Ask for Me Tomorrow

Eleven

Twenty-four hours later Aragon was still waiting in his hotel room to hear from Harry Jenkins. It was after eleven when the phone finally rang.

“It’s me, laddie.”

“Where are you?”

“Never mind about that. Listen, I said you were going to bring me luck, and by God, you did. I met this pigeon. He came down to Mexico to scout around for investment opportunities and I happen to have one for him. Me.”

“I’ve already invested in you, fifty bucks, two hundred more coming. I’m expecting a report.”

“All in good time. This other matter is more urgent. The pigeon’s due to leave town pretty soon and I’m trying to nail him down.”

“What are you nailing him to?”

“The chicken tortilla business. He thinks it’s a winner.”

“How many drinks has he had?”

“That’s not a nice implication,” Jenkins said reproachfully. “But I won’t hold a grudge. Maybe you got something against chickens, maybe you just lack financial vision.”

“Did you find Tula?”

“I’m on her heels. By tomorrow night I’ll be able to take you straight to her.”

“Why not tonight?”

“I told you, tonight I’m involved in a new business venture.”

“Where are you?”

“Now, why do you want to know that?”

“Because wherever it is, I’m coming. I want to protect my investment.”

“Oh hell, laddie, don’t do that. You’ll blow it for me. This may be my chance of a lifetime. He’s fat and juicy and ready for plucking.”

“Let’s get back to Tula.”

“Sure, sure, whatever you say. Only I’m in kind of a hurry.”

“I think you’re bulling me,” Aragon said. “You already know where the girl is, don’t you?”

“Even if I told you, you couldn’t find her. It’s not like she has an ordinary job with a real address and maybe even a telephone. Looking for customers while dodging the police, that takes moving around, see?”

“Where are you, Jenkins?”

“I asked you not to press me, laddie,” Jenkins said and hung up.

Aragon put the phone back on the hook. It was late and he was tired. He would have liked to go to bed and forget about Jenkins for the night, but the conversation had made him uneasy on two counts. The first was the possibility that if Jenkins plucked enough feathers out of his new pigeon, he wouldn’t wait around town for Gilly’s extra two hundred. He’d be in Mexicali by morning.

The second possibility was in a sense more disturbing. Rich, drunk, gullible tourists were not uncommon in Rio Seco, but the fact that Jenkins found one so quickly and easily was suspicious. Nobody was easier to con than a con man, and Jenkins would be easier than most. He seemed to have the same kind of basic innocence he’d criticized in B. J. If B. J. believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, Jenkins believed in rainbows with pots of gold. The only thing that would protect him from being taken was that he had nothing much to take, only the fifty dollars he’d received in advance for locating Tula.

Aragon was almost certain that Jenkins had found out where the girl lived and that the reason he’d refused to give more information over the phone was his fear of not being paid the extra two hundred. For someone in Jenkins’ position it was a natural enough fear. He’d probably cheated and been cheated hundreds of times. Now that he had something real to sell he would deliver it in person, for cash and in his own time. Meanwhile, some half-soused American tourist was hearing a lot about chicken tortillas.

As he put on his coat and tie Aragon thought back over the conversation. Jenkins had not, in fact, mentioned the word “American,” only a pigeon ready for plucking. The pigeon could be an Eskimo or an Algerian, but the odds were against it. Emilia had named three places as Jenkins’ favorite hangouts because they catered to American tourists, and Jenkins had referred to two of them the previous night, El Alegre and the Domino Club.

Aragon combed his hair and straightened his tie in front of the bureau mirror. “You’re going out on the town, laddie.”

El Alegre was in a new section of town that was already beginning to look old and in another few years would be just another addition to the slums. Right now business was booming. A fleet of taxicabs was double-parked outside the entrance vying with each other for the attention of the hustlers. Jenkins had compared the girls hanging around outside the jail to a flock of starlings. That was how they looked now as they gathered on the sidewalk in front of the club, like starlings getting ready to roost for the night, twittering, fluttering, fidgeting, grumbling.

