Cinnamon Skin

The restaurant smelled of good food, but the music was too loud. We were early. It was only seven. Mexicans eat at nine, and the tourists from Stateside soon catch the habit. The man who took us back to the table looked taken aback, astonished at his own bad guessing, and totally pleased when I dropped a hundred-peso note on him out of my beer change. He immediately moved us to a better table, by a window overlooking the lagoon, and snapped his fingers to bring a waiter on the run. He said the broiled fish was fresh and good, as were the tiny shrimp from Campeche. Shrimp cocktail, broiled fish, and a bottle of local white wine.

“Who are we supposed to be?” Meyer asked. “Just tourists?”

“What we are is refugees from the sorry real estate situation in Florida. We took a look at what was moving in Dallas and Houston, and a friend suggested we might make a connection down here, selling time sharing in the condos.”

“What do you know about time sharing, Travis?”

“Only what I learned secondhand from Cody, when he was being Evan Lawrence.

“One of the sales arguments is that when you buy a week or two weeks’ occupancy in a registered condominium, you can subscribe to a centralized computer service and through that service trade places and dates with some other timeshare owner. But essentially, what you do is buy the right to inhabit your one fiftieth or one twenty-fifth share of an apartment for a specific week or two weeks for the rest of your life.”

“Arguments against?”

“In a fifty-apartment building, half sold on two weeks, half on one week, you have thirty-seven hundred and fifty owners. That number of families can seriously damage the facilities available to everyone: pool, courts, beach, all common areas. The original owners, once all the time is sold, move on. It is up to the thirty-seven hundred and fifty owners to find somebody who will take charge of maintenance, rent the empties on due notice, and take care of the two weeks of close-down and refurbishing once a year. People resist any increase in assessments. People mistreat the furnishings and appliances. In theory it sounds attractive. In practice it can be extraordinarily messy.”

“A ripoff?”

“In most cases. If you cannot sell an apartment to one owner for a hundred thousand dollars, you sell it to fifty owners for thirty-five hundred apiece. Can you imagine being the last one in line, before the annual facelifting, and half the families in there ahead of you had small children and puppies?”

“So we will be posing as con men.”

“In a sense, yes. Cynicism will be more convincing than an air of earnest integrity.”

When we were bowed out by the headwaiter, a small, dark, burly Mexican thrust a pamphlet at each of us. It was a single sheet, folded. It invited us to free drinks and snacks from four to six o’clock any day at the Azteca Royale, a brand-new apartment building designed for vacation sharing. Absolutely free, without obligation. On Fridays the freebies would include a ride in a launch around the Nichupte Lagoon. Come to the reception desk outside the public lounge near the model apartment.

“This is what we were talking about,” Meyer said. “And they will know Willy No-Last-Name.”

“If Cody Pittler was not lying, Willy was selling time shares right here in Cancun the first two months of this year.”

Twenty-one

THE AZTECA Royale was under construction farther out along the island chain, out beyond the turnoff to the Hotel Camino Real, almost to the shopping plaza that served the hotel district, and not far from a convention center and a native crafts center.

In the morning we had ridden on out to the end to where a gate and a guard barred the way to the Club Mediterranee, bribed our way past the guard, bought twelve dollars’ worth of beads, and sat at an outdoor bar with a good view of the pool, drinking a brace of rum punches while we admired the pleasantly tanned mammary equipment of the younger lady guests. The bartender took three onedollar beads for each drink so two apiece was all our beads would buy. Bright sun, dark shade, ample drinks, and firm bobbing boobs splashing around in the blue water tended to stimulate erotic imaginings. This was what vacations are for.

After a light lunch and a nap back at Dos Playos, we were ready for the sales pitch. The public lounge with the model apartment beyond it was at the right, or east, side of the structure that was going up. It had little brown men crawling all over the reinforced concrete beams of the basic framework, hauling up buckets of this and that on frayed ropes, their muscular brown backs clenching and shining in the afternoon sunlight.

It was five after four. A handsome young man in an elegant linen suit sprang up from behind the reception desk, hand outstretched, smile wide. “Welcome!” he said. “Welcome! We have marvelous things to show you, gentlemen.”

“Bet you do,” I said.

He handed us each a batch of pamphlets and directed us into the lounge. It was large. There were little conversational islands of chairs placed on rugs at random around the large tiled floor. A maid in uniform, her eyes half closed, stood leaning against the wall behind an improvised bar, a long table covered with sheeting. Two more elegant men and two handsome young women were talking together. They all turned to stare at us, and after a murmured discussion, the taller and better looking of the two women came striding toward us, turning to pop her fingers at the maid and jolt her out of her trance.

“Welcome!” she said. “Welcome, gentlemans. Welcome to the luffly Azteca Royale!” She wore a white blouse with a little black string tie, and dark red slacks closely fitted. She had a fine walk and lots of eyelashes.

“What would you like for drinking, please?”

I had a small dull headache from the rum, and asked for a beer. She turned and said some machine-gun Spanish across the room to the maid, who delved into an ice chest and came on the run with two opened bottles of Carta Blanca and two frosty mugs. The girl asked our names and told us hers was Adela and looked down and pointed to her badge, which did indeed say Adela thereon. She guided us over to one of the little chair groups, and the maid put the beers, coasters, and paper napkins on the table. Adela said she was sorry she could not join us in a beer, but she would have a Fresca, and her steely look at the maid sent her scampering off to get it.

“So!” said Adela. “What do you say? Here is looking on you?”

“Looking on you,” said Meyer, and we sipped. “What a wonderful opportunity this is for you mens! Now we are having the preconstruction pricing. And we can offer some of the best times in the year. The Christmas and the New Year’s is gone already. But there is a nice week from the middle end of January, or two weeks if you like that. Do you like that, Mr. Mickey?”

“McGee. Miss Adela, I think maybe we are here under false pretenses.”

She looked blank. “What is this pretenses?”

“My partner here, Mr. Meyer, and I, we thought we might come down here and sell some of this time sharing to the tourists for you.”

She stared at us and then shook her head slowly from side to side. “Oh, no! This is a most bad season for selling. More people selling than buying. You have no papers to work here?”

“No, we don’t.”

“It is very hard to get them. Very long time. You have to have a… how you say, abogado?”

“Lawyer,” Meyer said.

“Yes, and is much, how you say, bite for you to get papers.” She rubbed her thumb and two fingers together in the time-honored gesture which means bribery.

I smiled at her. “Now suppose I went right out and sold three weeks for you and came back with the people and you signed them up. Wouldn’t you give me a little gift?”

She chewed at her underlip. “But I could cheat you, no?”

“A nice woman like you wouldn’t cheat us.”

“I am not the jefe here. I couldn’t say. You have experience?”

“Mucho!” I said. “Millions. But maybe we ought to get in touch with a fellow I know down here who’s in this line of work. Willy. I can’t remember his last name.”

“Willy?”

“Another friend named Evan Lawrence was working with him, and Evan didn’t have any papers either.”

“Oh, what you mean is Weelliam Doyle, from Yooston.”

“That’s who I mean.”

“Oh, he is gone a long time, that one. Many weeks: Too damn bad. My fren‘ thinks he comes back. I don’t think so. She’s a very high-class lady even if she’s Indio. She’s still living in his place, waiting for Weelliam.”

“Would she know where Evan Lawrence is?”

“Who can say? I do not see him any more either.”

“Where can I find this woman? What’s her name?”

“Barbara. Barbara Castillo. The place, it is down that way, toward the land. You will see it on the right hand. La Vista del Caribe. Apartments. His is ground floor on the front, no view. Ring the bell on Doyle.” She looked at her watch. “But Barbara is not coming there yet from work. She is running a reservation computer at Hotel Camino Real every day. And waiting. Maybe after six, a little bit after.”

“Thanks. Sorry we weren’t in the market to buy.”

She gave a shrug, made a funny little gesture with her hand. “So if it looked like you could buy, the other girl would be here, no? She is working longer than me.”

We got to La Vista del Caribe shortly after six. It was already almost dark. I would never, by choice, live just over a time line, on the west side of the line. All year long, your days are too short.

There was no one at the desk. Little kids were racing up and down the corridors. We looked around the ground floor until we found the right place: number 103. He had cut down an engraved calling card to fit the name slot. William Devlin Doyle, Jr.

The bell was underneath the name slot. I pushed it three times without result. As we were discussing what to do next, the door suddenly opened. She was tall and slender. She wore a robe and held it closed around her with her left hand. Her smile of greeting disappeared abruptly. She wore a black shower cap. There were droplets of water on her face.

“I was… who are you?”

“We’re from Houston, Miss Castillo. We’re looking for Willy. My name is McGee and this is Meyer.”

I was trying to look my ingratiating, foot-scuffing, awshucks best as she looked us over. “Come in, then. Please.” She led us into the living room. It was a small room, the furniture spare and gleaming, two unusual primitive paintings on the white wall, a bookshelf with books, small pieces of sculpture, two masks.

“Please be seated. I will be with you in a few moments.” She went down a short corridor off to the right. Ahead I could see through a pass-through arch into a white shiny kitchen.

I slowly let my breath out and said to Meyer, “Is that the most unusually beautiful woman you have ever seen?”

“Very unusual,” he said.

When she finally came back out, I hopped up. She wore a long toga affair in a crude rough weave, in an oatmeal color, sleeveless, tied at the waist with a thick gold cord. She wore gold sandals. Her gleaming black hair was brushed long. She had a suggestion of a look I had seen on drawings of old Mayan carvings, the slant of forehead, imperial nose, firm lips, the very slightly recessive chin, the neck as long as the ancient Egyptians‘. Her eyes were a large almond slant, the color of oiled anthracite. Her hair was long, coarse, black, and lustrous.

“Please be seated, Mr. McGee. May I get you gentlemen a drink?”

