The Return: A Novel (41 page)

Marder smiled at her, but she gave him a look that he could not decipher. “You’re enjoying being a warlord, aren’t you?”

“Not at all. I would much rather live in peace and develop a crafts-export business. But since I’m in this situation, you’ll allow me to find any amusement I can. Besides, I’m obliged to show a cheerful face.”

“You should be cheerful. When this thing collapses, you can take off to some other beach and leave the
campesinos
in the shit.”

Marder said, “You’re quite mistaken. I intend to die here.” He stamped his foot. “Here, on my land. And also, if I may, I find your cynical nihilism excessive, even by the standards of journalism. I would think that you’d cheer for a bunch of people trying to make a stand against a loathsome social cancer that’s killed forty thousand Mexicans, but all I hear is carping and nasty insinuations about my motives. It’s not objectivity; it’s personal, for some reason. Either your dislike of me is skewing your attitude or you’ve totally succumbed to
no importa madrismo
. In either case, I don’t want to hear that crap anymore. If you can’t stop sniping, you can take a hike.”

He walked away, not caring whether she followed or not. The sounds of firing grew louder, and soon he came to the edge of the inhabited part of the
colonia
and the area everyone called
el golf
. Skelly had rigged poles and wires from which hung paper silhouette targets, and men were lined up firing at them, in single-shot and three-round bursts. A larger group of men was standing behind the firing line, smoking and calling out to the shooters. Rafael was acting as the range officer, and Skelly was squatting on the ground among a group of men, showing them how to field-strip and clean a Kalashnikov.

It was like watching Nureyev dance, observing someone who could do something better than practically anyone else. Skelly really knew how to defend an area using irregular troops, how to train and inspire them, how to augment their qualities and compensate for their defects. Marder watched the young men learn until they could all do the simple task, on a weapon, after all, designed specifically to be used by careless, simple soldiers.

“I’m impressed,” said Marder, when the lesson was over and he and Skelly had walked a little distance away from the trainees. “You’ve done a lot in an incredibly short time. Do you think we have a chance?”

Skelly shrugged. “Yeah, if they run out of gun thugs before we run out of bullets.” He looked down toward the firing line, where Pepa Espinoza was videoing the shooters and interviewing the men who were waiting. “How’s your girlfriend? She seems to be in her element.”

The reporter paused and looked at the two men. It was a peculiar look, defiant and a bit hurt at the same time.

“Yes,” said Marder. “She has that in common with you. Speaking of girlfriends, where’s Lourdes?”

“Watching the little kids. Rosita’s got a day-care center set up.”

“We need to talk about that.”

“The day-care center?”

“No—Lourdes. I want to get her out of here. She should be in acting school in Mexico City. That’s what we arranged.”

“Maybe you should ask her what she wants.”

“Maybe the adults should make decisions for the children. What are you going to do, Skelly? Marry her? Give her a career, a home, and children? You’re old enough to be her grandfather, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe you’re taking this paternalism stuff too seriously, chief. Let’s drop the subject, okay? And let me say that if you were getting some nookie yourself, you might not be so concerned about the nookie other people are getting.”

“It’s not about sex,” said Marder. “It’s about someone’s life. I’m sending her to Defe.”

They had a staring contest then, which Skelly broke off first, laughing. “Look, Marder, here’s the way it is. This is a war and I’m the war lord, so I get any girl I want, for as long as I want, and Lourdes is the girl I want. It’s real simple. After the war, assuming we win, then we can talk about
arrangements
. Meanwhile, I got to go check the perimeter.”

He walked off, leaving Marder struggling to control his rage, which was made worse because he did not understand its source. He hadn’t been this furious in years at anyone but himself.

“What was
that
about?”

He spun around and there was Pepa. “Nothing,” he replied. “A small glitch.”

“It wasn’t nothing,” she said. “You should’ve seen your face; you looked like you wanted to shoot him.”

He gave her a sour look. “You never stop being a reporter for one second, do you?”

“Not with you I don’t. You’re a big bag full of secrets and lies, and I hope that if I keep poking you, some of them will leak out.”

“I’ve been nothing but frank with you.”

“Really. So tell me frankly what was that argument about.”

“Off the record?”

“If you like.”