A teenager wearing a high-rise platinum wig and four-inch cork wedgies attached herself to Aragon’s coat sleeve and spoke to him in English. “Hey, gringo, you and me make fun. What kind of fun? You name it. You tiger, me pussycat, me tiger, you pussycat.”

“I’m here on business.”

“Okey-dokey, we do business.”

“No thank you.”

“No okey-dokey?”

“No okey-dokey.”

“Son a bitch cheapskate.” She returned to the flock, twitching her tail and smoothing her ruffled feathers. She was about fifteen, the age Tula had been when she’d gone to work as a maid in Gilly’s house.

Aragon looked over the girl’s companions, wondering if Tula was one of them. No, they were all too young. Tula would be twenty-three by now, young by the standards of an ordinary middle-class American, old for a prostitute in Rio Seco.

“Hey, gringo, lotsa fun. Play games. Hot stuff.”

The Domino Club was on the other side of the bridge crossing the seasonally dry river that gave the city its name. It was October and the rainy season was late starting. The rio was seco after months of drought, just as the wells in the higher sections of the city were drying up and those nearer the sea were turning to salt.

In earlier days a narrow wooden bridge had divided the slums and squatters from the residential areas of the more prosperous merchants and professional men. With the building of the new bridge over the new concrete lining of the riverbed, the two sections of town were becoming indistinguishable. Thousands of cars and pedestrians crossed the steel arch every day. The wealthier citizens resented the intrusion and escaped to the hills and the privacy of iron gates and chain-link fences. Their deserted houses were torn down for apartments or rebuilt into stores or night clubs like the Domino.

Several coats of black paint decorated with white polka dots, a black-and-white marquee topped by a neon sign indicated that the Domino catered to a better class of clientele than El Alegre. A uniformed doorman kept the hustlers on the opposite side of the street, the taxicabs in single file and the cigarette butts swept into the gutter. Otherwise things were much the same, including the fact that Harry Jenkins wasn’t in sight.

Aragon was on the point of leaving when he noticed a small man in a blue suit slumped over the table in the end booth. He thought of Emilia at the jail talking about Jenkins: He’s not a drunk, liquor’s not one of his weaknesses.

Tonight was the exception. Jenkins reeked of whiskey as though he’d spilled it all over himself. His head lay sideways on the table at an awkward angle looking detached from the rest of his body. Though his eyes were open, they were as unfocused and unblinking as a dead man’s. One of his hands was curled around an empty bottle of beer.

“Jenkins? Hey, are you all right?”

Jenkins’ mouth moved in response to his name, but the only thing to come out of it were some bubbles of saliva that slid down his chin. Aragon took out his handkerchief and attempted to wipe off the saliva. Jenkins’ whole face, his hair, his shirt and tie, even the shoulders of his suit coat were soaking wet. Instead of merely spilling some whiskey on himself, he seemed to have been the target of a whole glass of it, as though someone had thrown it at him in a rage.

“Jenkins, can you hear me?”

He moaned.

“What happened to you? Are you sick?”

One of the bartenders came over, a young man with a moist red face like underdone beef. He spoke English with a New York accent. “This a friend of yours?”

“I know him.”

“That’s good enough. Get him out of here. I don’t want him puking up the place.”

“I think he’s sick.”

“I don’t care why he’s doing it, just let him do it some other place.”

“Help me lift him and I’ll put him in a cab.”

“I got a hernia.”

“How can you have a hernia when you’re all heart?”

“Just lucky, I guess. Use the back door.”

Aragon managed to get his hands under Jenkins’ armpits and pull him to his feet. “Come on, Jenkins, wake up. Wake up and see the birdie.”

“Chicken birdie?”

“Chicken birdie it is. Can you walk?”

“I can fly.”

“Good. Let’s fly home to roost.”

Jenkins’ eyes were coming back into focus. The pupils were so dilated that only a tiny rim of iris was left around them. He stood up, holding on to the table for support. “Who — are you?”

“I’m laddie. Remember?”

“Oh, I feel funny, laddie — help me, help.”

“You’ll be all right. Come along.”

