Dress Her In Indigo

Dress Her In Indigo

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #11 Dress Her In Indigo

John D. MacDonald

One

ON THAT early afternoon in late August, Meyer and I walked through the canvas tunnel at Miami International and boarded a big bird belonging to Aeronaves de Mexico for the straight shot to Mexico City. We were going first class because it was all a private and personal and saddening mission at the behest of a very sick and fairly rich man.

We had the bulkhead seats on the port side because I am enough inches beyond six feet to cherish the extra knee room.

Tourist cards in order, cash in the moneybelts, under-seat luggage only. And the unfamiliarly sedate wardrobes of the airborne businessman because there is a constant flow of them back and forth, the systems analysts and the plant location experts, the engineers and the salesmen, importers and exporters, con men and investment specialists. The Mexican peso is rock solid, the economy roaring, and the population zooming past fifty mil lion. So it is protective coloration to join the flock, as most trips combine business and pleasure, and the pure tourist is fair game for every hustle in the book.

But in one respect we were not entirely plausible. We’d spent the last few weeks aboard my houseboat, the Busted Flush, puttering around Florida Bay and the Keys with a small, convivial, and very active group of old and new friends aboard. When you get your clock adjusted to the routines of anchoring off shore, you keep the same hours as the sea birds, and the long hot bright days of summer had been full of fishing and swimming, walking the empty beaches of the off-shore keys, exploring in the dinghy rigged for sail, diving the reefs. So we were both baked to the deep red-bronze that comes from the new deep burn atop the years of deep-water tan, hair baked pale on my skull, saltdried and wind-parched, the skin sea-toughened. Even Meyer’s heavy black pelt had been bleached a little and now looked slightly red when the light hit it the right way.

So if we were of the business breed, it was something to do with engineering and the out-of-doors, like pipelines and irrigation projects.

He had the window seat. We sat in the sweltering heat of the tin bird until finally they unsnapped the umbilical tunnel, swung the door shut, and taxied us out toward takeoff. Then the warm air that had been rushing out of the overhead vents turned to cool, and white shirts began to come unstuck.

Meyer shrugged and smiled in a weary way and said, “That poor, sad son of a bitch.”

No need to draw a picture. The memory of my short visit with Mr. T. Harlan Bowie was recent and vivid. Maybe any complex and demanding life in our highly structured culture is like that old juggling routine in which a line of flexible wands as long as pool cues is fastened to a long narrow table and the juggler-clown goes down the line, starting a big white dinner plate spinning atop each one, accelerating the spin by waggling the wand. By the time he gets the last one spinning, the first one has slowed to a dangerous, sloppy wobble, and so he races back and waggles the wand frantically and gets it up to speed. Then the third one needs attention, then the second, the fifth, the eighth, and the little man runs back and forth staring up in horrid anxiety, keeping them all going, and always on the verge of progressive disaster.

So Mr. Bowie’s white spinning plates had been labeled Vice President and Trust officer of a large Miami bank, Homeowner, Pillar of the Community, Husband of Liz, Director of This and That, Board Member of The Other, Father of Beatrice known as Bix, the lovely daughter and only child.

He kept the plates spinning nicely, and I imagine he expected to eventually take them off the wands and put them down, with each deletion simplifying the task that remained, until maybe there would be just one plate called Sunset Years, placidly spinning.

But somehow life is arranged so that if one plate wobbles too much and slips off the wand tip and smashes, the rest of them start to go also, as if the sudden clumsiness were a contagion.

One morning Liz had asked him if he had time for another cup of candy. She became furious when he couldn’t seem to understand what she meant, and she got the steaming pot and poured another cup and said, “Candy!” She hesitated, frowning, and said, “Coffee? Of course it’s coffee! What did I call it?”

By the time she was scheduled for all the, neurological tests at the Baltimore clinic, she had lost the differentiation between genders, using he and she so interchangeably she had a fifty percent chance of being right at any given time, and she had admitted to having had sudden and severe headaches for several months, but had paid as little attention to them as possible, because she had never believed in babying herself. They took the top of her skull off like a lid and got some of it but knew they could not get all, and stuck a cobalt bead in there for luck, even knowing she had no luck left. She kept talking for half the time it took to die, but the words didn’t go together in any pattern anyone could translate. It took five months to kill her, if you start counting the morning she poured her beloved husband a cup of candy. It was hideously expensive and, to Harl Bowie, hideously incomprehensible. She died on Columbus Day. Daughter Bix had spent the summer at home and had stayed on, of course, rather than going back in September for her senior year at Wellesley. After Liz died, Bix told her daddy she would probably go back at mid-term.

He was not paying much attention, not only because he was stunned by the loss of his wife, but also because there had been a merger of certain banks, and there was a new imperative computer system for the handling of trust account investments, and Harl Bowie had to keep running up to Atlanta for a week at a time to try to find out what the hell the quiet young men who had been posted in the trust department were talking about.

But he paid a lot of attention when she told him right after Christmas that she had decided not to go back. She had decided to go to Mexico for a while “with some kids I know.” He had tried every bit of leverage he could think of, and he couldn’t move her an inch. He couldn’t even get any display of emotion out of her. She reminded him gently that she would become twenty-two in another month, and there was the twenty thousand left her by her mother, and said it would be nice if he could stop being so manic about it because she was going, with or without approval.

So she went, and he got some infrequent postcards, and in April he was driving through thunder to the airport for another bout with the systems analysis people in Atlanta, and a big semi coming the other way got a big blast of wind and lost it, and came piling and jackknifing across the medial strip into heavy oncoming traffic. They said it was a miracle half a dozen or more people weren’t killed, instead of just one man seriously injured, a local bank executive.

T. Harlan Bowie had to be pry-barred and torchcut out of his squashed Buick, and there was so much blood the rescue people were in a big hurry. As it turned out, they would have done a lot better taking it slow and easy rather than turning him and twisting him and working him in muscular style out of the metal carapace. Nobody could prove anything afterward. The lacerations were superficial. But there was a fracture of the spine, and between the second and third lumbar vertebrae the unprotected cord had been pinched, ground, bruised, torn, and all but severed. Nobody could ever say whether the accident had done it, or the rescue efforts.

And it killed him-from the fracture point on down to his toes. Meanwhile the fates were laughing dirtily in the wings at another aspect of the treatment they were giving the poor, sad, sorry son of a bitch. T. Harlan Bowie had always been both shrewd and lucky with what Liz used to call “Harlie’s funny little stocks.” He liked to put his eggs in a couple of baskets and watch the baskets like an eagle. The day they told him they wanted to take the top of Liz’s skull off, he stopped watching the baskets. They were a couple of little technology companies. He had about an eighty thousand investment in them, evenly split. It was not savings, because bank officers don’t make enough to save money like that after taxes. It was the pyramided gains of a dozen years of those funny little stocks.

His personal broker would call once in a while and try to report what was going on, but Harl didn’t want to talk about it or hear about it or even know about it. After Liz died, he was too upset about being so damned alone, and about Bix, to have even the slightest stir of curiosity about his two little dog stocks. Then, of course, there were the weeks in the hospital, and by early July they moved him from the hospital to an elegant place that was a combination rest home and therapy center. When he found out that the tab was running seventy-five a day plus extras, it stimulated the money-nerve and he began to check things out. An old and good friend had emptied out the house on Cricket Bayou, the redwood and coquina stone house Liz had loved so, had stored Harl’s personal stuff, and had gotten a very good price for the house the day after it was listed. The personal accident and disability and major disaster insurance was paying off handsomely. His attorney had negotiated a surprisingly fat settlement from the company which handled the trucker’s liability insurance. The premature retirement benefit and the bank insurance disability income clause were spewing more money diligently.

So he called his broker finally and heard the awed, hushed and respectful tone, and finally comprehended that the two funny little technology stocks had both come out with a couple of earnings quarters of a fantastic richness, that they had valuable patents in areas Harl had never even heard of, that one was listed on the big board and the other one had applied, and the stock of both of them had been generously split a couple of times. So in one of them, what had cost him six dollars was worth two hundred and fifty, and the laggard had gone only from eight dollars to a hundred and twenty. So there was upwards of two million two, or an aftertax one million six.

He laughed after he found that out; he laughed himself sick. He had his broker arrange a negotiated sale through the floor specialists, and he put the tax money aside in treasury bills, and he stuffed the rest of it into tax-free municipals, and there he was all of a sudden with a tax-free income coming in on the basis of like two hundred and forty dollars a day forever, and it was money he didn’t have to touch because what was coming in from all other sources was more than sufficient to his needs, even in Garden Suite Number Five in Tropicana Grove Retreat.

His lawyers had been trying to locate Bix in Mexico to tell her that daddy had been badly injured.

But the last plate had to smash and did so when a man with a polite and careful voice tracked T. Harlan Bowie down by long distance from the State Department to tell him that Miss Beatrice Tracy Bowie had been killed near Oaxaca when the vehicle in which she had been riding had gone off a mountain road, and the Mexican authorities wanted to know where the body was to be shipped and who would arrange and pay for the shipment.

Poor sick sorry rich and sad son of a bitch.

All you can say is: Well, that’s the way it goes sometimes. It goes very bad sometimes because they give you the bad in great big indigestible wads. As if they want to write you off in a hurry. As if the idea is to tear down your whole scene and sow the area with salt and acid, and be off looking for the next fellow who happens to be standing and smiling and thinking that life is pretty good lately.

So only-daughter was airfreighted back to eternal rest beside mother Liz in one of those happyvale places where the markers are flush with the ground level, the walks and gates have names, and stereotaped organ music comes wafting out of the pole-mounted guaranteed weatherproof highcompliance speaker systems.

Nobody knew whether she had enjoyed Mexico. So three days ago T. Harlan Bowie got Meyer on the phone and they had a long talk, and then Meyer said I should accompany him to Miami and talk to a friend of his. I said I did not want to talk to anybody about anything, because it had been a very nice cruise and I wanted to slob around and savor it in full measure.