He told her what the argument was about.

“What are you going to do?”

He looked at her avid face and the solution popped into his mind. “I’m going to get her out of here, and you’re going to help.”

“Oh, no, Señor. I was happy to help once, but I am not going to involve myself in any—”

“Yes, you will. I can tell you’re one of those new journalists who want to be involved in the story. No mere objectivity for Josefina Espinoza, oh, no—”

“—abductions from the seraglio. And, besides, why do you need me? Just pop the kid into a car and—”

“No, it has to be you. If I try to get her to go, she’ll run to Skelly and the two of them will be singing a
corrido
duet, with me as the villain. This is a Mexican romance, and the boyfriend can’t know that the girlfriend is leaving town. No, she’ll listen to you; she worships the ground beneath your Jimmy Choos. You tell her she has to go to Chilangolandia like I arranged and she’ll go. Now, we’ll need a car that can pass safely through the streets—”

“You’re not listening. I’m not going to do it.”

“Fine. Then you can leave my property. I’ll have to call around and see if there are any other reporters who want the biggest story of the decade. In fact, now that I think about it, I would rather have a man do it. It’s going to get pretty rough here over the next couple of days, and I’m not entirely sure you’d be up to it. So … it was nice knowing you, Señora Espinoza. I’ll look for you on the decapitation beat.”

He turned and walked away from her, back down the village street toward his house. He heard a shrieking, as from tropical birds or small children, and a mass of the latter ran past him toward a patch of beaten earth the community used for a playground. All of them wore skeleton masks on their faces, and their grubby fists clutched stick-mounted sugar skulls. At the back of the mob was an adult, also in a skull mask but with a body that was anything but skeletal and was instantly identifiable as that of the troublesome Lourdes.

He hailed her, and she tilted her skull back and gave him the Smile.

“Lourdes,” he said, extending his hand to her. “I’m so glad I ran into you. I was just talking about you with Pepa. She has some exciting news for you.”

Marder turned and called, “Pepa!” and made a fetching gesture with his hand. Espinoza was standing in the middle of the road, her head forward, her mouth unattractively agape, looking much like the bull after the matador has finished his bamboozling capework.

After a moment, Pepa arranged a TV smile on her face, came forward, and embraced the girl, but not before snarling
“Chingaquedito!”
in his ear as she passed.

Marder walked away from them both with a last friendly wave. Indeed he was a
chingaquedito
, Mexican slang for a sneaky, manipulative, sandbagging son of a bitch. His wife had introduced him to that word early in their relationship when he departed even a bit from the openhearted honesty she practiced herself and demanded of him. “If I wanted a macho, two-faced, lying dog,” she often told him, “I would’ve married a Mexican.”

The children had recalled him to the calendar. It was nearly the end of October, and the Day of the Dead was upon them. Of course that was what the cooking was for, not a tactical kitchen for a war but preparation for the fiesta. They would eat and drink and have music and dancing, and all the grave Mexican faces would split, revealing the antic trickster spirit they all kept carefully hidden. There would be fights and love affairs and drunken insults. Marder would be particularly insulted then, being the
patrón
, and he would not mind, because he would be dead drunk too. And after that, they all would string wreaths of marigolds and make altars to their dead, with sugar skulls and
pan de muerto
iced white as bones and molded in the shapes of bones. The first day of the fiesta would be for the little angels, the dead children, and the next day would be for the other dead; the families would travel to the cemeteries and have picnics at the gravesides of their defunct kin and prepare
ofrendas
, so the dead could eat too when they returned to earth, according to the will of Mictecacihuatl, the Queen of Death and of the land beyond death.

The preparation had passed without Marder paying it much attention, although he was more than familiar with preparations for Día de los Muertos and with the difficulty of getting just the right kinds of marigolds in New York, not that such was the chief difficulty at chez Marder in those years. No, it was that the señora could not, in fact, visit the graves of her ancestors along with her family and so had to content herself with drinking and insulting Marder. El Día was not Marder’s favorite festival as a result, and he must have suppressed the many signs that it was upon them—the stink of marigolds in piles, for example, coming from the doorways he passed, the scent of baking. Of course, one could buy
pan de muerto
in the shops now, but many believed the dead were not fooled.

