was starting to go and he was hearing things.

He was delighted to see it was only Amparo, standing at the long wooden table, making tortillas, and sobbing. A small television was affixed to the wall, showing a telenovela with the sound off.

“What’s wrong, Señora? Why are you crying?”

She stared at him, openmouthed, then wiped her streaming eyes with her apron.

“I heard the shooting. I thought they had killed you like—” She stopped, wild-eyed.

“Like they killed Guzmán?”

She nodded.

“These were the same men?”

Another nod. “It was Crusellas. Señor wouldn’t pay them, so they killed him.”

“In the garage.”

“Yes. They said they would kill everyone if we told.”

“Well, I think they will find it harder to kill people around here from now on. Tell me something, Amparo. How come this house is so orderly? Nothing has been stolen and you keep the place beautifully, as if someone is still living here. I was surprised.”

“They use it. Or they used to use it. It is a great prize and no one knows who will have it. I mean
los otros, los malosos
. They say El Jabalí was going to give it to his son, but El Gordo objected and that is the reason they are fighting now. Or so they say.”

El Jabalí
—the Boar. And the Fat Man. Marder didn’t know who these were, but he expected he would find out. He said, “So La Familia is having a war with itself?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know anything about such things, Señor. I’m only a housekeeper. Some say if only they would all kill themselves off, things would be better, but others say the important thing is to have peace and no bullets flying around, and for that to happen one must win, because there will always be
ni-nis
to deal in the drugs for
El Norte
.”

“Ni-nis?”

“What we call them, like those who came here. The boys:
ni trabajo, ni estudiar
. They’re like weeds, and if they don’t have a
jefe
who makes them behave, then life is hell for everyone. At least La Familia made them behave. Now, who knows?”

“Well, we’ll see what we can do to make them behave,” said Marder. “I intend to stay here, and I wanted to talk to you about arrangements. I want to put you in charge of the whole house. Hire staff, a cook, someone to clean, people to care for the grounds, and so on. I’ll pay you a flat amount each month and then you can take a salary for yourself out of that, pay the staff and the bills, buy food, and so on. Can you use a computer?”

The woman stared at him. “Yes … no, not very well, but the children can. They have one at the school.”

“Good. Epifania can be the accountant, and Ariel can be her assistant. I’ll get them a computer and show them how to work an accounting program. I’ll set up a bank account for you too—” He stopped in the face of her obvious distress. She looked as if she might start crying again.

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Señor! Why would you trust me with tens of thousands of pesos each month? How do you know I won’t cheat you? You don’t even know me.”

“I know you enough. You have books on the shelf in the kitchen, which shows you have had some education, but you make corn tortillas by hand instead of buying them wrapped in plastic, which shows good character and suggests to me that you are not fool enough to risk everything for some scam. Am I correct? Good. Now, here’s what I want you to do.”

They spoke of business matters for half an hour, the woman contributing in a manner that only confirmed Marder’s judgment that there were no flies on Amparo Montez. When this concluded, he said, “Two more things—no, three. First, that little community we have squatting here—do they have a leader? I mean someone who everyone respects and comes to for advice and help.”

She thought for a moment and came up with some names, which Marder wrote down in his notebook. One of them was Rosita Morales, the woman he’d spoken with earlier. “Next,” he said, “do we have any
ni-nis
on the property? Young men who might join La Familia or some other narco group?”

“A few. I’m sure Rosita would know who they are.”

“Okay, I’ll ask her. Could you send word that I’d like to see the people on this list after the evening meal, say eight o’clock? And you’ll need to get yourself a notebook and a cell phone. I’ll be throwing a lot of stuff at you soon, and you won’t want to forget things.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and then paused attentively. “And what is the third thing?”

“Right. I think we should talk about Lourdes.”

“Oh, my Jesus! Has she done something again?”

“No, but I perceive a problem that I would like to forestall. The child has a certain form and face, which she can’t help, of course, but she also seems unhappy. Sulky, even. That’s not an atmosphere I wish to cultivate in my house. Besides that, there will soon be men shooting one another over her, and given the unfortunate situation in Playa Diamante, that is not merely a figure of speech. I caught her with a man ten years older than her just this morning. No, not that—she was merely playing with him, but such play tends to get out of control very quickly. What is her story, if I may ask?”

“She’s my niece, my youngest sister’s only daughter. Her father is dead, a
narcoviolencia
thing, now many years ago. My sister went to
El Norte
when Lourdes was five. At first she wrote, she sent money, but now, for five or six years we haven’t heard from her. That usually means something bad. But after you shed your tears, there is still a child to raise.” She sighed, shrugged.
“No importa madre
,
”
she said, using the general Mexican expression for things that can’t ever be fixed, of which that nation had, oh, so many. “I have thought of sending her to my brother in Guerrero, to the
rancho
, you know? But she swears she will run away if I do, and she will. The girl is a mule. She won’t work, she is failing school, and she is starting to sneak out, as you saw. All she thinks about is money and things and how to get things, all the things she sees on the television and reads about in the magazines. She thinks she will be a model or a movie star and have cars and jewels and fine clothes. But I think some
guapo
will take her and give her drugs and that will be the end of her, poor little thing!”

“Perhaps not,” said Marder. He was looking up at the television, which had attracted his attention when the program changed to the spangled opening of a news show. Marder saw that they were leading with the incident in the square, with the torso. He saw again the pretty woman with the tan suit. He reached up and turned the volume on. He watched and listened, enjoying the
fresa
accent in the throaty voice, until the segment ended.

He turned back to the housekeeper. “Let me talk to her. Sometimes a young girl will listen to an older man.”