Meyer then reminded me that I had met Bix Bowie, and that last year, a week or so after her mother’s funeral, he had brought her around and we had gone with her and some other people on the Flush up the waterway, and the girl had seemed to have a good time, but it was hard to tell. He explained that he had been a sort of unofficial godfather to the girl when she was smaller, before she had gone away to school.

It stirred my memory, but I could not get a clear image of the girl herself. The world seems overful of quiet pretty blondes lately, and the trouble is that when they are silent and withdrawn one no longer knows whether it is shyness, total disinterest, or a concealed and contemptuous churlishness.

But I could see that it had racked my friend Meyer, and that if I continued to drag my feet, he was going to say please, and then I would be unable to help myself, so I agreed before he had a chance to say the magic word friends should not have to use on one another.

On the way down he talked a little about how Liz used to ask him to show up at school when there had been some kind of bring-a-parent situation and Harlan Bowie was too tied up to make it. He thought Bix was glad he would show, but he could never be certain. He had never been able to reach through to her. She had extraordinary composure and control. He and Liz had attended her high school graduation together, because Harl had an appointment in Tallahassee that day.

I said I thought a father should be able to manage at least a graduation for an only child and only daughter. And Meyer said it had often seemed so to him, too.

So we drove on down to Tropicana Grove Retreat, and Meyer was so troubled, I found myself getting emotionally hung on this blonde I couldn’t remember. By God, anybody who cruises with McGee deserves better treatment than the fates, or her father, had apparently given her.

The establishment was in a quiet area in Coral Gables, with low buildings, a lot of very handsome old banyans, lots of plantings, summer birdsongs, and old parties being wheelchaired along curved walks. They made a phone call from the office. A stocky woman in a gray and white uniform appeared and introduced herself as Mrs. Kreiger and smiled in pleasant recognition at Meyer, and led us back through garden walks to Garden Suite Five. T. Harlan Bowie sat in a wheelchair in the airconditioned, carpeted living room, watching a cable television picture of the changing prices on a brokerage house board, while a man was talking about the rails confirming the Dow. He turned it off with the remote control.

Tall thin frail man. His handshake was fragile and tentative. His eyes had that look. It is not so much a haunted look or a hollow-eyed look. It is a look of constant and thoughtful appraisal that keeps going on and on in spite of all conversations, all diversions. Any man who outgrows the myths of childhood is ninety-nine percent aware and convinced of his own mortality. But then comes the chilly breath on the nape of the neck, a stirring of the air by the wings of the bleak angel. When a man becomes one hundred percent certain of his inevitable death, he gets The Look.

He had a long face, high forehead, the finebodied white hair of the erstwhile blonde. Mrs. Kreiger told him she would be back in an hour to take him to therapy. She had broad pale lips, lovely eyes, a tidy muscularity in the way she moved. She told us happily, in a little more than a trace of German accent, that Mr. Bowie had moved the toes on his right foot.

He flushed. Part irritation. Part Aw shucks, it was nothin‘, guys.

He looked at the door she closed behind her and said, “Und soon, Herr Bowie, ve vill haff you running races, nein?” He asked us to sit. He said to Meyer, “Did you tell Mr. McGee what we discussed?”

“Some of the background, Harl. Not what you want done.”

He turned the chair slightly to face me more directly. “Mr. McGee, I know damned little about what my daughter, Bix, felt and thought and believed. I’ve had a lot of time to think. And a lot of the thinking has been painful. Appraisal of myself as a father-very, very poor. I know that when she was a toddler we were close. She adored me. That was the good part of it. Our only chick. Liz had had a bad time. Couldn’t have more. You know, Bix never went through any ugly period at all. Beautiful baby, lovely little girl, handsome teenager. No acne, no braces, no gawky period. Liz and I were too aware of her being an only child, I guess. And awed by how damned pretty she was, and upset at all the admiration she got. So we were too harsh with her. Two against one. United front. She had to strain like hell to get our approval, and we were too chinchy about giving it out. We made her obedient and docile and sweet, and we probably made her unsure of herself. But how can you tell? How many chances do you get to raise a child? I was very, very busy. So I wasn’t paying attention, not to Bix as a person. She was an object. Beautiful child.

“Then when Liz… got sick, Bix came down. She stayed with her mother right through it. And it wasn’t pretty. Bix was a rock. I took her for granted. I took her strength for granted. God only knows how badly it tore her up. She never let me know. Without Liz I was a zombie. I went through the motions. It should have been the two of us then. Father and daughter. But each of us was alone in a private way. I had my own hell. I don’t know where she was spending her time. She was just… around.”

He gave me a despairing look, and made an empty gesture with his hands. “I’m dithering. I’m not saying it. Look. I don’t even know how she lived when she was here with me in Miami. I’d find her in the house with friends. Pretty oddball-looking kids. I’d go through and they’d stare at me as if I came from Mars; as if my house were a bus station and I were some strange type in transit. Empty eyes, loud music. She went to Mexico in early January this year. Seven months later she was dead. I want to know… what it was like. I want to know-Oh God help me-I just want to know if she was having a good time.” His voice broke and he put his hand across his eyes.

Meyer said, “Harl had an agency do a little investigating. But the reports are facts without any flavor. He’d follow the back trail himself, if he could. He tried to think of somebody who could get away, somebody without a regular job or a family and he thought of me. When we talked about it, I said you were the man for the job. He wants us both to go. All expenses. Take our time and do it right and come back and tell him how it was for her.”

“And find out,” Bowie said, “what kind of people she was running around with-find out if they could have played… some kind of cruel game.” I questioned him, and he explained. After he had had word of his daughter’s fatal accident, he had received a letter that had been written and mailed at least a week before she had died, but had been sent to the house that had been sold and had taken a long time in transit. He took it out of the drawer and handed it to me.

Ordinary mail. Sent from Oaxaca in July, with a date stamp so blurred it could have been the 23rd or the 28th. Cheap envelope, cheap paper. Blue ballpoint. It was small untidy writing, half script, half printed, with no clue to the sex of whoever wrote it. No salutation or date or signature.

You want Bix to come back ever, or ever want to come back even, you better come after her or send somebody pretty quick because she doesn’t have any idea what’s happening to her lately.

“My daughter always knew exactly what was happening,” Bowie said. “Somebody was trying to create a problem for her. I don’t know why. A cruel little game of some kind. The part about her not wanting to come back certainly means that this note has no relationship to the accident.”

So we had talked a little longer, but by then I knew it was for no other reason than to have us report on the end of the short and happy life of Miss Bowie. But he did not look as if he really wanted to hear anything too ugly.

Maybe it wasn’t very pretty for Bix Bowie. Maybe it was a dingy way to die.

So we had the brief reports from the investigation agency, and we had the translation of the Mexican police report of the death, and we had some duplicate prints made from a negative Harlan Bowie had given us. The picture did not restore my memory of her. Full face, half a smile. A flash picture taken the last Christmas the family was intact. Home from school. Without a schoolgirl look. Mature woman. Long creamy spill and fall of thick, ivory-blond hair. Watchful eyes. Meyer told me they were dark, dark blue. Mouth curved with secrets untold. The expression was contradictory. She looked bland and reserved, almost content. But the slant of the flashbulb light picked up a little bulge at the corner of the jaw, a little knot of muscle, a look of tension held under the clench of teeth, under iron control.

The tin bird whoofed down the runway and lifted sharply, while everybody played the habitual game of total indifference which hides the shallow breathing and contracted sphincters of the Air Age.

I looked across the blue bay at the fantasy known as Miami Beach. Cubes of maple sugar. Candy minarets. Special low summer rates. We were off to start at the end of her life and work back.

Two

THE TWO Mexican stewardesses in first class were tidy, handsome, efficient, and very polite. It was restful to find they had apparently not been programmed to smile constantly. The drink cart was well stocked, and it stopped as often as you wanted it to. Lunch was late, fairly heavy, and though no gourmet feast, was served in a manner which had more of the illusion of permanence than is created by the disposable plastics of the domestic airlines in the States.

The plates were heavy cream-colored china with a gold band. Tablecloth and napkins were thick linen. The cutlery was massive silver plate, and the cream, sugar, salt, and pepper came in chunky, permanent, cut-glass containers.

Meyer found the whole thing pleasantly inconsistent. “The jet aircraft is a limited life-support system. It hangs up here, above the thunderheads, heated, pressurized, ventilated, with food and water and waste disposal. The duration of the system depends on the fuel supply. So, if one comes down at the wrong place at the wrong speed for the wrong reasons, the logical debris should be of disposable items. Travis, the mind boggles at visions of a wooded hill littered with broken pieces of dinner plates, cups, saucers and silver tableware. As if a dining room fell out of the sky. Those horrid little plastic compartmented plates and cardboard shotglasses for the cream and salad dressing are more apt for scenes of disaster. So the whole bit is an affirmation that it can’t possibly fall out of the sky. Subtle and interesting. Now if they could cover these jukebox plastic bulkheads with a very thin layer of teak or library oak…”

“Mighty guru, take your bulging brain off the psychology of air travel and put it on your old buddy, T. Harlan Bowie. He did not ring loud and clear. There is a crack in the bell somewhere.”