I said a beer would be fine if she had one. I didn’t really want it. I just wanted to watch her move around. She seemed to glide. It was the color and texture of her skin that was so unusual, and so complimentary to the rest of her, to her features, her slenderness, her polite dignity. It was a flat dusky tan, all the same even shade, not a suntan but a natural tone, without flaw, with the look of silk.

She brought the beer to us in mugs, on a tray. She said she was having her third glass of iced tea. The air conditioning had broken in the offices of the Camino Real, and she was dehydrated. All she could think of, riding the bus home, was a long cool shower.

“You are from Canada?” Meyer asked.

She smiled at him. “You are very good with accents, I think. I was educated in Canada, Mr. Meyer. But I was born in a little village to the south of here called Noh-Bec. It’s a Mayan village.”

“So you are Mayan?” Meyer said.

“I suppose. If there are any true Mayans left. The Mayans were a quiet peace-loving people. Long ago the Toltecs, war-like Indians, came over from Mexico and conquered the Mayans and interbred with them. I would suppose there would be some Spanish blood as well. That is the rumor in my family.”

“It’s a long way from Noh-Bec to Canada,” Meyer said.

She smiled again. “A leading comment? Why not. My father and mother went down to Chetumal when I was three. They worked in the home of a man named McKenzie. The McKenzie daughter and I became inseparable. We were the same age. When we were eight years old, with my father’s permission, Mr. McKenzie sent the two of us up to Toronto to live with his aunt and go to school there. Eliza McKenzie is still my best friend. She’s married and lives in Toronto and has two children.”

“I lectured in Toronto in June,” Meyer said, ignoring my glance of warning.

“How nice. Is it still beautiful?”

“Very.”

“What did you lecture on?”

“Economics, to economists. Dry stuff.”

She stared down into her glass for a moment and then lifted her head to stare directly at me. The impact of that look was astonishing.

“I do not know where William is. I do not know where he has gone or why he went.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Neither do I. I don’t know what to think. His clothing is here. His papers and credit cards. We were happy here together. We were talking about marriage. We quarreled, of course. I think everyone does. I thought he was wasting his abilities on these time-share projects. It is not really completely honest work. One has to promise more than can be delivered, and then try not to come upon the angry buyers later on. He is really a charming man, and quite intelligent, and with a lot of energy. But he was making a lot of money. He said that when he had enough, we would go back to Houston and he would go into another kind of work. But when I asked him how much was enough, he could not name a figure.”

“Where is the money?”

“In the Banco Peninsular. All of it. Earning big interest in a peso account. He was buying peso C.D.s, and he told me he would cash in before the next devaluation. Then we would leave.” Her eyes filled. “I am so terribly worried,” she said. “I saw him last on the sixth day of July, almost one month ago. It was a day like any other. I go to work first. When I came to the kitchen, he was in here talking on the telephone. I asked what it was and he said he had to go see someone, so on that day he left exactly when I did, and he drove me to the Camino Real. He kissed me good-by and said we would have some fish for dinner. Our car is a gray Volkswagen. I have not seen that either. They say he tired of me and drove back to your country. I can tell you that is a lie. I am so terribly worried.”

“Do you remember a man who worked with him called Evan Lawrence?”

“Of course. Why?”

“How long did he work with him?” I asked.

She frowned. “From Christmas last year. Maybe three months, maybe less. I told William it was against the law to have somebody working for you, a foreigner without papers. He said to me, ‘Who will find out? Will you tell them? Will Evan? Will I? He is a very good salesman. He has made us a lot of money. He is very good selling to the rich widows, promising them nobody can ever be lonely in Cancun.’ I just hoped he would go away, and he did. He met a woman, not very pretty, working for Pemex looking for oil, and he followed her back to Texas. I was glad.”

She frowned, pausing for a moment. “Nora? A name like that.”

“Norma,” I said.

“He must have followed her back and married her, because the newspapers from Florida said that he and his wife and another person had died in a boating accident, an explosion, in Florida. Perhaps they were on their wedding trip. Everyone here who had worked with him selling the time sharing was talking about it.”

She looked at me with doubt and speculation. “How did you know her name? What do you really want?” She straightened in her chair and looked sternly at me and then at Meyer. “You will please tell, me what my William, your great friend, looks like. Every detail, please.”

I smiled. “A nice man. Tall. Well built.”

“Yes?”

“Dark hair.”

She stood up quickly. “Dark hair? Dark hair? He has hair so red that the people here call him El Rojo, the red one. And his face and arms and shoulders are entirely freckled. So tell me why you are here or get out at once.”

“We mean you no harm, Barbara,” Meyer said. “Please believe us. We need your help. And maybe you need ours.”

“I do not want soft soothing talk, Mr. Meyer.”

“Norma was my niece. She died as you say, in that explosion on July fifth. The boat had a bomb aboard. Norma was a successful woman. She had quite a lot of money she had saved. It is all missing. Everyone was supposed to think that Evan Lawrence died when Norma did. But he didn’t. He wasn’t aboard. That’s why we’re here.”

Her face was expressive. I could almost track the patterns of her mind from the changing expressions.

“But he seemed so very nice!” she said. “He made us all laugh.”

Meyer said, “I don’t want to be brutal, Barbara. I don’t want to add to your pain. But it now looks as though William Doyle was the only person in Cancun who knew that Evan Lawrence lives down here, under another name and identity. I don’t think the man you knew as Evan Lawrence could take that kind of risk. I think he did what he had to do, to protect his identity. That’s who the phone call was from. That’s where he went.”

Her lovely face twisted and then went vacant. She was standing. She put her hands forward, as though to brace herself, and then began to crumple. I reached her in two strides before she fell, picked her up, and took her to the couch, surprised at the warm sturdy heft of her under the coarse fabric.

Meyer appeared at my elbow, with a cloth soaked in cold water. He placed its folded length across her forehead. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Maybe it was a wild guess, not true.”

She opened her eyes. “I’ve known he is dead. I’ve known it since three o’clock that day. I was working. And suddenly there was an emptiness in my chest, as if the strings that hold my heart had been sliced through, and it sagged to a lower place. I was going to tell William about that strange feeling. I know that was when he died, and I know he died thinking of me, trying to tell me. I could not admit it to myself. Suddenly you made me able to admit it. Don’t be sorry. I couldn’t live in limbo forever. He left everything behind.”

I moved away. Meyer eased himself down to sit on the floor beside the couch. He held her hand. “The dead have to leave everything and everybody behind. For some, it is the right time. For others…”

“How could that shallow smiling man be so wicked?”

“He has been able to get away with being wicked because he does not look or act wicked. He has the gift of friendship. He inspires trust. My niece loved him and married him.”

She tried to sit up and he touched her shoulder, urging her back. “Please,” she said. “What is his other identity here? You said he is someone else here.”

“We can get into that later.”

“Could you please get the box of tissues in the kitchen?” I went out and got it and brought it to her. She blew her nose and she wiped her eyes, and she tried to smile. “Sometimes we laughed about what my babies would look like. Dark little Yndios with red hair. I said we should hurry with them. I am twenty-seven. William was thirty-two. He had been married once. I had not.”

She pushed Meyer’s hand aside and sat up, swung her feet to the floor.

“So! I am not a weak person. I come from people who have survived everything. And I come from people who know violence. That is the Toltec heritage, not the Mayan. And I am not going to mourn my man in front of strangers.”

“Who would like to be friends,” Meyer said.

She studied him. “Very American. Instant friends. Like your instant foods. Heat and serve. The heart does not move so fast. You walk in here and destroy me. In the name of friendship?”

“But we only-”

“Do you have a car?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I will not work tomorrow. In the name of this new friendship could you pick me up very very early? There’s a place I want to be when the sun rises. We’ll have to walk a distance in the dark. Perhaps at quarter to four? I will bring a good flashlight. And insect repellent. Wear shoes for walking, please. I’m not asking too much?”

Meyer beamed at her. “Not too much to ask of old friends.”

Twenty-two

WHEN I pulled up to the entrance to La Vista del Caribe, Barbara was silhouetted against the dim interior lights. She came striding quickly to our pink automobile. Meyer had moved into the back. She slid in beside me and said, “I’m very grateful for this. I should never have asked.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s okay. Where are we going?”

“Toward the airport, but don’t turn off there. We go straight for many miles.”

She had brought cups, a thermos of coffee, a dozen doughnuts. The road was straight. It was almost eerily straight under the overcast night. It had no shoulders. The jungle grew right to the edge of the pavement. She sat quietly beside me, half turned to lean against the door, blue-jeaned legs turned and pulled up, sharply bent knees angled toward me.

“If we could go a little bit faster?” she said at one point. This was after a big bus came booming up behind me, doing at least eighty on the two-lane road, and nearly blew me away when it went by.

She identified the turnoffs as we passed them. There were not many of them. “Puerto Morelos, for the truck ferry to Cozumel.” And San Carlos, Punta Bete, Playa del Carmen, Xcaret, Pamul, Akumal, Xelha, Tulum. Finally, not far past Tulum, where she said there were Mayan ruins on the seashore, she told me to slow down and pointed out the right turn. More straight two-lane road. But the vines and bushes leaned so far out over the concrete, I drove down the middle. An animal scuttled out of the way. It seemed to be tan and had an awkward waddling gait.

“Coatimundi,” she said. “There are small villages here near the road. All dark at night. The children catch the coatimundi pups and make pets of them. But when they are grown they get angry quickly and bite.”

“Where are we going?” Meyer asked.

“Now it is only perhaps ten miles. It is called Coba. Great ruins, partially excavated.”

We arrived at a large parking area. There was a shack where one was supposed to buy admission tickets. I locked the car and we followed her and the beam of the flashlight directed on the ground.

A man came wandering out of a dark structure behind the shack.

“iSenora, senora, cerrado!” he cried.