They walked arm in arm with a kind of awkward dignity out the back door and into a dimly lit area that had once been somebody’s walled garden. A water-boy fountain, the pitcher on his shoulder long since dry, stood in the middle of dusty dying weeds. The only living relic of the garden was a half-naked tamarisk tree.

Aragon put the sick man down on the concrete bench that circled the fountain. Jenkins’ forehead was hot and the pulse in his throat very rapid and irregular.

“Listen now, Jenkins. Wait here and I’ll go line up a taxi and come back for you. Have you got that? I’m coming back for you, so wait here. Do you understand me?”

It was apparent even in the dim light that Jenkins was incapable of understanding. His eyes had glazed over, vomit was bubbling down both sides of his mouth, and he was alternately chewing and spitting out chunks of sentences. His symptoms didn’t fit those of an ordinary drunk. He’d had a few moments of lucidity when his speech was clear and unslurred, and he recognized Aragon as a friend. Now he seemed to have slipped once again into a state of delirium.

“Big bird, fly me golden... help B. J., he’s sick... must go home... takeout and delivery... fry me to the moon, Emilia... bad bird boy... where are you, laddie? Get me a drink. Water. Water.”

“I’m right here. I’m going away for a few minutes, then I’m coming back to take you home. Are you listening, Jenkins? You stay where you are. Don’t move. I’m going for help.”

“Where’s laddie? Water. Drink.”

Jenkins reached out and clutched the marble water boy with both hands. Aragon left him like that, hanging on to the statue as if it were still pouring out the stuff of life.

Aragon returned through the bar to the front of the building. He gave one of the taxi drivers waiting at the curb five dollars to come and help him with Jenkins. The two men were just starting toward the club when Jenkins himself came staggering out through the front door, his head lowered as if he were about to charge some unseen unknown enemy.

Aragon shouted at him, “Jenkins, wait for me. Hey, hold it!”

Jenkins turned and began running toward the bridge, dodging between pedestrians and around passing cars. He was small and agile, and whatever illness he was suffering from hadn’t affected his speed. By the time he reached the bridge he was ahead of Aragon by a hundred yards or more. He started to cross the bridge, his arms flapping like the clipped wings of a chicken. Then, about a third of the way across, he suddenly stopped and clutched his stomach as though he was going to be sick again.

He leaned over the railing. People paid no attention to him. They were like travelers on the deck of a ship politely ignoring a fellow passenger who was seasick. Five seconds later he had disappeared into the concrete darkness below the bridge.

A woman screamed. A crowd gathered. People peered down into the darkness to see if anything exciting was going on. It wasn’t. They walked on by.

Aragon stood at the railing. Beads of sweat rolled down his face, as cold and heavy as hailstones. I have a nice feeling about you, laddie. You’re going to bring me luck.

“God Almighty,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, Jenkins, I’m sorry.”

A short fat young man stopped beside him. He wore a striped serape over his work clothes, and his hair was greased back over his head so that it looked like a black plastic cap. He had a wheezy worried voice: “Did you push him?”

“Push him? For Christ’s sake, he was a friend of mine.”

“Then why were you chasing him?”

“I was trying to help him.”

“Why was he running away from you?”

“I don’t know. Now will you please—”

“Pretty soon the police will arrive. Already I hear the sirens.”

Aragon heard them, too.

“They’ll be nasty,” the man said. “They always are when such a serious crime is committed.”

“There was no crime.”

“They arrest everyone in sight, helter-skelter. They have to act fast because corpses are usually buried the next day... What story will you give them?”

“No story. Just the truth. I was trying to save him, to take him home because he was sick.”

“It didn’t look that way to me. You were chasing him and he was trying to escape from you. The police don’t like it when Americans come here to murder each other. It gives our country a bad reputation.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“And if the Americans also swear and blaspheme—”

“Okay, okay. How much?”

“Twenty dollars seems a small price to stay out of our jail. We have a very poor jail.”

Aragon gave him a twenty-dollar bill and the man disappeared into the crowd as quickly as Jenkins had disappeared into the darkness below the bridge.

The sirens were getting closer. He started walking as fast as he could back toward the Domino Club. His legs felt rubbery and the sweat was still pouring down his face.