Meyer shrugged. “Sure.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“He rings true enough, as what he is. What you sense is that his concern seems a little faked. It isn’t. It’s limited by his own limitations. He’s using us to buy a kind of emotional respectability. He’s using us to pat his image back into shape. Oh, he adored her when she was a toddler. Tiny girls are cute and huggable, like puppies and kittens. Lots of people adore kittens, and when they get to be cats they take them for a nice ride and dump them out in the country somewhere and imagine them living in a nice barn, catching mice. MeGee, the world is full of reasonably nice guys like Harl. They go through all the motions of home and family, but there is no genuine love or emotion involved. There is an imitation kind. They are unconscious practicing hypocrites. They’re stunted in a way they don’t and can’t recognize. If I had to nail it down, I’d say that people like Harl go around with the unspoken, unrealized conviction that nobody else in the world exists, really, except as… bits of stage dressing in the life role that they are playing. So wife and child and job and home are part of the image, and he kept it burnished and tidy, but without any deep involvement with anybody but T. Harlan Bowie. Now he’s studying his way into his new role. Tragic, crippled figure. So the dramatics are off key, just a little. And the tears are not quite real. Our mission is part of the new image. But don’t fault him. He believes he is really in the midst of life and always has been. He doesn’t know any better, because he’s never known anything else. What a limited man believes is emotional reality is indeed his emotional reality.”

“Doesn’t everybody fake a little in their own way?”

“Sure. And you’re aware of it when you do, aren’t you?”

“Uncomfortably.”

“But he isn’t. And that’s the difference.”

I thought it over. “Question answered, Meyer. What was his wife like?”

“A nice woman. Comfortable. Adjusted.”

“Would Bix have been able to understand what you’ve told me about him?”

“She would have known it existed. Whether or not she understood it is something else. Maybe she thought it is what people mean when they talk these days about the generation gap. I imagine it would have given her the feeling that no matter how hard she tried, she could never really please him. She would believe, maybe, that there was some well of warmth and understanding and love that she couldn’t ever reach, without realizing that she couldn’t reach it because it wasn’t there, not for her, not for anybody.”

I retrieved the investigation reports from the inside pocket of my jacket and studied them carefully, looking for any lead I might have missed the other times I had gone over them.

The group had left Miami on January 3, five of them traveling in a blue heavy-duty Chevrolet pick-up truck two years old, Florida license, registered in the name of Walter Rockland, who, up until Christmas, had been a swimming pool attendant at the Sultana Hotel on Miami Beach. A few days before Christmas Miss Beatrice Bowie had withdrawn eight thousand dollars from her savings account, leaving a balance of thirteen thousand two hundred and eleven dollars and sixty cents, twelve thousand of which had been part of the twenty thousand from her mother’s estate. She had purchased a new camper body for the truck and the group had purchased a great deal of camping equipment and supplies-sleeping bags, a shelter tent, hatchets, camp stove, netting, gasoline lanterns, flashlights, first-aid kits.

They had shown up on January 10 in the public records at Brownsville, Texas, where they had applied for and received tourist cards good for six months. The other three members of the group were Minda McLeen, age twenty, occupation student, address Box 80, Coral Gables, Florida; Carl Sessions, age twenty-two, occupation musician, listed at the same address as Miss McLeen; and Jerome Nesta, age twenty-six, occupation sculptor, home address Box 2130, Key West, Florida.

The agency had come up with only a few additional facts about the quintet. Miss McLeen had stopped going to the classes of the University of Miami in May of the previous year. Walter Rockland had been fired by the Sultana Hotel, and though the personnel manager would not state why, there was reason to believe that the hotel management thought he was implicated in some way in a series of robberies of the winter guests at the hotel. Jerome Nesta had been arrested three and a half years previously at Marathon, Florida, in a narcotics raid, had been charged with and had pleaded not guilty to possession of marijuana. When the case came to trial, there was insufficient proof that the marked and tagged container presented in court was in fact the same container taken from him when he was taken into custody, and a defense motion to dismiss was granted by the judge.

And that, of course, is the tragic flaw in the narcotics laws-that possession of marijuana is a felony. Regardless of whether it is as harmless as some believe, or as evil and vicious as others believe, savage and uncompromising law is bad law, and the good and humane judge will jump at any technicality that will keep him from imposing a penalty so barbaric and so cruel. The self-righteous pillars of church and society demand that “the drug traffic be stamped our and think that making posownHion a felony will do the trick. Their ignorance of the roots of the drug traffic is as extensive as their Ignorance of the law.

Let’s say a kid in Florida, a college kid eighteen years old, is picked up with a couple of joints on him. He is convicted of possession, which is an automatic felony, and given a suspended sentence. What has he lost? The judge who imposes sentence knows the kid has lost the right to vote, the right to own a gun, the right to run for public office. He can never become a doctor, dentist, C.P.A., engineer, lawyer, architect, realtor, osteopath, physical therapist, private detective, pharmacist, school teacher, barber, funeral director, masseur, or stock broker. He can never get any job where he has to be bonded or licensed. He can’t work for the city, county, or federal governments. He can’t get into West Point, Annapolis, or the Air Force Academy. He can enlist in the military, but will be denied his choice of service, and probably be assigned to a labor battalion.

It is too rough. It slams too many doors. It effectively destroys the kid’s life. It is too harsh a penalty for a little faddist experimentation. The judge knows it. So he looks for any out, and then nothing at all happens to the kid. Too many times harsh law ends up being, in effect, no law at all. All automatic felony laws are, without exception, bad law, from the Sullivan Act in New York State, to the hit and run in California. They destroy the wisdom and discretion of the Court, and defeat the purposes they are meant to serve.

I wondered if Jerry Nesta, sculptor, knew how close he had come to the edge. I wondered if it had marked him in any way. And I wondered if I’d ever get a chance to ask him.

So they had crossed over into Matamoros, Mexico, on January 10, and some seven months later, on August 3, a Sunday, according to the translation of the police report, Miss Beatrice Bowie, twenty-two years old, American tourist, had been driving at dusk down State Highway 175, heading southwest toward Oaxaca. At a steep and dangerous part of the highway, the vehicle left the road at a spot fifteen miles from the city. A bus driver on a switchback on the opposite side of a valley saw the bloom of flame and reported it when he reached the bus station in Oaxaca. As night had fallen, the police were unable to locate the automobile until the following morning. She had been alone. The car was a British Ford with State of Oaxaca plates, owned by a resident American named Bruce Bundy, age 44, of 81 Calle las Artes, Oaxaca.

He stated that on Saturday afternoon he had loaned his car to a young man, an American tourist, known to him only as George. He did not know why there was a girl alone in the car, or why she had been on that road. Police could find no identification. On Monday afternoon a woman came to the funeral parlor and made a positive identification of the body as that of Beatrice Bowie. She made a statement to the effect that Miss Bowie and Miss McLeen had been staying in the guest apartment at her winter home on Avenida de las Mariposas in the section known as La Colonia. The woman, a French national, Madame Eva Vitrier, told the police that several days earlier her guests had evidently quarreled, and Miss McLeen had left for Mexico City. She said that Miss Bowie had seemed upset and depressed. When she did not return to the guest apartment on Sunday night, and when on Monday she heard of the recovery of the body of the unidentified woman, she had thought it might be Miss Bowie, and discovered that indeed it was. She knew Mr. Bundy, but did not believe that Miss Bowie knew him. The name George did not mean anything to her. But it was probable that Miss Bowie knew him. All the young American tourists seemed to become known to one another.

The police had returned to Mrs. Vitrier’s home with her and had there picked up Miss Bowie’s personal effects, including her purse and her tourist card which, on the day of her death; was almost a month overdue for renewal. Their search for the young man known only as George had been unsuccessful.

As I put the papers away again, Meyer said, “Anything new?”

“Just more questions. When did she send for that bank draft to clean out her account?”

“Harl said it was in late March.”

I had the address where they had sent it. She had been at Los Tres Rios Trailer Park at Culiacan, over in the State of Sinaloa, on the Gulf of California, and it had been made out to her, payable at the Culiacan branch of the Banco Nacional.

“My question right now, Meyer, has something to do with it being one hell of a trip from Brownsville to Culiacan and another hell of a trip from Culiacan down to Oaxaca. And did they all go, and did they go in that camper, and where and when and how did they split up? And the Mexicans are very touchy about people getting their vehicles back to the border in six months. You can renew and go back in again, but don’t get cute about overstaying your tourist card deadline. Why did she want the money, all of it, and why did she overstay her permit?”

“Shut up,” said Meyer, “and look out at the nice volcano, McGee. I mean at the three nice volcanoes. No, by God, there are four of them.”

“Citlaltepetl, Malinche, Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatopetl.”

“Travis, do you have something caught in your throat?”

“If you want to cheat a little, you can call that one over there Orizaba instead of Citlaltepetl.”

“I did not know you had any expertise on Mexico’s snow-capped peaks.”

“Once upon a time there was a roof garden in Puebla, and a little tile stairway going up to it, and the biggest mesh hammock you ever saw in your life, old friend. And when the moonlight was right and the night balmy, a fellow could go padding up the tile stairs and stretch out in that hammock, and one Maria Amparo Celestina Rodriguez de la Vega would take up her warm one third of said hammock and make a fellow name each volcano and name it right.”

“Is that where you got your pidgin Mexican, senor?”

“It helped.”

So fasten seat belts, and, in the late afternoon, head down and into that misty, poisonous, saffron smutch that fills the mountain bowl of that great city half full. Better than six million of the fifty million Mexicans live on that swampy plateau seven thousand five hundred feet high. An inaccurate comparison would be twenty-four million Americans living in Denver. Mountains rim the Mexico plateau, enclosing and holding the exhaust fumes of uncounted thousands of trucks and buses ranging from brand new to items so ancient they have a sidelong, clattering shamble, steaming and groaning. And the exhaust of a bedazzling number of Volkswagens. A big new plant on the Puebla highway stamps them out like production-line tacos, and every boulevard is a combination scrambling road rally, dodgit game, and demonstration of machismo. Add the smoke of a few hundred thousand little charcoal cooking fires, and the city is in an unending haze, saffron-gold on the sunny days, purple-brown when it is cloudy.

Our cab driver was a large, loud, jolly type with a dashboard covered with religious statuary and medallions. With graceful little flourishes of hand and wrist on the wheel, he slid through openings that opened just as he got there, closed just as he got through. He said we were very lucky it was not yet five o’clock, because we would make the trip to the Hotel Camino Real in perhaps twenty minutes, and a half hour later it might take an hour and twenty minutes. I translated for Meyer. Meyer sat with his eyes shut and said he would have preferred the hour and twenty minute version.