She put the light on him. As he stood blinking, bare to the waist, she said a single long sentence in a language unlike any I had ever heard before. It was full of snappings and pops and little coughs. He bowed and backed away and she began walking again, so swiffly I had to take a couple of running steps to catch up with her.

“Watch where you step,” she said. “It is uneven here. There are pebbles and stones.”

I would estimate we went two miles on a dark track wide enough in places for a car, through the jungle, through the keening, shrilling of a billion bugs, the caws of night birds, a thick stillness of the air. Toward the end she was almost running.

When she stopped abruptly, I stopped in time but Meyer ran into her and backed off apologizing. She ignored the apology. She gave me the flashlight. “Here I am going up that pyramid. I will not need the light. Please don’t turn the light on me while I climb it. It will spoil my night vision. Please wait here. When it is time, I will call for you to come up.

I turned the light off. She went off into darkness. In a few minutes I could see that she had gone‘ toward a huge bulk that loomed up out of the jungle, bigger than any cathedral. As my eyes became used to starlight, I saw how it projected up and up, blotting out a big segment of the starry sky, and I could make out the paleness of her white long-sleeved shirt, a tiny object a third of the way up, moving steadily. Meyer was still panting from the fast twomile walk. We had, all three, forgotten the bug repellent. So we stood in the darkness, waved our arms, slapped our necks and foreheads. I broke some small leafy branches off a bush. When we whisked those around, it lessened the problem.

A rooster crowed nearby, and when I looked toward the summit of the pyramid, it was now outlined against gray instead of against a blackness with stars. It was not much later when I realized I could see the tree trunks and see Meyer’s face. Looking at the summit, I thought I could see her up there, sitting on a flat place at the very top, her back toward us.

Morning bird sounds began. There was a gray morning light, and then a rosiness beyond the pyramid as the sun began to come up out of the sea. I could see her clearly then, with a spill of black hair down the back of the white shirt. Sunlight struck her, golden, setting her ablaze. Soon we could see it against the treetops to the left and right of the pyramid.

A small herd of turkeys came strolling out of the brush, gabbling softly among themselves, stopped aghast when they saw us, whirled, and went back to cover swiftly, looking back over their shoulders, telling each other how dangerous we were to turkey life everywhere.

We heard her faint cry and looked up and saw her standing, beckoning to us. My watch said she had been alone up there for a little more than an hour.

“She wants us to climb up there,” I said.

“Up that?” Meyer said.

“Come on. Just don’t look down.”

“Dear God,” he muttered, and came padding along behind me.

When we got to the base of it, we could no longer see her up there. I put the flashlight down and looked at the dimensions of the steps. They were about twenty inches high and only about eight to ten inches deep. So the way to go was almost on all fours, to lean into the slope and use the fingers on the steps for balance. I told Meyer this would be the best way, and I heard him sigh.

Once one was into the rhythm of it, it was not bad. The full heat of the day had not yet arrived. It was a long climb. I tried not to think about going down. I waited near the top until Meyer was on the same level, about six feet to my left. She bent and caught his hand and helped him up the final tall step. I scrambled up. She smiled at us. She encompassed all the world in one sweep of her arm and said, “Look! Just look!”

I did not feel at all comfortable about standing on that small flat top. It was only about four feet by eight feet, and it fell steeply away in all directions. We were so high above the jungle that it looked like a dark green shag rug. The sun was two widths above the horizon. She pointed and said, “See that little silvery glint out there, like a needle beyond the trees? That’s the Caribbean. Over thirty miles from here. Look down that way. See? There is the pink car. It is so glorious up here in the morning!”

To my relief she sat down, legs hanging over the rubbly slope on the side opposite the one we had climbed. We sat on either side of her. She pointed out smaller pyramids that poked out of the trees.

I said, “Is it part of being Maya? I mean, to come here when someone has died?”

“Not really. I don’t know. Maybe they did that. It all ended hundreds of years ago. By the time the Spaniards came, it was already over. Archaeologists make up stories about what it was like in the Mayan cities, trying to read old stelae and glyphs, and other archaeologists translate in some other, way and make furious objections. We do know that the classical period ended five hundred years before the Spanish came. The Maya abandoned their cities and temples, moved away, went off into the jungles. Why? No one knows. They thought it was because the land would no longer produce. But that has been proven false. They dug channels through swamps, piled the muck on the center rows between the channels, grew water lilies, and racked them up onto the long mounds to decay there. It was sophisticated agriculture and very productive. Tikal was the greatest city of all, to the south of where we are, in Guatemala. Perhaps two hundred thousand people lived there. It was a center of commerce on the rivers and the sea. This Coba was one of the strange old cities. Like Chichen, Uxmal, Palenque, Bonampak, Yaxchilan. I have been to the others, but it is only here in this place I feel… part of it. As if it pulls upon my heart. We were a bloody people long ago, even before the Toltec, with rites, ceremonies, processions, blood sacrifices. And we had measurements of time going back eight million years. I was in Canada when my father died. When I was able to come back, I came to this place as soon as I could, and I sat here at dawn and said his Mayan name one hundred times as the sun came up. They gave him the name Pedro Castillo because they could not say his real name.”

When she said it, it sounded like “Pakal.” But the P was more explosive than the P sound in English, and there was a coughing sound to the x. The r, was odd, as if during it she moved her tongue from the back of the roof of her mouth toward the front, giving it the value of “ulla.”

“It was believed that he was descended from priests. Some priests became kings and then became gods. He would have been seen as a tall man anywhere, but he was very tall for a Maya. And my Mayan name is…”

If I’d had to spell it, it would have been Alklashakeh. The vowels were purred, the sibilants rich.

“It is all over,” she said, “and yet it isn’t over. I do not know why I was moved to say his name, and William’s name, one hundred times at dawn from here. But it made me feel better both times, as if they were afloat in death and I had moved them to a safe shore. Do you know that deep in the jungle there are small secret villages where men with guns still guard hidden idols from everyone except the deserving Maya? The holy figures sit there in the dark huts, remembering everything.”

She shrugged off her sadness and asked us to swivel around to face in another direction, toward a small nearby body of water and a cluster of tile-roofed buildings.

“There is the hotel,” she said. “There is a lake in front of it. See? And the old Mayan road went across that lake on a causeway, and it went all the way through the jungle, all the way to Chichen Itza. It was wide enough for a carriage, but they did not have wheels, it is said. If they did not have wheels, then why does one ancient wall at Chichen clearly show the meshing of the cogs of three wheels as in the gears of some machine? If they did not have wheels, how is it so that a giant roller was found here at Coba, weighing tons, and was used to crush and flatten the limestone out of which they built that road? It went off that way, beyond that lake, for fifty miles. It is now all narrow and rough. But it is a trail that goes from here to Chichen and from Chichem to Uxmal. We were not animals. There was a culture here.”

Meyer shook his head. “I’m not ready for all that, Barbara. I am still trying to comprehend the thing I am sitting on here, to comprehend the skill and devotion and determination it took to raise up this gigantic pyramid. I was about to say in the middle of nowhere. For them it was perhaps the middle of the universe.”

She looked questioningly at me. “Was it worth getting up in the middle of the night?”

“It was. It is.”

“You came up the right way. Go down the same way now, backward. Look down between your thighs and around your hips to see the next steps. If any rock step wiggles, take your weight from it at once. Sometimes they fall. People fall with them. Tourists burst their brains on the stone. There is talk about making it forbidden to climb the pyramids. What is life if all risk is taken away? Go down now, if you are ready. There is only one more thing I want to say to myself up here.”

By the time we reached the bottom, with almost simultaneous sighs of relief, Barbara was on her way down, quick-moving, graceful, assured. She turned and jumped down the last few steps, dusted her hands, smiled at us.

She walked toward us in the bright shadow of morning, in a flow of side light, her skin the shade of coffee with cream, or of cinnamon, fine-grained, with a matte finish, flawless and lovely.

We walked back to the car slowly, and she told us what she knew of the place. We took a side trip down a narrow winding path to look at a stele, a huge one, broken into three parts and re-erected, protected by a thatched roof, the carving on it so worn it was almost invisible.

At the ticket shack, she called the man out and walked over to the side with him, talked to him, gave him some money. We got into the car and drove to the hotel we had seen from the top. It was by then seven fifteen and there were six Japanese in the dining room having an exotic breakfast of huevos rancheros. We sat where we could look out at a small garden. She insisted that it would be her treat.

“Now then,” she said, as coffee cups were refilled, “you know the other name this person uses?”

“And a post office box number in Cancun,” Meyer said. “Box seven ten.”

“There is no mail delivery down the highway,” she said. “You rent a box in whatever city you are near. And near can be eighty miles.”

“In any direction?” Meyer asked.

“Only going south… Along the highway toward Merida, for example, you would not go that far before you would get your mail in Valladolid. Tell me. What is his name?”

“Roberto Hoffmann.”

She sat so very still I had the feeling she was not even breathing. Then she slumped. “For one moment I thought there was something I would remember about that name. All I know is that I have heard it. I do not know when or where. But it is a common name. Anyway, there will be no trouble finding him. No trouble at all, if such a person exists.”

“What will make it easy?” Meyer asked.

“The Maya network: Listen, my friends. All up and down this coast and off into the deep jungle, the Maya do the hard work. A lot of Mexicans have come in to work at the hotels, but in some of them, like the Casa Maya, it will be all Maya workers from one village. There is one man who has a big ranch. He has important political jobs. He is like the jefe of all the Maya. He can spread the word that Barbara Castillo wants to know where is this Roberto Hoffmann. If he lives in Quintana Roo, someone will know him. There are lots of strangers now, houses being built, people coming from Venezuela and Honduras and Germany, building houses by the sea. But the Maya do construction, make gardens, roads, string wires. Someone will know. I will leave the word with him on our way back. It is beyond the place I showed you, Akumal, but not far beyond. With a stone wall done in the old way.”