He was watching Amparo’s face when he said this and observed a variable display there: fear perhaps, doubt, then resignation. The animation that had appeared in her eyes while they were talking of the business of the house faded, and the servant’s polite mask reappeared.

“Yes, Señor. I will tell her. May I get on with my work now?”

Marder nodded and went up the stairs to have his siesta. As he closed the blinds and lay down on the cool sheets, he thought, She thinks I want to have the girl myself and thinks it might be the best thing for her, a rich old American instead of a thuggy kid who’ll get her pregnant. She read me wrong, he thought; I already had that life.

He stared at the ceiling, a flawless pale-cream field, and entered, as he often did when exhausted, a hypnagogic state, in which the past seemed more available. Was he more prone to this since the diagnosis? Perhaps he was running back through his life, as people are supposed to do at the moment of death, but more slowly, consideringly, as befitted an editor of encyclopedic works. In any case, now in his half-sleeping mind, he was on a different bed, narrower, harder, and the ceiling above was mustard yellow and cracked in a peculiar circular pattern, like the outline of a cat’s head. He was in his room at the Las Palmas Floridas Hotel, after a motorcycle journey of several thousand miles. He had not planned to come to Playa Diamante, had never heard of the place, it was just where a series of spontaneous decisions had led him, not toward anything but away from a life he thought he had screwed up beyond repair. He was twenty-four.

He had left his wife, a perfectly nice woman he did not love. Like so many of his brothers-in-arms, he had married her on the rebound from Vietnam, seeking life, seeking warm human shelter from what had happened to him over there. Janice Serebic: he could hardly recall her face at a remove of over thirty years. Yet even back then, lying on that other, narrower bed, guilt had washed her features, her voice, from his memory. She’d been the cashier in the place where he’d worked as a cook, both before and after the service, a student place up on Amsterdam Avenue near the university. He was sad beyond words; she was funny and plump and made him laugh and steered him like a salvaged vessel into marriage’s dry dock. He’d lost his caring machinery up there in the rainy mountains, and subsequently whatever happened, whatever someone else wanted, was okay with him, because he’d found out what making decisions and volunteering and wanting stuff came to: nothing good.

His parents liked her; that was big plus. His dad was starting to go weird and she was okay with that. She was a nice person he didn’t love, and when it hit him finally that he was going to spend his whole life faking affection, he went a little nuts. One Friday, after drawing his paycheck, he cashed it and got on his Harley and, without really thinking too much about it, drove past 20th Street, where he lived with her in a second-floor walk-up, straight down Broadway and right at Canal and through the Holland Tunnel and through many a winding way and strange adventure, slowly building his courage up again, the numbness fading, until he was brave enough to call his mother and tell her what had happened to him and call Janice and bear the sobs, the screamed imprecations coming over the line, standing with a fist full of quarters under the snapping bug lights of a Gulf station somewhere in central Texas.

He’d heard Guadalajara was cheap and so it proved to be, but it was full of Americans, and he’d lost his taste for watching his countrymen boss around short brown people. Besides that, he was too broke after a month on the road even for Guada, but in that city he’d heard that the Mexican Pacific was even cheaper, and so he’d followed Route 200 down the coast and made a random right turn and followed a rutted road until it dead-ended at Playa Diamante.

*   *   *

He remembered the first time he’d seen her. Wasn’t that the way when it’s real love? You recall every detail of face and body and dress, even the smell, the feeling of keys sliding into a lock you never knew existed. She was waiting tables in the small restaurant the hotel kept to serve breakfast to its guests. He came down that first morning and filled his plate at the buffet; he loaded it, because he had a young man’s appetite and no money and the breakfast was included with the room: eggs fried with salsa and scrambled with sausage, beans, enchiladas, warm
bolillos
—what they have in Michoacán instead of croissants—and a vast tray of fruits. Except for oranges and grapefruit, they were all unfamiliar to him. He loaded another plate with samples of each and sat down at a table, and then she walked out of the kitchen holding a pot of coffee. He stopped eating to watch her pour coffee for the other guests.

She approached his table, she smiled, and he was a gone goose. Her eyes were palest hazel, her cheekbones high and staring through skin like a creamy Bourbon rose, and, topping all, that mass of thick glossy red-black hair. She asked him if he would like coffee. He could barely answer yes. She poured, turned away, and he cried, “Wait!”

“What are these fruits?” he asked when she turned politely.

He made her explain the tejocotes, the cherimoya, the guanabana, the nanchi, and the puzzling guamúchil. In his halting high-school Spanish, he asked how one ate it. She showed him how to open the brown pods, exposing the shiny beans covered with pale fibers that tasted like cotton candy. She demonstrated how to suck clean the little bean and smiled again. It was like the Garden of Eden.

He lost interest in all else, planning his campaign; he was back in the jungle, collecting intel. He pumped the hotel staff without shame, tipping more than he could afford, cornering the bartender, the chambermaids, the gardeners. Her name was Maria Soledad Beatriz de Haro d’Ariés y Casals, known as Chole. She was a daughter of the place, a student at the National University in Mexico City, home for the summer to help out. Her mother was Carmela Asunción Casals, whose family had founded the hotel, and her father was Don Esteban de Haro d’Ariés. They were
criollos
of the highest water, reduced by the revolutionary depredations that took their estates in the thirties to the indignity of running a ten-room hotel in Playa Diamante. The girl had literary pretensions, always a notebook or a book of poetry to hand. She wished to be modern, to write, to have a career, but the father was set on a grand marriage, preferably to one of the local
caciques
of the PRI, the permanently ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. One such had been found, with acceptably light skin tones, and an engagement was imminent. By this act would the family fortunes be restored: Don Esteban would expropriate the expropriators.