Once he got to the Paseo de la Reforma heading out toward Chapultepec, he was able to play the chicken game at each traffic circle-at Colon, Cuauhtemoc, Independencia, Diana. To play the game properly, you get into five-abreast traffic and accelerate to fifty as you enter the traffic circle, then all go screaming and swaying around the monument in the middle and find room to peel off and out of the group and exit from the circle at the street you want.

Meyer had opened his eyes: They were too far open. I tried to take his mind off the chicken game by telling him bits of lore-such as the fact that Chapultepec means Grasshopper Hill. But all he could say, watching the traffic inches away, was a barely audible “Dear kindly Jesus.” He said it several times.

We popped out of the flow at Diana, sped across the bow of several buses, and gradually slowed down as we went along Mariano Escobedo. The driver turned into the hotel entrance, stopped abruptly, hitched around to face us, looked at his watch, and with a big grin said in semi-English, “Twenny-toos minootis!”

“I’ll just sit right here for a while,” Meyer said. But a large young man garbed like an Ecuadorian admiral handed us out and got us and our luggage into the incoming flow. My first look at the Camino Real. Twenty-five million dollars worth of it. Seven connected buildings, the tallest only five stories. Entrance lobby the size of a football field, paved with little oblongs of gleaming hardwood, each piece smaller than the end of a pack of cigarettes. Bold colors, daring architecture, startling vistas, all of it a maze of shops and bars and lounges, fountains and pools and restaurants, stairways and corridors and carpeted luxury. Seven hundred and something rooms and suites.

The reservation was in order, the bellhops brisk, and after a very short elevator ride and a very long walk, we were deposited in a pair of interconwcting singles on the third floor of a bedroom wing. Drinks came swiftly. I unpacked. I heard Meyer’s voice raised in sonorous melody, and wandered into his place and found him in his giant tub, his drink on the broad marble encircling slab, the black pelt on chest and shoulders foamed with soap.

“About those last lions,” he said. “Too damned fat and sleepy and indifferent. Send the boys out to get some lean and hungry lions. How can we put the fear of God into those Christians unless we use faster lions?”

“Anything else?”

“Who catered that last orgy? There were only three dancing girls apiece. An austere orgy is no orgy at all.”

“I’ll make a note of it.”

“And get me my fiddle.”

“So soon? We haven’t put out the last fire yet.”

He hoisted his glass. “Here’s to primitive, backward Mexico. Here’s to hardship.”

I left him there, paddling happily, soaping and singing, and went back into my room and looked up Ron Townsend’s number in the oversized phone book. The hotel operator told me I could dial direct. There was a little gadget on the phone. Push the gadget and dial.

A girl answered and I asked for Ron.

She had a good voice, husky and very personal. She got my name and came back and said, “Hang in there while waterboy gets the soap out of his eyes, friend.”

He came on the line, properly enthusiastic. He is a young partner in a Miami advertising firm. He was born and partially raised in Cuba. He is the agency expert in Mexico and doing well. I had made a good recovery for them some time ago when a secretary, unbonded, took off with enough cash out of the safe to sting them pretty good. He was delighted to learn Meyer was with me, and apologetic about having a date he couldn’t break. But he said he could stop off on the way, so in thirty minutes or so he joined us at the bar in the Camino Real which he favored, named Azulejos, bringing with him the voice on his phone, a young girl at least five ten, suitably spectacular, and clad in minileather fastened with big brass chains and galoshes snaps. Her name was Miranda Dale and she had just finished a bit part in a West German motion picture they had shot at Mazatlan, on Mexico’s west coast.

I told Ron our problem, and the girl listened to it with a pretty and sympathetic show of interest. I asked him if he could recommend a useful and influential contact in Oaxaca, and he came up with one named Enelio Fuentes and wrote it on the back of his business card and slid it across to me. He said Enelio was an old friend, had a big VW agency and other business interests scattered around the State of Oaxaca. But he couldn’t help with a name in Culiacan. He said he would phone Fuentes and tell him to take care of me if I had to look him up.

Then I asked him how he would go about checking on the Chevrolet truck and camper with Florida plates, registered to a Walter Rockland, and he said he wouldn’t even try. In theory you get car papers at the border, and they keep a copy at the place where you enter, and if you leave at some other border town, the stamped papers are supposed to go back to the place where you entered, and then the set is supposed to be sent to Mexico City and filed somewhere, possibly by some branch of the Mexican Tourist Bureau. But that was only theory.

I said we’d be back in Mexico City sooner or later, but right now the most useful thing to do was get down to Oaxaca while there was still a good chance that friends of Miss Bix might be around.

They had to leave. Went across the dim and crowded room. Those long, sweet, taffy-sleek legs, from boot leather to mini-leather, seemed to gather available light and reflect it. Three mariachi types were on the stand, one singing a ballad, and he inserted an improvisation I could not catch. Ron turned, grinning, and called something to the musicians, and there was laughter and applause.

Meyer and I stayed on. He had discovered that tequila anejo conmemorativo, with sangrita on the side, is one of the world’s more pleasant drinks. The anejo-the “j” pronounced like a guttural cough-means old. The conmemorativo means a very special distillation. It is drunk straight, pale amber in color, strong, smooth, and clean. The chaser’s full name is sangrita de la viuda, which means for some reason I have yet to learn, “little blood of the widow”. It is tomato juice, citrus juices, with several varieties of pepper and spices. It changes the taste buds, readies them for the next sip of the tequila. Meyer crooned and beamed and ordered more.

But later his mood changed. “Vulgarity can be many things,” he said. “It can be having a good time while en route to where the daughter of an old friend died. Dead young women are a pitiful waste.”

We had finished a late dinner. “Tequila shouldn’t make you morose,” I told him.

“Without it, I would probably be crying,” he said.

Three

WE WERE reserved on an early Mexicana flight. It was an elderly Douglas with four genuine propellers and a full load of passengers. Noisy engines, with oil stains on the housings, littered floor, some popped rivets, lots of vibration. My turn at the window seat. Went roaring and clattering down the runway and lifted off. You get conditioned to that steep upward slant of the jets. This thing lifted off and seemed to hang there, fighting for every slow foot of altitude. Lots of time to look down into the streets. At seventy-five hundred feet as a starting place, and with a full load, we did a lot of clawing before we finally came up out of the last of the bright morning smutch and made a long slow turn.

A very plump stewardess in a soiled uniform served us paper cups of coffee and sweet rolls, and she did a lot of bantering with the customers. Then we went between Popo and his sleeping lady, Ixtaccihuatl. The blazing white summits of the dead volcanoes were easily a thousand feet above us, and vivid against the indigo sky. We were close enough to see snow plumes trailing off the cliffs of Ixta in the morning winds.

Then down along the torn and crumpled country, old stone spilled from the spine of the Sierra Madre. A day so clear you could see tiny villages, see the pale narrow marks of burro paths along the ridges. ‘Ibo harsh a land to sustain life, but it does. Spaniards could never have taken it from the Indios without all those cute political tricks, turning them against each other. Travel-worn old DC grinding slowly down the side of the rocky world, a tin impertinence making its rackety noise across the stone indifference of the volcanic land. So eat the sweet roll and look down at the world of a thousand years ago. Mexicana Airlines sells tickets on a time machine.

So we came down into the valley of Oaxacapronounced wuh-HOCK-ah-beginning the descent at the upper end of the valley some twenty miles from the airfield. Green valley encircled by old burned brown rounded hills. It is a plateau valley, five thousand feet high, in the Sierra Madre del Sur, and the Pacific is not far away. Skimmed lower. Saw a broken, abandoned, stone church amid cornfields. Saw a man scratching a groove in brown soil with a wooden plow pulled by slow oxen. Saw village children, bright as spilled flowers. And our pilot set the old crock down with such precise and loving delicacy that there was but one small yelp of rubber, and not the slightest jar:

A neat little terminal, wine warm air, a confusion of greetings and luggage and taxis and hotel vehi cles. The man from our hotel made himself known by pacing through confusion, calling “Veeeek Tory Aaaah! Veeeek lbry Aaaah!”

So soon we were off in a VW bus, the other passengers two stone-faced ladies with blue hair, large satchels, and guidebooks in German, and one young Mexican couple. The girl was in a smart travel suit of painful newness. The boy looked everywhere except at her. New gold rings gleamed.

We passed a sign as we approached the city, assorting that there were eighty thousand people therein. We skirted an edge of it, and climbed steep grades, then, in lowest low, ground up the long, r4teep, divided driveway to the parking area at the top, and the portico over the entrance to the Hotel Victoria.

The modern hotel, five stories tall, stretched along the top of a ridge, looking out across all of the city. Down the slope, in random array, beyond a huge swimming pool, were individual bungalows, each with carport, each landscaped with brilliant flowers and flowering vines. Rough stone steps and walks and stone driveways wound down through the bungalow community, all of it behind a guarded security fence.

The bungalows had girl-names instead of numbers, and they put us in Alicia. There was one large, tiled, plain room, simply furnished, two double beds, a bath, a dressing room, and a small porch in front overlooking the panorama-a porch with a tin table and poolside chairs. Alicia was two hundred and fifty pesos a day for two. Twenty dollars. I had explained to Meyer the quick easy McGee system for keeping track of the pesos. A fifty-peso bill is a four-dollar bill. A ten-peso bill is an eighty-cent bill.

Meyer stood on the porch and looked at the city and the mountains and the blue, blue sky. He looked at the flowers. He sniffed the flavors of the summery air: Then he turned to me and said, “I would have this handy little magic wand and I would take one little pass at you. Kazam! Suddenly you are Miranda Dale, looking at me like she looked at Ron Townsend.”

“Didn’t all those legs make you feel insecure?”