“We have a photograph of him back at the hotel,” I said.

“Good. Because how he looked is not very clear in my memory. He had… a nice ordinary look. Just one more, pleasant person who smiled a great deal and said agreeable things. Are you sure?”

“Almost positive.”

She pursed her lips in thought and then asked, “Why would such a man want to marry that woman, your niece, and then kill her?”

Meyer told her Cody Pittler’s story. She understood at once. “Aha!” she said. “He is killing Coralita over and over and over. He is punishing them and himself for being evil. But that does not include killing my Willy.”

“I would guess that-”

“We will find out,” she said. “We will find out soon.”

On the way back we stopped at the ranch on the west side of the road. She walked from the driveway to the ranch house and was gone for about ten minutes. She came back and said, “He was not there, but I left a note. He will get word to me. I told him it is urgent.”

Twenty-three

THERE was no word from Barbara Castillo the rest of that day, or all day Saturday or Sunday. On Sunday evening when we came back to the hotel at nine, there was a note to come to her apartment.

As she held the door open and we walked in, once again I was aware of the physical impact of her. She had all the presence of one of the great actresses, along with such vitality you could almost feel the electricity. It was like walking under the power lines that march across a countryside. In the field under the lines you can feel the hair lift on the nape of your neck and the backs of your hands.

She wore white shorts and a red blouse, no jewelry at all. She was barefoot. I had noticed before that her hands and feet did not fit with the slenderness of the rest of her. They had a broad, sturdy look of strength and competence.

She clasped her hand around my wrist. Her hand was quite cold and damp. She tugged me toward the couch. I sat beside her, and Meyer sat in the nearest chair.

“I know about him!” she said. “Many many things. I showed Ramуn the photograph you let me take, and it is the same, but with a mustache now, and the hair much darker.”

“Who is Ramуn?”

“Oh, a nice shy little man, very broad and strong, very polite. He is Maya. One of the jefe’s employees drove him in in a truck to tell me about the man he works for, Senor Hoffmann. He has worked for Senor Hoffmann for, he thinks, eight years. He went to work for him shortly after the big house was built, one year or maybe two afterwards. Remember I pointed out the road to Playa del Carmen, where we can go to Cozumel by passenger ferry or small airplane? To find Mr. Hoffmann, you go down almost to the water and turn left, to head back toward this direction. It is a public road and it goes for maybe a mile. At the end of it there is a big iron gate and a warning not to enter. Once you are through the gate, the driveway winds through some gardens and then comes to the house. It is a big house, with a beach in front of it and a lagoon beyond it, with a boathouse and garages and servants’ rooms. Mr. Hoffmann is very rich, Ramуn says. But compared to Ramуn almost anybody would seem rich. I asked what kind of work Mr. Hoffmann does. Ramуn said that he often goes on business trips and stays for a long time. Many months. He is a residente. He has the proper documents. He speaks Spanish as good as any Mexican, and better than most Maya. There are six servants, including Ramуn. He has no woman, this Hoffmann. He does not have friends who visit him. He does not give parties. The only time he leaves his house and grounds is when he goes out in his boat to fish or into the jungle to hunt tigers. Or goes away on a trip. He has a big shortwave radio receiver and a big aerial. He listens to it a lot. Now he has a television set. Of course there is no station he can hear, but when he came back from the United States last year he brought American movies and a machine to play them over his television. Sometimes he lets the servants watch one. Oh, and he has an exercise room, with machines in it.”

“Did you say tigers?” Meyer asked.

“Tigers? Oh, yes. They are big tawny jungle cats. Wildcats or panthers. Do you know that men used to gather chicle in the jungle to make chewing gum? They tapped trees. The men who gathered the chicle were called chicleros. They shot the panthers. Then it became possible to make the juice in a laboratory. No more chicleros. The chicle trails are overgrown. The panthers are returning. They used to say the panther is the second most dangerous creature you can meet in the jungle. The most dangerous, of course, was the chiclero. They were wild rough men. So he fishes and hunts and stays by himself.”

“What about William Doyle?” I asked.

She put her cool hand back on my wrist and tightened her grasp. She looked down and spoke so softly Meyer leaned forward to hear her. “On that day William dropped me off, Ramуn said a man came in a small gray automobile. I showed him a picture of Willy. Ramуn said possibly it was the same man, but he could not tell, they all look so much alike to him. They went out fishing in the boat. Usually a servant named Perez went along when Hoffmann fished, but he did not go that day. When the boat came back, Hoffmann was alone. He said he had let his visitor ashore at the house of a friend, and he would come back for his car later on. And in the morning, the gray car was gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

She lifted her head to look at Meyer. “You were right. William must have known somehow, maybe by accident, that Hoffman and Evan Lawrence were one and the same. It was not healthy to know that. William thought he was a friend.”

“Hoffman seems to have all the conveniences,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Ramуn says they have a good well, which is very unusual in this part of Yucatan. And there are two big generators which came in long ago by ship, and tanks which hold many gallons of diesel fuel. Thousands, Ramуn said. But it is probably hundreds. Also there is a tank and a pump for the gasoline for the car and the boat. With our little car, all he had to do was take it out onto the highway and find a place to run it off the road into the jungle. The village people would soon take everything from it. What was left will rust away very quickly. He could walk back by night, ducking out of sight when traffic came. It is no problem for him. I loved the little car. It was like a fat friendly little dog. It tried hard but it could not run very fast.”

“Does Ramуn understand he is employed by a bad man?”

“He does not want to think that. But it doesn’t matter what he thinks. He will do whatever his people tell him is necessary.”

“The others too?”

“If they are all Maya. And if we ask them, through the jefe.”

“If he goes hunting he has guns there,” I said.

“I forgot. Many many guns. And there are burglar alarms, Ramуn said. No one can approach the house at night, or come in the lagoon in a boat. A loud siren sounds. The children of the servants have set it off by accident, and they have been very frightened.”

“And he is there now,” Meyer said.

“Yes, of course. Ramуn thinks it will be a long time before he goes away on a trip. Perhaps not until next year, not until the spring. Then he will probably leave from Cozumel, Ramуn said. That is where he departs. Once a week Ramуn comes to Cancun to look for mail in the box. Some years there are no letters for Don Roberto. Some years one or two.”

She released my wrist. We sat there with our separate thoughts. We were together, but alone in our minds.

Meyer stood up and paced and came back to stand facing us, looking down. “One aspect of this keeps bothering me,” he said. “And it goes right back to the beginning, back to Coralita. We have no proof of anything that happened that night. All we have is a commonly accepted hypothesis which has never been checked out with anyone who was there at the time.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked him.

“There is a very wise British astronomer, Raymond Lyttleton, who has said that one must regard any hypothesis as though it were a bead which you can slide along a piece of wire. One end of the wire is marked ‘zero,’ for falsehood, and the other end is marked ‘one,’ for truth. One must never let the bead get to the absolute end of the wire, to either end, or it will fall off into irrationality. Move the bead along the wire this way and that, in accordance with inductive and deductive reasoning.”

“Okay, where is your bead, Meyer?”

“One position of the bead is where Cody Pittler got out of bed and got his father’s target pistol and shot Coralita in the back of the skull and waited to ambush his father. Then the struggle and the flight. That presupposes a murderous mind from the beginning, well concealed, awaiting any outlet. Another position adds an additional person to the mix, a young male friend of Cody’s caught servicing the insatiable Coralita. Another position of the bead has the father coming home and getting into bed with Coralita, and having something she says confirm his suspicions about her and his son. So he gets up and dresses and gets the gun and kills her just as Cody comes home. I am saying that the people of Eagle Pass invented the circumstances of the murder which seemed to them to fit the situation. We know neither the truth nor the falsehood.”

She jumped up and faced Meyer. “Why are you talking about all this? What difference does it make to anyone?” Her voice was loud and angry. “Don’t you know what we are going to talk about now? We are going to talk about how to kill him.”

“Barbara,” I said, in what could have been construed as a patronizing tone.

She spun and bent to stare down at me. “Isn’t that what we do? We kill him. We end his life.”

I tried to look into her eyes, but there was no penetration in my stare. It bounced off shiny black polished gemstones.

“Young woman,” Meyer said. “I am not going to be a party to killing that man unless and until I can communicate with him.”

“What about? His movie collection? Which airline he likes?”

“About several hypotheses we have made about him. Before one shoots a fox in a henhouse, it is interesting to find out how many henhouses have been on his nightly route. I have more than an average curiosity about what makes the human animal react as he does. I do not think there have been many people who have adjusted so cleverly and carefully to a life of murder. I want to hear his views about himself.”

She turned and dropped into the couch beside me. “And I do not care what he thinks about himself. Ask a cesspool why it makes bubbles! What I care about is how to kill him in such a way there will be no involvement of the police. None! There are two ways to do that. If he should disappear forever without any trace, it will be thought that perhaps he went on another trip and something happened to him there. If there is a body, then it should clearly be an accident.”

“Going to his house is no good in either case.”

“So,” said Meyer, “it has to be when he goes to fish or to hunt. Or one waits until he travels.”

“I will not wait for travel. I do not like the idea of the sea. It is all too open,” she said.

“So how do we tell when and where he will go hunting?” I asked.

“He will hear of a great cat, a big one. The Maya guides sometimes make pad marks in the mud to play jokes on each other. They do it so well even the most expert are fooled.”

“Where will this cat be?” I asked her.

She frowned, chin on fist, then brightened. “I think it will be near some cenotes. There is a trail off to the right before one gets to Playa Xelha. You cannot see it from the road. It is always marked with bits of red yarn or ribbon tied high to the trees on the other side of the road. It goes in for more than a mile and then it comes to the old Maya trail from Coba to Chichen. One turns right there on the Maya trail and goes perhaps three miles, then one leaves the Maya trail and goes west perhaps a half mile. There are big cenotes there, perhaps three or four. It is a good place for cat. It is wild there. Very thick. Very bad walking.”