Marder’s dead was in a jar in his bedroom. As he thought about this and about why he had banished this particular season from his mind, he experienced one of those little miracles of coincidence that occur in all lives. He was thinking that he had to talk to the priest, and there the man was, walking down the street, chatting, hand in hand with two kids in skeleton gear. Marder wanted a long talk with the priest but not here in the middle of the street. He explained his problem, though, and Father Santana was helpful as always.

“You’re worried about being stopped and abducted,” the priest said. “But I don’t think there’s much of a chance of that. In the first place, we’ll be traveling in my car. Everyone knows my old VW and it passes pretty freely, even when things are as bad as they are now. Though they live lives of depravity and murder, they all want the sacraments when they’re dying. Besides that, it’s the Day of the Dead. Banks and businesses close down, and so does the narco war. You know, even
los otros
have their dead to visit, and no one wants to get on the wrong side of Mictecacihuatl.”

“That’s good, then. I assume I’ll see you at the fiesta here.”

“Well, no, actually, which is why I’m here now. I’ll be at my own church and the celebration in the town. Señor Cuello always throws a big party, and I’m expected to sit with the notables and give countenance.”

“That’s not very good company for a priest, is it?”

“Yes, everyone says that, but sitting down with thieves, murderers, and torturers is exactly the sort of company a priest should keep, if he wants to imitate Christ. Which I try to do. Our Lord, you know, never turned down a nice meal.”

“Your imitation doesn’t go as far as seeking crucifixion, I suppose.”

The priest laughed. “Oh, that too, if necessary, but let this cup pass and so on. Cuello is curious about you, by the way. He was pumping me for information the last time we met.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That you were an American retiree with philanthropic ambitions.”

“And did he believe you?”

“Of course not. At first he thought you were an agent of some other cartel. Now he thinks you’re an agent of
El Norte
.”

“And who do
you
say I am, Father?”

Father Santana laughed again. “Very good. I say you are a soul in trouble, like most of those I meet.” He held out his hand. “Let us say ten o’clock, the day after tomorrow, in front of the house here. I’ll probably be late, but you won’t mind that, given the Day.”

17

“You look like death warmed over,” said Marder to his daughter.

“Thank you. It was a communal effort.”

“I bet. Where did you get that dress?”

“This old thing?” She flounced and twirled it. It was yellow, made of satin, ankle length, with a low ruffled top that bared her shoulders and elevated her small breasts. “I don’t know—Rosita and the ladies had a trove of them. They did my makeup too.”

“I like it. You seem happy to be deceased.”

All of Statch’s exposed skin had been painted matte black, upon which had been skillfully drawn the shapes of the underlying bones, in white. Her face had been painted to look like a skull; her short red hair had been center-parted and slicked down with gel, and she wore a kind of tiara made of colored ribbons from which depended a long yellow wig. She was impersonating La Calavera Catrina, the upper-class lady who is a feature of every Día de los Muertos.

“I
am
happy. This is the first Halloween party I’ve been to since I was eleven that I didn’t go as the you-know-what. I used to get so tired of carrying around that book and flashlight. The walking dead is much more restful. How’re you doing? I notice you’re not dancing.”

Marder indicated the bottle of old brown tequila in front of him. “No, I’m working on my drunk. I fear it would impair my dignity were I to fall on my face, even though this is an occasion for the
hidalgos
to make asses of themselves and for the people to have a good laugh at my expense.”

“You should dance with La Espinoza, though.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, she’s been looking at you with hot eyes all evening.”

Marder spontaneously cast his gaze around the terrace but found no hot eyes. He did see Lourdes, also dressed as La Caterina but in red satin, filling out the dress more lusciously than his own girl, and dancing with Skelly, who was wearing a silk-screened skeleton shirt and a skull mask. Skelly was a good dancer; they were both good dancers. It was a pleasure for all the people to watch them—the most fearsome man and the most beautiful girl. It was like a
corrido
being written before their eyes; all that remained was the tragic ending they knew had to come. Marder, who had arranged the tragic ending himself, wondered whether Pepa Espinoza had made her move and whether it had worked, and whether, having made the decision to leave, the girl Lourdes had enough brass and self-command to keep it from her aging desperado.