“And so did the age of the child. But this is the sort of place where I could try to overcome minor obstacles.”

“You are a hairy, over-educated, lecherous old man.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, McGee. It’s eleven-fifteen. What now?”

“Our wheels.” We took a cab down into the city. The Hertz office was on a side street near the zocalo-the public square. The man was pleasant enough, but had absolutely no record of any reservation. He would have a lot of nice cars soon. Maybe in a week. He said he felt desolated by being unable to serve me. I said I would like to give him a four-dollar bill to ease his desolation. It was not to spur him to greater effort on my behalf, I said, because I was certain he would give me every possible help. It was a token of my understanding. He said there was, in truth, a car, but it would be a pity to rent it to me, because I obviously was used to better, and deserved better. It had been many, many kilometros and needed small repairs and was unclean. A boy with a Le Mans psychosis brought it around.

It was a Ford Falcon, from the Guadalajara assem bly plant. Made in Mexico by Mexicans. Pale green. Four doors. Standard shift. It had been thirty-five thousand kilometers, and had been grooved on both sides by near disaster. And it had been traveling some very dusty roads. I signed for it. I took it on a test run, with Meyer copiloting, using the street map they had given us at the airport. Either the Ford engineers have decided Mexicans are a small race, or the cars shrink in the dry climate. With the seat as far back as it would go, my knees were on either side of the edge of the steering wheel, and unless I remembered to swing the right knee out of the way, each time I shifted into high I gave myself a sharp and painful rap on the inside edge of the kneecap. When we hit the first potholes I found the front shocks were gone. The front end hit the frame with a metallic thunk, and then a rumbling chatter.

So I asked directions, and found the Ford garage about seven blocks west of the zocalo. It was then a little past noon. The boss man took it for a turn around the block and came back shaking his head, and said I could have it at four.

We walked to the central square, along narrow sidewalks on narrow streets. The plaster-over-stone fronts of the two-story residences and shops formed a solid wall along the walkway, and they had been painted and repainted with pure strong pigments. One blue wall brought Meyer to a stop. Maybe it had been painted and patched fifty times. Layers had cracked, peeled, faded. It was all the shades of blue there are.

“Fix that with transparent epoxy,” he said, “peel off a rectangle eight feet long and five feet high, frame it in rough-cut cypress with a white stain, and take it to any decent gallery-”

“And somebody will tell you their little daughter could do it better.”

“The creative act is in selecting which rectangle to frame. It is very damned beautiful, Travis. And that talented daughter is a rotten kid.”

Buses, trucks, cars, bicycles, and the ubiquitous popping and snorting of the Mexican plague-the motor scooter. So we went out of the sun heat into the cool shade of the gigantic trees of a splendid zocalo. It had its ornate circular bandstand in the middle, a criss-cross of wide walkways and a perimeter walk past gaudy riots of flowerbeds. Traffic circled it counterclockwise. There were men, women, children selling serapes, shoeshines, chewing gum, straw baskets and straw animals, black pottery, fresh flowers and wilted flowers, serapes, cigarettes, fake Indian relics, silver jewelry, junk jewelry, firecrackers, aprons, serapes, ice cream, soft drinks, and hot tacos stuffed with God only knows what kind of meat. And serapes.

There was evident poverty, beggars with twisted limbs, sick children, stray mongrels, but there was a sense of great life and vitality, of enduring laughter. We found an empty bench. Meyer sat and saw everything, soaked it up, and smiled and smiled. And it was Meyer who spotted a little group on one of the diagonal paths, carrying purchases from the public market, walking toward the largest hotel that fronted on the zocalo, an old ornate stone and plaster structure with a sign proclaiming it as the Hotel Marques del Valle. There was a long, narrow roofed porch across the front of it, a couple of steps up from sidewalk level. Fat cement columns supported arches that held up the overhanging bulk of the ho tel. The porch was two tables wide and about thirty tables long, about half of them occupied, with white-coated waiters hustling drinks and food.

It was a group of four young men and three girls. The college-age men were wearing faded Mexican work shirts, bleached khakis. Two of the men and one of the girls were barefoot, and the others wore Mexican sandals. The girls wore shorts with bright cotton Indian blouses, and the boys were extravagantly bearded, long-haired. This, as Meyer pointed out, was clear indication they had been in Mexico for a long time. The government had long since closed the border to what were called “heepees,” so the shorn locks and whiskers had to be regrown south of the border.

We got up and followed along. The waiters pushed two tables together for them. Meyer and I took a table about twenty feet from them, which was as close as we could get. The tempo of the public square was diminishing visibly. Shops were closing. It was siesta time, and not until two-thirty or three would the town begin to stir again. Only the serape salesmen along the sidewalk stayed in business, holding up the rough woven gaudy wools, trying to catch the tourist eye, the tourist interest. And a dirty big-eyed child roamed from table to tatile, trying dispiritedly to vend her “cheeeklets.”

The young seven were a closed circle, totally indifferent to everything and everyone around them, relating and responding to one another. Too many for any initial contact. So I looked at the menu. Meyer had to trust me. The waiter was very patient with my verbless Spanish, and I was equally patient with his rudimentary English. So I managed to find a good solution-chicken enchiladas covered with Chihuahua cheese and baked. He said they had no Dos Equis, but if we wanted a dark beer, Negro Modelo might please us. And it did, and we were into the second bottle before the enchiladas came, bubbling hot in oval steel dishes.

After some thoughtful mastication, tempered with the dark beer, Meyer said, “Offhand, what are the immigration laws?”

“I’ll just leave you here, and you can take your chances.”

“I’ll send you a card every Christmas.”

Another student couple had appeared, a huge boy with a small head and a sensitive delicate face, and the blond silky hair and beard style of the Christus. He was with a small wiry black girl with a skin tone like dusty slate, sporting an African blouse and a tall tightly kinked African hairstyle through which she had bleached several startling amber-gold streaks.

“Wish me luck,” I told Meyer, and with beer in hand went ambling over to their table. There was one extra chair.

“Join you for a couple of minutes?”

They looked up at me with a quick, identical wariness, and looked away again, and kept talking as if I was not there. Bad tactics. Should have asked the stranger to go away.

So I sat down, smiling blandly, and cut into their conversation, saying, “I am not on vacation, kids. I am not looking for fun and games. I am not drunk. I am not fuzz.”

She stared at me with a hot, dark-eyed hostility and said, “Did you catch the strange word, darling? This fellow seems to have some sort of in-group syndrome.”

“Fuzz,” the boy said thoughtfully. “Wasn’t there some sort of quip about that we never understood, Della?” Boston accent.

“I don’t recall at the moment, dear.”

He put on a minstrel show, end-man accent, doing the Sambo thing very badly. “Hey, you all hear ‘bout what happen to Jemima?”

“No!” she said. “Whut happen to ol‘ Jemima?”

“Got herself picked up by the fuzz.”

“Lordy me! That sure musta stung.”

“Hyuck, hyuck, hyuck,” I said, unsmiling.

“Just go away,” Della said. “Be cooperative. Go back to your friend.”

“If you had to make a guess, why would you say I came over here?”

They glanced at each other. The boy shrugged. “I guess the most likely thing would be one of those little speeches about tolerance and miscegenation and all that, so that you can pretend to be so terribly understanding and get some queasy little kick out of it, and get some barroom conversational gambits back wherever you come from, and also, let’s see, delude yourself into believing that there is something so awfully swinging about you that you can bridge the communications gap.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He was bright. He was so damned right and so damned wrong, all at once. I rocked the chair back and laughed. They looked startled, then angry, then they fought the temptation to smile, and then they were laughing. He had a piercing giggle, and he had a deep, rhythmic bray. We were being stared at. Finally, when I could get my breath, I said, “My name is Travis McGee. Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”

“Della Davis,” he said. “I’m Mike Barrington.” His was a large, hard, muscular hand.

“Equal time?” I asked. He nodded. She had the hiccups. “I’m loaded with a lot of kinds of tolerance and intolerance, and the only time I get defensive is when I identify some kind of tolerance or intolerance I didn’t know I had, or thought was something else. The only people who need queasy kicks are the ones with the sex hangups, and I think I was a little hung up when I was twelve years old, but not lately. I don’t need a new supply of small talk. And if I did, I wouldn’t look for the raw material on a hotel veranda. Anybody who gives it any thought knows that there has always been a communication gap between everybody. If any two people could ever really get inside each other’s head, it would scare the pee out of both of them. I don’t want to share your hopes and dreams, Mike. I just want to communicate in a very limited way, politely, with no stress on anybody.”

“I guess they aren’t with the mining company after all,” Della said to him. She turned to me. “We noticed you two and decided you weren’t tourists. There’s a mine up in the hills northeast of the city. Okay, Mister McGee, let’s communicate in our limited fashion.”

“If you two haven’t been here a month, communication ends.”

“We got here… the second of something. May or June, dear?” she asked.

“May,” said Mike, “and I change my guess. You’re looking for somebody’s baby darling, so in your nice, personable, reasonable way you can talk baby darling into coming back home to daddy. Or maybe that’s daddy you were sitting with over there. And you locate her-or him-and lay on the tickets, the kind you can’t cash in.”

“Closer. But that isn’t daddy over there. Daddy is back in Florida because he got nearly, but not quite, torn in half. And baby darling went home already. From here. In a box, early this month.”

“Oh sure. The one with the country-day-school nickname. What was it they called her, Del?”

“Hmmm. Dox? Nax? Bax?… Bix!”

I put one of the prints on the table, facing Della Davis. She pulled it closer.

“That one?” I asked.

“ ‘Tis she,” said Della. “We saw her around. You know. Stay here a while and you see everybody. Nod and smile. Didn’t socialize. The group she was in, or better the groups she ran with, we don’t make those scenes. I’ve got nothing for or against, you understand. Freedom is being left alone to do your own thing. Mike is a painter.”