“Yes, but what are cenotes?” Meyer asked.

‘I’m sorry, Mr. Meyer,“ she said. ”This peninsula is all limestone, with a very thin coating of soil on top. In the heavy rains there are underground rivers, not very far down, which run to the sea. Long ago in many places the earth and limestone above the rivers collapsed in big potholes, fell into the rivers, and were washed away. What this leaves is a cenote. It is a deep round hole with sheer sides, or undercut sides. It would be usually a hundred or a hundred and fifty meters across and ten to thirty meters deep. In the dry season, there is no water at the bottom, or just a little. Where the river goes through at either side of this deep hole, there is a big cave, usually with a stagnant pool of water in the bottom. Drippings have made stalactites coming down from the roof. There are almost always bats, and bat dirt afloat on the pools. In the heavy rains the rivers swell and water rushes through. Some cenotes have a crumbled side so one can climb down easily and go into the cave if one wishes. Cats go down to drink from those where there are little streams. At Chichen there is a big deep cenote where the guides will tell you they threw virgins. What they threw in there were small children. They would throw one in at nightfall, and if he was still floating and living in the morning, hanging onto a steep side, they would bring him out, and from then on he could predict the weather in the next growing season.“

I saw Meyer swallow. He cleared his throat and said, “Hoffmann would have guides.”

“Yes. And they would know he was going in and not coming back out. They would not even need to be told why. They could go in and prepare the paw marks of a very big cat, then lead him to them and then track the imaginary cat over to the area of the cenotes. One of them is a sacred place. There is an old altar on the side near the cave, too high for water to wash it away.”

“How soon would we do this?” I asked.

“I am not going back to my job until this is over. I have told them I have personal business. There is another girl they can use. She is not as quick as I am, but she will do. Often they hunt the jaguar, or panther, or puma, or wildcat-it has many names-by the light of the full moon. But I think that would be too dangerous. Too many things could go wrong. Sometimes the guides find a place where a big cat holes up in the daytime. Daytime would be best.”

“Have you got it all figured out, Barbara?” Meyer asked.

“All but the end of it. We must go in with the guides the day before. It is very very bad walking. Believe me. We will find the right place and then they will bring him to us. Last night I dreamed he was on the ground and I slipped a knife into his belly. It went in like butter. But I could not pull it out. He was on the ground, smiling up at me, looking sleepy. I braced both feet and used both hands, but the knife would not come out. Then the handle of the knife was a snake and I jumped back and he started laughing and I woke up sweaty.”

“What about weapons?” I asked.

“There will be guns for you two,” she said. “I will tell the guides. We will find out which men Hoffmann has used, and the jefe will talk to them. It will all be arranged. I will leave a message and you can come here ready to go. You must have good strong shoes that come up high, to support your ankles. The trail is all loose rock as big as this.”

She made a circle of thumbs and fingers big as a baseball.

“It will be steaming hot in there. You should wear clothing to absorb moisture, and maybe have a sweatband for your head and a light hat. We will need a great deal of water, so get something to carry water in. We will go in the afternoon and stay through the night. The guides will leave us there, wherever we decide. I will be the cat he has come to kill.”

“Bedrolls?” Meyer asked.

“A light blanket only. Boughs can be cut. Bring a knife.”

“Food?” I asked.

“I will arrange that. The guides will carry it. And a repellent for the insects. Each person should bring his own. And toilet tissue, and any medication you take… You would know what you need for an overnight hike, the same as when you were little boys.”

“Or little soldiers,” I said.

“You were military?” she asked me.

“A long time back.”

She went into a long brooding silence and held up a warning hand when Meyer started to speak. “I think it will be possible to remove his rifle,” she said. “If the guides could take him to a very difficult place where he had to climb up or down, one of them might take his rifle and then just melt off into the brush like magic, the way they can.”

“Won’t that alert him?”

“By that time, it will not matter, will it?” she asked.

Meyer was very quiet on the way back to the Dos Playas. He moved a chair onto our small balcony and sat with his feet up, braced against the railing. I opened two beers in our kitchenette and took them out. He thanked me and drank half of his before putting it down on the floor beside his chair.

“She thinks we should just blow him away.” I said, turning to lean on the railing. “Did you see her eyes?”

“I did indeed. But she wants him to know why. They met. She is not a woman one would forget. If he gets a good look at her, then he’ll know why. But I think she wants the satisfaction of a few words. I have a very ugly image of things to come, Travis.”

“Such as?”

“I see us in a cave. Water is dripping. Cody Pittler is tied hand and foot. She is squatting beside him. She tells us to take a walk. We climb out of there and walk to where the guides are waiting. We all stand there and hear him screaming for a while, and then it stops, and she comes climbing out, looking tired but smiling.”

“Was that on NBC or CBS?”

“Listen, I do not have any affection for Cody Pittler, God knows. And I am pragmatist enough to realize we can’t get the law down here to do anything about him, and we can’t get him back to Eagle Pass. I have just never directly killed anyone.”

“This one should probably be indirect.”

“Just the same,” he said, picking up his beer and finishing it. “I don’t know exactly how to think about it. How have you thought about it?”

“In the past? There has never been enough time to do much thinking.”

“And afterward?”

“Kind of blah. Draggy. Tired and guilty and also a little bit jumpy. Takes about a week to go away. But the actual scene never really does go away. It’s sort of like having a collection of color slides. Some nights the projector in your head shows them all. Meyer, just don’t think about it. Let it happen. There is no little book of rules. No time outs. No offside. Just CYA. Cover your ass, because you can be certain the other guy will not feel that badly about you.”

Twenty-four

WE WAITED a long time before we heard from her. We had a difficult time finding the kind of walking shoes she described. Everything else was easy. Meyer found shoes. I couldn’t find a pair big enough until finally I found a pair a size and a half too big and too wide. But with two pair of heavy white orlon athletic socks, they felt snug enough, especially with the laces pulled tight. We found liter canteens in a downtown supermercado, on long straps, and bought two apiece. The Texas straws were too big for jungle walking, so we found baseball caps with Velcro bands which said Y-U-C-A-T-A-N in red across the front. Tennis shirts and tennis headbands and wristbands were available, as were long lightweight cotton trousers. Small flashlights, repellent, waterproof matches.

I debated the choice of knives for a long time and at last bought two. They both folded. One went in a leather holster with a snap fastener on my belt, and the other went in the right-hand pocket. It had no case, and when I took it out exactly right, and flicked my wrist, the five-inch blade fell out and snapped into place.

Dressed for action, we looked like tourists waiting for a party boat. I got impatient and went over to her place twice, but she wasn’t there. Meyer said she was doubtless doing everything she could. But Monday, Tuesday Wednesday Thursday, and Friday went by On Saturday August fourteenth, when we went down to breakfast, there was a small sealed envelope in the box. Come here today at eleven this morning. B.

We dressed in our jungle best. I had the car gassed and the oil checked. She was waiting for us outside the entrance, sitting on a bulky blue canvas pack. She hoisted it without effort and put it in the back beside Meyer. She seemed both intent and preoccupied as she looked us over, and gave a small nod. She wore a cotton T-shirt in a pale salmon color, baggy oyster-white slacks tucked into what looked to be L. L. Bean women’s hiking boots. She had her black hair tied back and a white terry band around her forehead.

“You are late!” she said.

“By almost three minutes.”

“If they should think we’re not coming-”

“Don’t get yourself in a nervous sweat,” I told her. She flashed me a black and evil look out of the side of her eye.

“Have you got everything?” Meyer asked.

“Yes, but not in that pack. They have already taken some things out to where we are going.”

I turned on the air conditioning, and that ended all conversation. I kept them too busy hanging on to think of talk anyway. The tires were the best looking thing about the pink rental, so I had the satisfaction of making her yelp with alarm when I darted between an empty southbound fill truck and a full one coming the other way.

Almost an hour later she yelled to me to slow down. She leaned forward, looking high into the trees on the left. She told me where to pull as far over as I could. There was some semblance of shoulder there, gravelly and badly tilted. When we got out, three small men appeared out of the brush. She introduced them quickly. Jorge, Juan, and Miguel. They wore toe-thong sandals, dirty khaki shorts which looked too large for them, faded cotton shirts, and ragged straw hats. Jorge and Juan also wore small-caliber rifles strapped diagonally across their backs arid machetes in scabbards on belts around their waists. They were solemn and their handshakes were utterly slack. They did not inspire a lot of confidence. Miguel wanted the car keys. He got in, and when I began to object he went roaring away, turning out almost directly in front of a maddened tourist bus. It blatted around him and went fartingly on its way toward Tulum.

She caught my arm and said, “It will be brought back when this is all over. Now we follow the boys.” And that was a very good trick indeed, following the boys and following her. It was a strange kind of jungle: scrub jungle. The soil could not support big trees. They ranged from sapling size to ball-bat size, and from ten feet tall to thirty feet. The cover was sparse. A lot of sun came down through the leaves. It was, as she had promised, a punishing trail. At first I tried to watch where I placed each foot, but that made the passage too slow. I finally decided to trust to the ankle support of the high shoes and let the stones underfoot roll as they pleased. Rain had washed all the soil from the trail, leaving loose rock. On either side, the terrain looked a lot better for walking, but it was a wilderness of tough vines that dropped from above, sprang up from below, and were hammocked from tree to tree. One would have to chop through them all to make a path.

It was incredibly hot in there. Though you could see off into the scrub jungle for maybe forty feet, there was no breeze at all. The air was as thick as pastry. The sweat began to pour. Jorge and Juan set a very fast pace, schlepping along in their dumb little sandals. They did not seem to sweat. I began to hate them. I wondered if Barbara was sweating. I lengthened my stride and caught up to her for a moment. Yes, she was. She was the winner of the international wet T-shirt award. But she flunked Miss Conviviality. Meyer, with shorter legs than mine and in not as good condition, had it the worst of all. He was panting and blowing and streaming. I had brought some salt tablets. I stopped, and Meyer and I took a good swig of cool water and a salt tablet each. They kept going, out of sight around a curve far ahead.

“Hold it!” I roared into the thick buggy silence of this third-rate jungle. There was no answer. So on we trudged, thrown off balance by the stones as they rolled, waving our arms to catch ourselves. Meyer said a few words I had never heard from him before. I discovered that there is a certain amount of sweat that begins below the forehead band and runs into the eyes. The wristlets took care of that for a time until they became too soggy.

I began to wonder if Cody Pittler had hired Barbara to take us into the wilderness and lose us for good.

They stood waiting for us where the trail converged with the old Mayan trail from Coba to Chichen Itza. Jorge and Juan squatted on their heels. Barbara leaned against a small tree. She took a look at me and decided that whatever she was going to say would not be appreciated.

“Now this way,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Can’t you slow those dwarfs down?”

“Wherever there is a choice of directions, they’ll wait.”

“And you too?”

She gave me her obsidian stare and said, “Of course.”

I had hoped that the old Mayan trail would be in better shape, but if anything it was worse. I finally settled into that hypnosis of physical effort which frees the mind to roam to better things. I stomped along until, not far ahead of me, I saw a better thing. Her baggy slacks had become as sopping wet as the T-shirt and clung to the alternate flexing and bunching of the round smooth musculature of her buttocks. Her hair was sweat-wet, flattened to her skull. I slowed and looked back. Meyer was out of sight. I stopped and saw him come around a bend. I caught up to Barbara, stopped her for a salt tablet and a slug of water. In the stillness I watched her throat work as she tilted the canteen. She exuded a warm murky scent of overheated woman. She smiled her thanks.

“You said it’s a rough walk. Okay, it’s rough. Do you have to be cross?”

“I’m not cross, Travis. Really. I’m just very very anxious that this works for us, that we kill him.”

“Have you ever killed anybody?”

Her eyes changed. “No. I saw a person killed. When I was very small. He broke the law of the village. Have you ever killed anybody?”

“Not in cold blood. Not by trapping him, like this.”

“Other ways, though.”

I shrugged. “Self-defense.”

“Many?”

“Not a lot.”

“I heard it gets easier.”

“I guess it depends on the person. From where I stand, you heard wrong.”

“After I saw that person killed I had bad dreams and woke up screaming, night after night. Maybe I will after this, too. I don’t care. I just don’t care.”

“When will he be coming in?”

“Tomorrow, earlier than we’re arriving. Maybe ten thirty.”

“Who brings him?”

“These same boys. They know this area. Miguel too.”

Meyer came up to us, sighed, settled down on the curve of a fat root. He took a short drink, capped his canteen, and shook his head at us, smiling a sad and weary smile. He looked as though he had been dipped in fine oil. He gleamed. We talked for a little while and then went on together, better friends somehow.

At last we turned off the rock-strewn trail and angled off through the brush. The boys had their shining machetes out, and they cut through the vines with effortless twists of the wrist. I had hoped that it would slow them down so that we could keep up with them. I had finally realized that it was a childish game with them, to effortlessly outdistance the heaving sweating Yanquis.

Then they showed us another trick. Meyer and I were following Jorge. Barbara was off to the side, following Juan. Jorge would get a little ahead and then go around a tree in an unexpected direction. Unless you noticed you would charge ahead and suddenly be wrapped in tough vines, held motionless. You had to back off and find where he had sliced through them. That took time. And by then he was farther ahead than ever, cutting tricky patterns through the undergrowth. So I roared at him with enough authority to stop him in his tracks. I told him that if he did not stay back so I could follow him, I would take his machete away from him, lop off his head, and kick it all the way back to the highway. He didn’t understand a word, of course. But he understood the meaning. And from then on he kept looking back nervously, making certain Meyer and I were keeping up.

The second cenote we inspected looked about right. One wall had collapsed into rubble, so it was easy to clamber down to where the small stream flowed. It flowed through an area of flat rock. The flat rock extended into the mouth of the cave, with another flat shelf about three feet higher. It was astonishingly cool in the mouth of the cave. A breeze came blowing gently out of it. There seemed to be a kind of camping place on the higher flat rock, and just outside the mouth of the cave there was a big rusty iron kettle. Barbara explained that this had probably been a place where the chicleros met to boil down the gum they had tapped from the chicle trees. Juan had been carrying the blue pack. He put it down beside Barbara and went off to retrieve the stores they had brought in the previous day. While he was gone, Jorge made three fast trips off into the jungle, returning each time with a huge armload of boughs. Juan came back overburdened with goods. There was a small Primus stove, canned goods, a jug of water, bread, blankets, and two rifles wrapped in plastic and tied with twine.

He handed me one with a polite bow and smile. I undid it and found myself the proud possessor of a single-shot Montgomery Ward.22-caliber rifle. A friend of mine had had one just like it when I was a kid. It had been made by Stevens Arms up in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, back in the thirties. The front part of the foregrip was painted black. The blueing was pretty well gone. It was called a Frank Buck model, I remembered, but I couldn’t remember who Frank Buck had been. I had the feeling he had gone to Africa to capture wild animals for American zoos. My friend’s little rifle had been chambered for shorts. This one came with a small leather pouch tied to the bolt in which I found nine long-rifle shells. My face must have shown great dismay. He explained something very rapidly to Barbara and she said, “Juan says it is a very good gun. Very accurate. It belonged to his father. He treasures it.”

I made myself smile. Meyer unwrapped the other one and handed it to me. It was a Remington 410 shotgun with four shells. All birdshot.

“We are a veritable arsenal of democracy,” I said. “I think it would be useful if he left us his machete.” She took me seriously, and he did. And then they were gone. They disappeared without a sound.

“What are their orders?” I asked.

“They will bring Hoffmann here, but around to that side, where he cannot see that this is the easy side. It is steep, so one of them will go down first and ask Hoffmann to hand down the gun. The moment he reaches the bottom, the one with the gun will run over and up this slope and away. And the other will run back from the top of the slope. They will go down to the trail and wait there until we call. That will leave Hoffmann there at the foot of that steep slope. One of us can be here and another up over there where the brush is thick, looking down from hiding.”

“Then what?”

“Where can he go? What can he do? If he tries to climb back out, you can shoot his leg. You seem to want to talk to him. That is all right. It won’t matter by then. We can talk to him and you can hand me the gun and I will shoot him. I will walk closer to him and shoot him. Show me how to work the gun, Travis.”

Meyer hitched himself back on the rock shelf, more deeply into the cave, folded his arms, and, with his back against damp rock, went to sleep. She had laid out the provisions and made the three blanket beds. I walked the area, climbed the steep slope, came around and came down the rubbly slope. I checked out the hiding place she had pointed to and I found a place that looked a little bit better. It was outside the smaller cave, at the opposite side of the cenote, where the water flowed in and disappeared. There was a jumble of big rounded boulders, some of them the size of sedans, with a good place of concealment behind them. I was about to suggest it as an alternate until I looked up and saw, about twenty-five feet overhead, how the land was undercut, tree roots hanging down. It looked as if the whole thing would come down. It was probably a lot more solidly set than it looked.

I hated the weapons, but the plan seemed reasonable. We ate some canned beef stew without much appetite. I stretched out and went to sleep. It was dusk when Barbara awakened me. “You must see this,” she said.

“Dear God, I have never seen anything like it.”

The bats were leaving on their evening rounds. They had hung upside down all day and they were letting go and catching the air and darting out with that curious shifting tilting flight of the hungry bat. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them, long columns against the pale sky of evening. Meyer was watching in awe.

Bugs did not come into the cave in any great number. Barbara extracted a flat bottle from her pack, a pint of tequila. We passed it back and forth and moved toward the front of our cave and watched the stars come out. In the black velvet sky of full night, there was an incredible number of them. We finished the pint. She sat close to me and said, “You are so good to help me.”

We ate with far better appetite than we had for the earlier meal. Our clothing was stale with dried sweat. Bugs screamed out in the brush. One had a whining noise that seemed to come from everywhere and bored through your ears into the center of your skull. There was a long spine-chilling scream in the night, not far away.

“Cat,” Barbara whispered. “They’re out hunting. They hunt the esquintla.”

“What is that?”

“A kind of giant rat. Quite fat and slow. They were put on earth to be food for the cats. They are a delicacy. Very delicious. They taste like pork.”

“I must remember to have some someday.”

“Want me to cook one for you?”

“Don’t put yourself out on my account.”

Later we heard some squealing which she identified as esquintla. Perhaps the big cat played with them a little before the kill. It is said that the adrenaline of fear tenderizes the meat. Everything has a purpose, as Meyer says. One needs merely to find out what it is.

The blankets were big enough to work like an envelope; over and under, and in the coolness the cover was welcome. We were close. At one point I could hear Meyer purring directly behind me while her breath, a sweetness flavored just slightly with tequila, touched my cheek with her every exhalation.

Tomorrow, I realized, would be the fifteenth. And suddenly I remembered Annie was leaving tomorrow for Hawaii. A great desolation moved across my mind, like a black storm coming across wide fields. It enveloped me, and I said her name without making a sound. I wondered if I would have to go to the top of the great pyramid at Coba and say her name a hundred times as dawn came. I reviewed every measured micro-inch of her, each cry and cadence, each sweet pressure. How big of a damn fool can one man be? No use hoping the job would fold, or that she would change her mind. No hope at all, at all.