“Wants to be a painter,” he corrected.

“And he doesn’t want to talk about it. He gets up early and he works all day and he goes to bed. And I prowl around driving hard bargains for tortillas and beans and rice and thinking up new ways to cook them. So today I got a little check from my sister in Detroit. So we’re living it up. I mean we aren’t here much, so we don’t keep good track. Anyway, she’s dead. What are you after?”

Mike Barrington said, “If old dads wondered if somebody pushed his baby darling off the mountain, he might send somebody like Mr. McGee to come and snuff around.”

“Oh, he doesn’t doubt that it was an accident. It was a pretty good police report. They were out of touch since last January, when she came to Mexico. He wants to know what the last six months of her life were like. How she lived and what she thought and how she died.”

“And,” said Della with an acid sweetness, “I suppose she was always a very good girl.”

“Kept her room neat,” I said, “got good grades, remembered names, thanked the hostess, brushed her teeth, and said her prayers. I guess he’d like to know who the hell she was.”

“None of them know who we are,” Mike said. “Or care much, really. Hang in there with an image they can live with, and they love it. You don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who you are.”

“So who was Bix Bowie?”

“A girl who died young,” Della Davis said.

“If I had to guess why,” Mike said, “and understand I’m not knocking her, I’d say she was probably turned way on. She was high and she was flying, and she was coming down the mountain without knowing if she was there or she was dreaming it, and it turned out she wasn’t dreaming it. In a dream, when you hit bottom, you wake up. The thing about Mexico, the stuff that’s on prescription in the States, here you can buy it in any drugstore. All you have to know is the name of what you want. Little lists circulate. The right names for Thorazine, Compazine, oral Demerol, Doriden, reserpine. Mardil, Benzedrine, other amphetamines. And in the public market, at the herb stalls, you can buy a kilo brick of very good, strong pot. It’s all a big lunch counter. You mix them up in brand new ways and wait and see where and how it hits you. If you like it, you try to find the same combination again.”

She put her wiry black hand on his and said, “That used to be the name of your game, sweetheart.”

“There’s a better high,” he said, smiling into her eyes. “I don’t ever have to come down off this one.” She gave me a bawdy wink, which somehow was not bawdy at all, and said, “Like the old saying, man, I changed his luck.”

“It needed changing,” Mike said.

“Was she any kind of hooked?” I asked them.

“I wouldn’t know,” Mike said. “I didn’t know her. It’s unfair to make guesses. Maybe one of those damned cows came clumping onto the road and she swerved and lost the car. But it’s fair to say she was some kind of user, because it was users she was with, mostly, but I don’t know how much or how often, or even what.”

“Those seven over there at that table. Would any of them know more about her?”

Uella leaned back and made a careful inspection. “I just don’t know. If any of them, it would be the girl facing this way, with the round face and the reddish hair and the big sunglasses, and the skinny follow sitting on her left. I think they’ve been here the longest.”

“Got a name for either of them?”

“Mike, isn’t that the girl they call Backspin?”

“Yes. God knows why.”

I used my little notebook to refresh my memory. “liere are the names of the ones she came into the country with back in January. Stop me if I come to anyone you know. Carl Sessions? Jerry Nesta? Minda McLeen?”

“Whoa,” Della Davis said. “Little bit of a darkhaired girl. She and that Bix were usually together. Strange-acting girl. Haven’t seen her around lately. But that doesn’t mean anything. Mike, darling, that horrible bore of a man with the funny hat. Wasn’t his name…?”

“McLeen. I went to the public market last week with Del and he introduced himself. Said he was looking for his daughter.”

“He still around?”

“I have no idea.”

“Walter Rockland?” They both looked blank, both shrugged.

“They came down in a Chevy pickup, blue, with a new camper body on it.”

She looked at Mike. “Rocko?” she asked.

“He says the name is Rockland, and the truck fits. Mr. McGee, is he a little older than the rest of the bunch? Husky?”

“That fits.”

“Then Miss Bix came down here in bad company if she came with that one,” Della said. “That one is one mean honkey son of a bitch. That one is a smart ass and a hustler. When did we have that fuss with him, honey?”

“About the fourth of July I think. The day after the fourth.” They took turns telling me about it. They’d gone to visit a couple they knew, who were living in a travel trailer at the trailer park over near the Plaza de la Danza. Rocko’s camper was in a nearby site. Evidently someone had pried open a little door in the side of the camper and stolen his little tank of bottle gas. He came over to the travel trailer in an ugly mood, acting as if it was the fault of the friends of Mike and Della for not seeing it happen. Mike told him to take it easy. Rocko looked the situation over and told Mike he didn’t need any advice from him or his spade chick. They were standing outside the travel trailer.

Mike swung on Rocko and missed, and Rocko tagged him as he lunged forward off balance.

“And,” said Della, “Mike was out of it right then. And that mean bastard knew it, but he hit him three more times before he could fall down, and then kicked him in the side. I jumped on his back and reached around to claw his face, and he bucked me off right into the side of the trailer. It sprained my neck and I went around for a week with my head way over on the side like this.”

“Is he still there?”

“Our friends left not long after that. We had no reason to go back. Maybe he’s still there.” They told me how to find it. It was on the west side of town. It was near a street carnival. It was near a school. It had an iron fence around it. It was near the Ford garage. Oh. And called Los Pajaros Trailer Court.

With considerable animation, Della said, “We’ve got a crazy pad, built like into a corner of a walled garden where there used to be some kind of tourist home that burned. We met such a sweet guy in Mexico City at the art school, and we were running out of money, and he said we could stay there. Outdoor plumbing, and a well with a pump that Mike fixed, and all the tame flowers have gone wild. It’s about a mile along the Coyotepec road. You ought to come and see us and…”

She froze, and her eyes changed and narrowed. “You are some kind of sneak, man. What the hell am I saying? Who knows you?”

“We know him, honey,,” Mike said gently. “You have to go along with your own reaction. We can’t keep all the walls up all the time. We can’t demand credentials.”

“Easier for you,” she said obliquely. “The man can be so dear, and then his partner takes over and raps you on your kinky haid until your ears bleed, and then the dear man takes his turn with sweet talk.”

“Come and see us if you get a chance. On the left on the way to the airport,” Mike said. “Look for an old red jeep parked under the trees by the wall.”

“I’m sorry,” Della Davis said.

“I’ll stop by and say hello. Thanks for the invitation. One thing I forgot to ask. The man who owned the car she drove off the road. Bruce Bundy. Know him? Or the woman who identified her body, the French woman, Mrs. Vitrier?”

They did not know them. Mike said, “There are some eerie people living in these little resort spots in Mexico. Here and in Cuernavaca and Taxco and San Miguel. Some are loaded and some are just making it. And the summer is hunting time, both ways. All the kids come flooding down, and there are weirdo types who stalk the kids, and hard kids that stalk the resident crazies. I used to make that scene. Now I don’t need it. I can’t use it. Depending on what hangups you run into it can go all the way from laughs and kicks to nightmares you couldn’t believe.”

Their waiter came with the tab. I made a foolish move to pay it, and nearly lost both of them. I relinquished it to Mike, saying, “It was going to be a deductible contribution to the fine arts.”

They softened, their pride undamaged.

We said good-bye, see you around, see you soon, and I went back to Meyer.

Four

JUST AS I was finishing my factual summary report to Meyer, four departed from the group of seven. One of the girls and three of the boys took off and headed slowly along one of the shady walks that angled across the zocalo, in the somnolence of the warm siesta afternoon. Only a half dozen tables on the porch were occupied. The sun was slanting in. The three who were left-the round-faced redhead with the curious nickname, the very skinny boy, and a muscular girl with a tight cap of brown curls under sunglasses with blue lenses-moved back to an empty inside table out of the sun. A yawning waiter went over to them.

A red jeep went by with Mike driving. Della was talking to him, gesturing with little chopping strokes of a slender black hand. The windshield was down, and the breeze of passage streamed back his silky hair and beard.

Our waiter brought us more Negro Modelo, and when I glanced again at the three of them, I saw that after the departure of their four friends, they were no longer turned inward upon themselves, making their own closed world of talk but were now aware of what was around them. They had become interested in us. The redhead, staring at us, said something inaudible to the others. The boy laughed and laughed. The big-shouldered girl in the blue glasses did not react. It was idle interest, and we were fair game, Business types.

Establishment. She was pretty good at her little jokes. She kept the boy laughing, never taking her eyes off me. The quite obvious intent was to make me uncomfortable, and if they could get a reaction it would improve the game. So I provided the reaction.

I gave Meyer a warning wink and got up and walked over to them, properly stuffy and irritated, and said, “Something seems to be very, very funny. How about letting me in on it?”

They were delighted. The victim had walked right up to the gun. The skinny boy took it. He said, “Think maybe big tourist fella like to make bangbang with nice clean American college girl? This one here name Jeanie. Nice big strong girl. Three hundred pesos maybe? Take her up to your room right now, big fella. She give you a good time. She likes you. Right, Jeanie? you like the big fella, sweetie?”

The girl’s head turned very slowly and I could not see her eyes behind the blue lenses as she looked up at me. I pulled the extra chair out and sat down. The skinny boy and the redhead waited in mildly pleasurable anticipation for the shocked reaction. This was called blowing the mind of the random member of the establishment. I let my mouth sag in stupefaction as I appraised them, looking for clues to the best approach. At such close range they were far less attractive than at a distance. The bigger girl looked less muscular, more suety, and smelled slightly rancid. There was grime in the creases of the redhead’s neck, and stains on the front of her Indian shirt. The dark boy’s hands were filthy. The two pair of eyes I could see were not quite right. They were subtly out of focus, with that slightly glassy and benign look of the mind behind the eyes being skewed a degree or two off center.

There were several ways to go with it. I picked the one I thought might sting the most. I shoved my chair around so that I could call to Meyer and at the same time keep the edge of my eye on the trio.