Twenty-five

WE WERE Up earlier than we needed to be, just after first light. After an improvised breakfast, we removed all visible traces of ourselves from the area outside the cave.

I took Meyer up to where he would lie in ambush and had him stretch out there, little shotgun at the ready, while I went down and climbed the steep slope and climbed back down again, trying to see any significant bit of him or his weapon. It was good concealment, and from there he commanded most of the cenote. I went back to where he was and made certain he knew how to operate the weapon, breaking it to extract the empty shell and insert the new one.

Because of the difficulty he would have getting into position, we decided it would be best if he established himself there a little before ten, ready with minimum motion to aim down from his thirty-foot-high vantage point.

Barbara and I were to remain in the cave, back in the shadows where we would be invisible to eyes adjusted to the glare of daylight. I would stand in a niche on the right side of the cave-right side facing out-near the entrance. From there I could see the steep slope down which he would climb, and would see Jorge or Juan catch the rifle and scoot across the floor of the cenote to the other side while Cody Pittler was halfway down the slope.

At ten thirty we became very tense, but there was another ten minutes of whispered conversation before Barbara Castillo silenced me and tilted her head, listening. As soon as I heard voices and a crackle of twigs, I suddenly felt we were doing this wrong, doing it badly. We were in a hole and he had the high ground. It was contrary to everything I had been taught long ago. I moved into the niche I had selected, and she moved deeper into the cave. I heard a quiet sloshing as she waded back into the edge of the pool.

Then they were visible up on the brink speaking Spanish. Jorge pointed down and toward us, and I could imagine he was telling Cody Pittler that the great cat was holed up in the cave. Jorge swung over the edge and came lithely down, holding onto roots and onto the small bushes which had grown out of the steep fall of earth. He pushed himself away from the slope and dropped the last six feet, caught his balance, looked up and held his hands out, and called some instruction.

I held my breath. This was critical. I saw Pittler clearly as he lay on his belly, leaning down over the edge, holding the rifle at the horizontal, letting it go. Jorge caught it, by stock and foregrip, and stood there with it as Pittler started down. He wore pale khakis dark-sweated at waist, armpits, and collar, a tan bush hat with one side of the brim tacked up, a la Aussie, and rubber-soled hiking boots that had seen much wear.

When he was halfway down the slope, he looked back and down over his shoulder just in time to see Jorge light out in full gallop. There was no hesitation in Pittler. He pushed away from the steep slope, dropped fifteen feet, landed, and sprawled onto his butt, but while landing, he unsnapped the holster I had not seen, and without any scrambling haste, took out a long-barreled pistol and shot Jorge as he was starting up the rubbled slope a hundred feet away. Jorge took one more running stride and came tumbling over backward, throwing the rifle ten feet in the air. It landed near him. Jorge was on his back slack face toward the cave, mouth half open, unhurried blood seeping from the corner of it, eyes almost closed.

Pittler looked back up at the silence at the top of the slope. He stood very still, listening. Then he began to walk carefully, slowly, across the floor of the cenote toward the body and the gun.

I should have put the pellet from the little gun into his right ear. It would have made a lot more sense. I put it into the meat of his right thigh. It made a pitiful snapping sound. He hissed with pain, fired two shots into the cave, and went on a hobbling, skipping run, faster than I would have believed possible, over to the bulwark of boulders and vaulted into the shelter behind them.

He knew he had been ambushed, and he had reacted swiftly and decisively. He had made the right moves. So he was in shelter now, waiting for what might come next, not knowing that Meyer was looking down at him from hiding.

He yelled a question in Spanish. Before I could motion back to her to be still, Barbara answered it in kind.

“For God’s sake!” he cried. “Willy’s damn woman. Barbara, honey, what have you got against old Evan?”

“You killed William!”

“Talk sense, honey. William got sick and tired of you. You were just a little bit too dark-colored for him. What I did, I helped him get back to the States, that’s all. He’s probably dating some little redheaded gal by now. Come on out and we’ll talk it over.”

“And maybe talk over your big house near Playa del Carmen, eh? And the name you have there? The Mr. Roberto Hoffmann who lives so quietly?”

There was a silence. Finally he said, “I’m very sorry you had to say that, Barbara. Very sorry. It means you’re going to stay right here in this hole forever. I can’t let you get away. Did Willy tell you? When he told me he hadn’t told anyone at all, I believed him.”

“What did you do to him?”

“I chunked him on the head, wired him to a lot of lead, and rolled him over the side of the boat. I guess in a way, honey, it was my fault. I went hunting too close to home. I didn’t think until later on that after it was in the paper Evan Lawrence was dead, I’d have to stay nervous about him coming across me some day. Now Evan Lawrence can stay dead. No problem.”

“No problem except me?”

“Except you and Juan.”

“And me,” I called to him.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, with a small break in his voice.

“I’m here to ask you about Isobelle Garvey, Larry Joe. You recall her. Over near Cotulla, a long time ago. You buried her in the gravel, but floodwaters washed her out. Little bit of a thing. Too young for you. Didn’t matter to you how young.”

“I know that voice,” he said. “Say some more.”

“Sure, Jerry. Did you watch Doris Eagle burn up that night near Ingram?”

There was a long silence. “McGee?” he said, his voice not as audible as before. “Is that you, McGee?”

“I’m McGee. The problem is finding out who you are.”

“I’m not any of those names you said. I’m not Jerry Tobin or Larry Joe Harris.”

“I didn’t mention their last names, pal.”

“I’m not them, and I’m not Bill Mabry in Montana, or Carl Keith in Pasadena, or Max Triplett in Shreveport. I’m not any of those. They’re gone, all of them. You don’t understand. I’m Bob Hoffmann and I live near here. I live a quiet life down here in Yucatan. I don’t have to worry about anything down here. You wouldn’t understand how it is.”

“Just the way Norma didn’t understand.”

“Didn’t we have a good time that night, McGee? That was a great evening aboard your houseboat, it really was. I can remember, because I can still remember being Evan Lawrence. And he really loved that woman. When he first started making love to her she was cold as a fish. She was scared. She couldn’t let herself go. But when Evan finally taught her to let herself go, she was a treasure. She was just about the all-time best. Evan was in hog heaven with that woman. When she was gone, he was gone. Is that so hard to understand?”

And he punctuated his question with a shot that clanged off the side of the old rusty iron kettle and ricocheted into my corner of the cave, smacked the wall near my temple, and stung me with rock dust. It set a few dozen bats to squeaky complaining. He had worked it all out while talking, guessing where I was from my voice. A trick-shot artist. I could see the small shiny groove in the red rust where the bare metal was exposed. Elementary logic told me that were I to move to where I could not see the kettle, the trick wouldn’t work. I had a new load in the toy rifle. I dropped and edged to where an upjut of rock protected my head, but from where I could see, through a narrow chink, most of the rock jumble behind which he was hiding.

With the aid of some spit which I chewed into my dry mouth, I made a delayed bubbling moan. Barbara screamed and came running to me. I pushed her out of harm’s way and whispered, “I just died.”

“You killed him!” she yelled dramatically. “You killed McGee!”

I don’t think it impressed Pittler, but it got to Meyer. “Cody Pittler!” he yelled. “Cody T. W Pittler, look at me! You killed Coralita and you killed your own father who loved you. You killed Bryce Pittler. Look at me!”

There was the chunky little bam of the shotgun, and there were two snappy shots from Cody’s handgun, and I saw the shotgun slide out of the brush at the top of the slope and fall through the sunlight, turning slowly, to clatter onto the rock below. My heart emptied. Poor Meyer. Friendship had brought him to the Busted Flush at just the right time for Dirty Bob to steal his pride and his sense of himself as a man. And now the fates and friendship had brought him to this sinkhole in the Yucatecan woodland to die at the hands of a madman-a very quick and able madman.

Pittler scampered out of hiding, ran to the shotgun and snatched it up, and ran back, limping badly. I tried a shot and knew as I pulled the trigger that I had missed him. I reloaded.

Pittler cursed, and I guessed he had discovered the limited possibilities of the new weapon. No possibilities at all, actually, except as a club. One used shell in the chamber.

Pittler yelled, much louder than was necessary. “My old man lives in Eagle Pass, Texas. Nobody killed him. Hear me? He ain’t dead, God damn it! Don’t try stuff like that.”

“You’ve got your head all messed up, Cody!” I called. “You don’t know who you are. You did that playacting in school and you forgot who you’re supposed to be. You’re crazy. Stick that gun in your mouth and save us the trouble.”

He made an unintelligible howling sound, a ululation of pain and rage. And my eye caught movement above him, way up at ground level. It was Meyer, moving slowly from right to left. It was a blundering walk, and he was grasping small trees to pull himself along. He turned toward me, and he wore the mask of the young people who do pantomime in the streets. One half of his face was white, the other red, in an almost even division. And he smiled a ghastly smile.

I began talking loudly to Pittler to cover the sound Meyer had to be making, up there over his head. I told him he was a sick vulture, living on dead women. I told him lots of good things like that. And slowly, step by step, Meyer came out toward the lip of the overhang. Two small trees grew near the brink: Meyer grasped one in each hand, standing between them. And then, heavily, solemnly, he began to jump up and down. Three times. I ran to the mouth of the cave and aimed at the big boulders that hid Pittler, hoping to get him if he tried to run for it.

Somebody belted me on the outside of my upper left arm, just below the point of the shoulder, with a tack hammer. The arm was suddenly very tired. It sagged and I kept aiming and holding the gun with my right hand. Right after Meyer’s third jump there was a grating sound, and then the whole landscape up there tilted and came down, gaining speed. Tons of rock and dirt and trees and roots and bushes. A vast piece of layer cake. A chunk of eternity. Meyer held to the two trees and rode it down. It filled and obliterated the area where Pittler crouched. When it hit bottom, Meyer was at a forty-five-degree angle, leaning forward. The impact jolted him loose and flung him forward on his face, and the spill of loose earth then covered him to the waist. His face was in the slow creek.