“Hey Charley!” I called to Meyer.

“What do you want?” he yelled.

I said to the trio, “My buddy is a little hard of hearing.” I raised my voice to a pitch that startled the serape sellers. “Charley, there’s nothing here worth fooling around with. The big one with the the shades he wants twenty-four bucks for. The redhead would maybe go for thirty. But, honest to God, Charley, they’re both of them so damn dirty it would turn your stomick. The redhead has spilled food down her shirt, and you should see her neck.”

“Knock it off!” the boy said in a pinched little voice.

“Charley, the big one here is named Jeanie, and she doesn’t take baths. And all three of them are stoned out of their skulls on something. The kid has got the dirtiest hands I ever seen. Scrawny little bastard. If you ever could get him cleaned up, I don’t think even old Crazy Eddie would grope him.”

“Get away from us! Get away from us! Get away from us!” It was the redhead, in a dismayed little whine. All the waiters were wide awake. Pedestrians had stopped to admire the volume of sound. Some tourist tables were staring, eyes bulging slightly. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the boy make the move, snatch at the bottle. So I gave him full attention, snapped my hand up and let the bottle slap into the palm. I twisted it away and put it carefully back on the table and gave him a wolfsmile and said, “That’s lousy manners, sonny.”

I stood up and said, “Charley, maybe a couple of years ago these fatso broads would have been worth a free jump, but now they’re so far over the hill… Charley! Can you hear me, Charley?”

“Just barely,” he roared.

“Even if they were cleaned up and dressed nice, they couldn’t even make expenses at a hardware convention in Duluth.”

I dropped all the way back to merely a hearty conversational tone and smiled down at them and said, “Thanks anyway, kids. You got any slim clean pretty little friends who need more vacation money, send them on up to the Victoria and tell them to ask for McGee. But don’t send any turned-on slobs like you two sorry girls. Fun is fun, but a man likes to keep his self respect. Right? See you around.”

I went back to Meyer. He rolled his eyes when I sat down with him. I slid down in the chair, ankles crossed, thumbs hooked in my belt, and smiled amiably at the three.

They tried to brass it out for a little while. But the redhead started snuffling and choking. They gathered up their market bundles and took the route around the nearest corner and out of sight.

Meyer sighed. “In a queasy kind of way, I think I enjoyed it. Did you?”

“The target was the redhead.”

“And?”

“She won’t be able to leave it alone, Meyer. She’ll have to pick at it. She’s not so far gone as the other two. She can’t endure anybody having that reaction to her. They have to be wrong. So she’ll have to tell me how wrong I am. Ruptured pride. And then I can ask about Nesta, Rockland, and company. What if I’d asked them today?”

He nodded. “I keep forgetting how devious you are at times. McGee, it was one of your better performances. You were in good voice. But… it was brutal.”

“Because it was too close to the truth. Let’s go.”

The car was ready when we got back to the Ford garage. The shift still whammed me on the knee bone, but everything else was fine. I found a place to park it not far from the Ford place, and we walked over to the street carnival area and then located the Los Pajaros trailer park. There was a spiked iron fence around it, crumbling stone pillars. There were big old trees with dusty leaves shading unkempt flower beds. Paths had worn the grass away, and nobody had picked up the scraps of litter in a long, long time.

The bossman was a jolly fat little type in a ragged blue work shirt and paint-spotted khakis. He had a big gold-toothed grin, and more English than I had Spanish. We went into his little office-store and he looked the information up in his registration notebook. When he pronounced Rockland, it came out “Roak-lawn.”

“Ah, yes. The Senor Roak-lawn, on place numer seexteen, from… ah… twenny-four of Abreel to… ah… twenny three in Zhuly? Yes. Tree month. He was having a camper here, was Chevrolet trock of Florida, color… how you say?… azul.”

“Blue.”

“Ah, yes. Blue!” Suddenly his smile dwindled. “Ah! Yes, it was that one. You his fren?”

“No. I am not his friend, senor.”

“Then I say. Many, many people here. Nice American turista people. That one, that Roak-o, the only one I must ask to leaving when the month is up. Too much the fights and noise. Too many times he called me bad words. This is not right, that is not right. Nothing is right for him. I have to get policia to make sure he is going.”

“Where did he go from here?”

“Who knows? Away from Oaxaca, for surely.”

“Who was with him when he left?”

“Who knows. Different people live with him here the two month. One two three four. Different girls sometimes. Boys and girls. I have no names, nothing. It is nothing to me. So, he is going now for… wan month and six day.” The grin was broad as he said, “I am not missing him moch, you bet. One other senor was asking the same things, maybe it is two weeks ago, I think. And he is asking about his daughter.”

“Was his name McLeen?”

“Ah, yes. Senor McLeen. But I do not know of the girl nothing. To me, senor, a father is never letting his daughter go off far away in these times. All is changing, no? Some of these young American, they are very nice and good. But there are the ones such like Roak-o, doing bad things.”

“Are there any young people here who were friendly with Rockland?”

“Some would know him, I think maybe. Some are here many month. Perhaps the young ones, the senor and senora… I cannot say. Here, look, is the name.”

Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Knighton, of Kerrville, Texas.

They were in space number twenty. It was a travel trailer with canvas rigged to make an extra area of living space. But whatever towed the trailer was not there, and the trailer was locked. Happy Fats explained that the young man was an amateur archeologist who was writing a novel about the Zapotecan civilization in pre-Columbian Mexico, and said that the couple went on a lot of field trips in their “Lawn Roover.”

“Very young. Very nice. Very hoppy.”

So it was then a little past five on that twenty-ninth day of August, and I asked Meyer if it might not be a good time to chat with that expatriate American, Bruce Bundy, who had loaned his car to some unknown named George, who had loaned it to Bix, who had died in it, or near it.

“I used to be young and nice and hoppy.” Meyer said wistfully.

“So now you are old, and nice, and hoppy. And you don’t listen. Bundy. Bruce Bundy. Now?”

“Why sure.”

I studied the map and found Las Artes, a short street about ten blocks north of the zoealo, toward our hotel. I parked at the end of the street and locked up, and we went looking for number eighty-one.

It was a very narrow two-story house squeezed between its bulkier neighbors. Its plaster front was painted in a faded hue of raspberry Grilled iron doors were locked across the arched entrance, but the inner doors were open. We could see down a long shadowy corridor to the sun-bright flowers of the rear courtyard. I tugged a woven leather thong and a bell hanging in the archway clanged. A man, slender in silhouette, appeared and came swiftly along the corridor, and then slowed as he saw us, and stopped, frowning, in the edge of daylight, one long step inside the doorway.

“Are you looking for someone?” he asked.

“For a Mr. Bruce Bundy.”

“I am he,” he said, and it surprised me because he looked no more than thirty-four, and the police report had said he was forty-four. “What do you wish to see me about?”

“It’s about the fatal accident involving your vehicle on the third of this month.”

He shook his head and sighed. “Oh dear Lord, will I never come to the end of the bloody red tape. I have answered endless questions, and have filled out endless reports. What is your part in it?”

“This is my associate, Mr. Meyer. My name is McGee. I’m sorry to bother you, but this is a necessary part of the insurance investigation. Could we come in.”

“Now really! Are you men trying to be terribly tricky or something? The whole matter has been settled. And I must say that it was terribly unfair. I should have gotten full value for my marvelous little car, but they kept talking about my not putting that fellow, George, on the list of people authorized to drive it. Actually I shall never loan anyone a car, ever again, no matter how nicely they ask.”

“Insurance,” I said, “on the life of the deceased, Miss Beatrice Bowie of Miami, Florida. There is an accidental death clause in the policy.”

“And you came here from Florida!”

“A large sum of money is involved, Mr. Bundy.”

“And I’m sure it’s all terribly important to you and your company and the beneficiary and all that, and I suppose you are here to practically lunge at any hint that the pretty child killed herself so that you can save great wads of money, which I suppose is what you are paid to do, but I am expecting guests, and I was just about to make my famous salad dressing. So why don’t you plan to come back tomorrow, Mr. McGoo? But I won’t be able to tell you a thing, actually. I did meet those girls, but I knew them so slightly I had the names mixed up. I thought it was the little dark one they called Bix, and I was surprised to find it was the tall, quiet blond one.”

“It will only take a couple of minutes.”

“Sorry. Tomorrow would be far more convenient. Come at about… eleven-thirty in the morning, please.”

He turned away and had gone two steps before I tried my hunch. “From talking to Rocko, I thought you’d be more cooperative, Bruce.”

He stopped in his tracks and turned very slowly. “To whom?”

“Walter Rockland.”

He moved closer to the gate and looked up at me, his head tilted, his lips sucked flat. He wore a coarse cotton hand-woven shirt, off-white, with full sleeves and silver buttons on the tight cuffs. He wore a yellow silk ascot, and snug lime-green slacks, and strap sandals the color of oiled walnut. He had brown-gray bangs, a slender tanned face, eyes of pale amber brown.

“Now where would you have encountered that creature?”

“If we could come in for a few moments.”

“What did he say about me?”

“I promise we won’t take too much of your time.”

He unlocked the gate. I followed Meyer in. Bundy locked the gate and told us to go straight ahead to the garden and he would be along in a few moments. He said he wanted to make the dressing and get the woman started on the main course. He told us to help ourselves to a drink.

There was a high wall around the small courtyard, a fountain in one corner. The courtyard was paved in a green stone, and the flowers and shrubs were in huge earthen pots. The furniture was of dark heavy wood upholstered in bright canvas. There were bright birds in bamboo cages.

I poured some of his Bengal gin onto ice. As Meyer fixed himself a whiskey soda he said, “From whence came that inspiration, Mr. McGoo?”

“I’d rather not try to find out. I might not get any more inspirations if I knew.”

I dug through the back of my wallet and found one of my Central General Insurance cards and showed it to Meyer so he would at least know who we were working for.