We ran to him. I had to work one-armed. Barbara Castillo was a marvel. She dug with both hands like a hasty dog, and together we pulled him out and dragged him past the creek and rolled him onto his back. The water had washed the blood off his face. It ran from a two inch groove over his right ear, persistently but not dangerously. He grunted and pushed us away and sat up. He stared at where Pittler had been. He did not try to talk. He merely pointed and raised his heavy eyebrows in question.

“Yep,” I said. “He’s under there.”

There was a confusion of expressions on Meyer’s face as he realized what he had done. There was awe, and concern, and a troubled wonderment. He is my friend. He is a man of peace and gentleness.

But he’d had a very bad year, and even though the end of the strange man called Pittler had been sudden and ghastly, in the doing of it, Meyer had restored his own pride and identity.

And finally the underlying emotion supplanted all the others, and his smile, a strangely sweet smile, won out, and spread slowly all over his face, proud and certain: the smile of a man who had suddenly been made whole again.

“When you felt it start to go, there was time to scramble back off it,” I said. “You could have killed yourself.”

“I had enough left to jump three times and that was it. Scramble back? Couldn’t. You know, you think of weird things when you don’t have anything left. I thought that if I was only wearing the right costume, you know, like a cape, I could spread my arms and fly out of here.”

Barbara got a knife and cut up her spare shirt and bound his head, tightly enough to stop the bleeding. She used the rest of it on my upper arm. On her way back with the cloth she had squatted by Jorge and learned he was just as dead as he looked. The wound was at the base of the skull.

Juan reappeared. He looked sallow. He sat by Jorge, his lips moving. Then Barbara and Juan carried Jorge into the shelter of the cave, out of the sunlight. She talked with Juan and then told us it had been decided that some of his people would come out and get the body, and that we were leaving the supplies and stores for Jorge’s family: There would be no fuss made about it, she said. Ramуn would learn that Senor Hoffmann was never coming back from this trip. He would tell the others. Little by little inconspicuously, they would strip the great house of everything they wanted. It might take months. And then they would disappear back into the jungle villages. Eventually the authorities would notice he was gone, the house empty and decaying. But nobody would really care very much.

Meyer said, “It offends my sense of neatness. Shouldn’t we go to the house? Look for… I don’t know. Proof? Money?”

“You couldn’t go there, either of you. The servants wouldn’t let you in. I could go there. Ramуn would let me in. I could look around, I suppose.”

“Maybe we should tell the authorities where he is,” Meyer said.

She stared at him. “Shot in the leg and buried alive? Both of you wounded? Do you want to spend two or three years here answering questions, living on tortillas and beans?”

“No,” I said. “No Way.”

“Nor I,” she said, with her habitual little air of formality.

Right at that moment I began to feel uncommonly hot and strangely remote. All colors were too bright. The sun hurt my eyes. I didn’t start having the chills until we were halfway out of the jungle. Meyer had to drive.

Meyer headed back three days later, very nervous over taking back into the States the items Barbara had collected in Pittler-Hoffmann’s house: a few thousand in U.S. currency, a stack of Mexican old fifty-peso pieces, several diamond rings, and two expensive wristwatches. We had agreed among ourselves they should be sent to Helen June in upstate New York. No need to include any kind of a note. We believed she would understand from the contents that there would probably never be any more packages from her brother.

I thought I was recovering and would soon be well enough to travel, but the day after Meyer left the illness came back. Barbara Castillo moved me to her place, the better to look after me.

She had found no proof in the Hoffmann house. She had found no clue to where the rest of the money might be.

We didn’t need the money, and we didn’t need any more proof than we had.

Twenty-six

ANNIE RENZETTI phoned me from Hawaii at two o’clock on Sunday, September nineteenth.

“Isn’t it pretty early there, kid?” I said.

“Sort of about eight. Morning on Sunday is my best office time. Catch up on stuff. Who was that who answered yesterday when I phoned?”

“Kind of a Maya princess type.”

“A what?”

“A nice person. Barbara is a nice person. She’s up here from Mexico on sort of a vacation. I keep talking her into making it a little bit longer.”

“I’m glad you have a nice new friend, Travis.”

“I’m glad you’re glad. Neat weekend we are having the great Meyer chili festival. On an empty sandspit way down Biscayne Bay.”

“Gee, I wish I could make it.”

“Wish you could too.”

“How is Meyer?”

“In the very best of form. He has enlisted the services of a troop of young handsome women. They follow him around, helping him carry the provisions back to his new boat. Which, by the way, is a dandy. The Veblen. Built-in bookshelves, and his colleagues are helping him replace the library he lost.”

“Did you really stop looking for Evan Lawrence?”

“Meyer and I had a moment of mature consideration when we wondered what we would do if we caught up with him. So we gave it up.”

“That doesn’t sound like either of you!”

“We’re learning discretion late in life.”

“Travis, there was a little paragraph in the Advertiser about the HooBoy sinking. Wasn’t that the name of Hack’s boat? What happened?”

“Dave Jenkins waited until one of the people who had contacted him finally showed up to claim the boat. They’d paid a lot of money to have it made much faster, and they’d had a verbal contract with Hack about what they would pay for it when it was done. Dave thought it might be something like that. He’d alerted the Coast Guard and their friends, and they came and put an automatic beacon in the hull that would broadcast for a long long time. So the men came and claimed it, paid off Dave, and arranged the title transfer, and three weeks later they caught it loaded with pot, hash, and coke. They had to make a hole in the hull before it stopped. And after they saw the load, they took the men off and let it go down.”

“And you had nothing to do with that?”

“Annie, I don’t want to have anything to do with anything like that. Boats sinking. People getting hurt. It’s all behind me. Meyer is delighted that now we’re both sedentary.”

“Sedentary? You?”

“We’re settling down a little, that’s all.”

“I don’t think I like it.”

“Well, Annie, you are out there in Hawaii earning your battle ribbons, and I am here admiring this year’s crop of beach bunnies and dipping into a little Boodles on the rocks from time to time. Everybody seems in good form. We have a few laughs.”

“You’re going to make me homesick.”

“How is it out there?”

“Same as last time. There’s an awful lot of work. It isn’t as much fun as it was in Naples. But… it’s a bigger challenge. There are some chauvinists in the company who are hoping I’ll fall on my face. I won’t give them that little satisfaction, dammit. I just wanted to hear your voice, dear.”

Barbara came in from the beach and came striding across the lounge to give me a quick kiss beside the eye before heading for her shower.

The conversation with Annie was soon over. It might be the last one, I thought as I hung up. There was a little edge of loss, but it had softened. It no longer bit.

I got up and stretched and wandered into the head, where Barbara was in the giant shower, singing. She has a nice voice but absolutely no sense of pitch or rhythm. Consequently whatever she sings sounds like “Home on the Range.”

“Good swim?” I called.

“Just beautiful! Say, did you turn off the oven at the right time like I told you?”

“Of course.”

“Who was that on the phone? The woman from yesterday?”

“Same one.”

“I don’t think I like her calling you. Her voice is too pretty. Is she as pretty as her voice?”

“She is in Hawaii, Bobs.”

“Then okay. She can be pretty if she wants.”

She had the shower turned high. I kicked off my sandals, dropped my shorts, peered cautiously around the curtain, then slid in behind her and grabbed her around the middle. She squealed and fought in a very satisfying way. So we had some good old scrubbing and soaping fun, and then some good old rinsing fun, and then outside the shower some great big towel fun before I picked her up and carried her off to bed, giving her head a slight thump on the doorframe in passing.

And once again, after love, I had the marvelous pleasure of burying my snout in the soft and fragrant texture of the side of her throat. In dusty tan tint and in taste and fragrance it reminded me of something, always had, ever since that night when in her apartment at La Vista del Caribe, my great shuddering and gasping and chattering of teeth had awakened her and she had come in from her bed nest on the couch to put more blankets on me. She called it a little jungle fever. I do not ever want to have a big jungle fever. When all other warming efforts failed, she had slipped in there with me, under all the blankets, to hold me tightly until all that kind of fever went away and an entirely different one began, over her dwindling objections. I did not mind when, later, after her breath had caught several times during one long audible inhalation, she cried “Weeeeleee.” I did not mind being his surrogate that night, or having called him back to life for her for that one instant on the edge of release. But it never happened again. She never called his name again.

So suddenly I knew what was at the back of memory as I snuffed at her throat, eyes open to see the odd dusky-dark coloring.

“Cinnamon!” I said.

“What?”

“You smell like cinnamon and you have the right color. Cinnamon skin.”

“My God, McGee, can’t you come up with something more original?”

“I thought it was.”

She laughed. “It’s a song, you idiot. Piel Canela: Cinnamon Skin. They sing it all over Mexico. A love ballad, quite tender. You can ask any group of mariachis, and they will play it and sing it for you. Like this.”

She sang it softly to me, but it sounded like “Home on the Range.”

She dropped off to sleep and came awake with a start. “Oh!” she said. “I dreamed about that man again.”

“Bad?”

“Not too bad this time. All that dirt and stone that came falling down, it made a pyramid, a perfect little pyramid, with him under it. Which makes sense.”

“Sense?”

“Of course, McGee. That pyramid we climbed at Coba? It is all a big tomb. There is somebody buried in there, maybe more than one. But they may never get to excavating, to looking inside.”

“Why not?”

“For the same reason the Spanish left us all alone in Yucatan, why they didn’t care to conquer us and civilize us and turn us into little brown Christians.”

“Which is?”

“McGee, lovemaking must dim your wits. Because the Maya had no gold!”

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Travis McGee #20 Cinnamon SkinJohn D. MacDonald Dedicated to our special group of Kiwis, with loveCINNAMON SKIN