Bundy came into the courtyard carrying a glass of wine. He sat on a low stone bench and looked at me. It was a look familiar to any veteran poker player, when someone is debating whether or not you have the gall to check and raise.

“I think you’d better tell me, Mr. McGoo-”

“McGee.”

“Oh. Terribly sorry. McGee, then. Tell me when and where you saw Charles Rockland.”

“Walter Rockland.”

“Terribly sorry. Charles didn’t sound quite right, did it? Rocko suits him better than either, of course.”

“We just saw him in Mexico City the day before yesterday Mr. Bundy.”

“Really?”

“Just routine. After all, he did own the Chevy truck and camper that entered Mexico last January tenth, and Miss Bowie was one of the group. Miss Bowie, Miss Minda McLeen, Carl Sessions, and Jerome Nesta. He wrote to a friend in Miami and gave his Mexico City address. So we looked him up, of course.”

“Naturally. Part of your investigation. Go on.”

It was turning sour. You can take only so many chances. But when it does turn sour, at least you know at what point it started to go bad, and that can be useful. “Go on with what?”

“With what he said to you about me, of course.”

“Just that if you seemed uncooperative, to mention his name.”

He finished the wine, licked his finger, ran it around and around the edge of the wine glass until he created a thin, high musical note.

He smiled at me. It was a mocking and flirtatious smile. “Bullshit,” he said softly.

I smiled back. “At least I gave it a try, Bruce.”

“Dear fellow, little games of intrigue, little fabrics of deception, they’re too much a part of my scene. I had years of stage design in New York, and years of set design on the Coast. I’ll give you one little gold star for your forehead, though. You are a little more subtle than you look. Your type, all huge and hearty and outdoorsy, I expect just a kind of clumsy blundering about. Rocko, for example. Dear God, if at this stage of my life I hadn’t learned how to protect myself from anything any piece of rough trade could dream up, I’d be terribly vulnerable and innocent, wouldn’t I? Don’t you think you’d best leave now?”

“Never argue with the umpire. Come on, Meyer.”

He walked us out to the gate. As he unlocked it he said, “I suppose that if you are really what you claim to be, and you really want to know whether it was an accident or suicide, I’d think that that little brunette friend of the Bowie girl’s would give you the most clues. Actually, her father is clomping all over town trying to locate her. A perfectly dreadful, dreary man from one of those ghastly midwest states that begin with a vowel. Product of Kiwanis and Dale Carnegie, and once he affixes himself to you, you have to pry him off as if he were a fat little pilot fish.”

As I thanked him his two guests arrived, spectacularly, in a little custom Lotus Elan convertible in bubblegum pink with black upholstery. The woman came out from under the wheel, leggy, slender, tall, nimble, in light-blue linen sheath dress to midthigh, sleeveless. She had a wild and riotous ruff of wind-spilled lion-mane hair, high-heeled sandals and purse to match the car. For just an instant she was twenty-something, but then in the light across her face she was thirty-something, with a twenty odd body. The boy was in his early twenties, in white shirt open at the throat, crisp khakis, and a powder blue jacket that was a precise match with the lady’s dress. He was brick-red from the sun. His hair was cropped to a copper bristle. He had a sullen face, heavy features, and he moved with the indolent, indifferent grace and ease of one of the big hunting cats, or one of the many imitations of Brando.

“Brucey!” she cried in joyous greeting.

“Becky darling!” he cried.

Giving us a sidelong questing glance, she ran to embrace the host, saying in a British accent, “David had the most fascinating day at the dig. They came upon a whole pocket of tiny beads of bone and jade, and the poor darling had to spend practically the entire day on his knees in the bottom of a monstrous hole, brushing the dust away and picking them up with tweezers. He desperately needs a Iarge whiskey, don’t you, darling?”

The sunbaked boy grunted, and Bruce tried to wove them inside. We had gone a half dozen steps when Becky gave that upperclass commanding caw. “You! I say, you two! Wait up a moment! Bruce? Dearheart, why must one set of guests leave when the next arrives? Your house is rather small, I grant that. But not that small.”

I saw the way it might go, and came back as he murmured protestations to her. I said, “It really wasn’t a social call, ma’am. In fact we wouldn’t have even got inside the gate if I hadn’t tried a little doubletalk. But it only worked for a little while. Mr. Bundy called my bluff. So I don’t believe he’d be very happy about having us come back in as guests.”

She measured me with vivid emerald wicked-gleam-of-mischief eyes through the rough spill of the red-blond-gold-russet hair and made up her impulsive mind and cried, “Nonsense! We are just too terribly inbred around here. One says the same old things to the same old faces in the same old places year without end. Bruce, dear, these gentlemen would make it a more lively evening.”

“But Becky, they are insurance types, from Florida. And it’s all a very dull bit about the dead girl, the Bowie girl, and they know she traveled here with that Rockland boy. Apparently there was some sort of policy on the girl’s life.”

“But Brucey, what if they are insurance types? Does that mean we have to sit about talking about premiums? Let us widen our horizons a bit, dear.”

He hesitated and then, from the little lift and fall of his shoulders, I could see that he had given up. He said to us, “Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison is one of our most attractive local institutions, and she has, as you may have detected, a whim of iron. Becky, may I present Mr. McGee. and Mr. Meyer. Gentlemen, please come back into my home as my invited guests.”

“Bravo!” said Becky. “That was really gracious, Bruce. Like a child taking medicine. Mr. McGee, I am Becky and you are…”

“Travis. And Meyer is Meyer.”

“And this is David Saunders, who is down here on a grant, grubbing about in the ruins. Bruce, dear, are you going to keep me out here on the street? I’m beginning to feel like Apple Mary.”

So we went back in, with Meyer giving me an amused little wink, a little nod of approval. We went out onto the twilight patio, sweet with the evening song of the birds, heavy with the scent of flowers that were just opening for the hours of the night, with fleshy pink petals, and a smell something like jasmine.

Each little group of strangers establishes its own set of balances and unspoken agreements. Tentative relationships are made and broken until the ones are found which are durable enough to last the evening, at least. From long habit, Meyer and I could talk on one level while maintaining an elliptical kind of communication on a level inaccessible to the other three. Bruce and Becky were doing the same thing, wherein innocent expressions had subterranean values.

Bruce bustled about, happily hostessing, making drinks, lighting the patio lanterns, summoning a solemn little Mexican woman to present the trays of hors d’oeuvres, with Bruce anxiously awaiting our verdicts on each delicacy.

Becky was all animation, in constant movement, making wry and bawdy judgments, with hoots of harsh laughter. In her evident maturity, she was still totally girl, that special kind of girl who does not have any self-conscious awareness of herself, but can fling herself about, leggy and lithe, laugh with an open throat, comb her casual hair back with splayed fingers, scratch herself, kick off her sandals, stand ugly, lick crumbs from her fingertips. She was teeming and burning with endless and remarkable energies, with taut slender vibrating health. One could not imagine her ever being bored. Her drink was a pale Spanish sherry, in an old-fashioned glass with a single cube of ice, and she seemed able to make one last indefinitely.

David Saunders was a familiar type, muscular, burly yet feline. He moved with languid grace. He sat immobile, thighs bulging the khaki slacks, apparently in total disinterest and indifference to anyone and anything about him. It was that special arrogance which relieves the possessor of any responsibility to communicate with anyone or please anyone. He could have been in a bus station, waiting for an overdue bus. But he did not become inconspicuous or invisible. There was a surly presence, an assurance, that made people try to please him, to bring him into the conversation. His drink, to Bundy’s apparent dismay, was bourbon and Coke, and he knocked them back with stolid, metronomic efficiency.

I decided that I could risk, for the sake of possible returns, casting a large doubt on our insurance story, and Bruce’s statement of having done stage design in New York and set design in California gave me the opening. So at a handy opening, using that-reminds-me, I brought up a Famous Female Name in the Industry.

“That wretched bitch!” Bruce said. “The most self-important little slut in the world, believe me. I did one totally commercial job for her. One of those period piece things, where they wrapped her little ass in crinoline, and had her bang her way through half the Confederate Army. I went a little camp with the decor, not to cut the picture, but to make a little gentle fun that only the cognoscenti would catch. So she raised stinking hell about my color patterns being wrong for her. She wants to act, direct, produce, write the script, and design the sets, and she doesn’t know one thing about her own trade. The only acting she does that seems authentic is when they have her horizontal. She is one of the reasons, dears, why I tucked away all their abundant bread into very good little securities, and when I had enough to live nicely on for the rest of my years, I told them all what they could kiss.” He paused and looked at me with a suspicious glint. “But don’t tell me she was buying her insurance in Florida.”

“It was something else, Bruce. She partied on a sun deck with a mixed bare-ass group, and somebody with a good telephoto lens tried to get rich quick.”

He nodded. “I remember a rumor that she was in that kind of trouble, but nothing happened.”

“I got lucky.”

“But why would you get involved in something like that, Travis?”

“Because she came around and asked me.”

“Why would she come to you?”

“Because I solved another kind of problem for someone she knew.”

“Then you aren’t really in the insurance business?”

I smiled upon him. “Hell, I don’t know. I guess that lady would be willing to say it was a kind of insurance.”

“But what are yod trying to do here? Who are you… trying to insure, Mr. McGee?”

“I think that if I had gone around telling people what I was trying to do for the actress, it wouldn’t have worked out as well as it did.”

Meyer broke in and said, “We just go around helping people, Bruce. I think it’s some kind of guilt syndrome. Trouble with those windmills, you stick a lance into one in a good wind, and it will purely toss the hell out of you.”

Bundy, after a few moments of narrow-eyed consideration, dropped it. And soon he began moving in on David Saunders’ blind side. But first there was a little exchange between Bruce and Becky that went over David’s sullen head.

Bruce said, “Becky, darling, Larry told me last week that you. practically gave him that marvelous ceremonial mask from Juchatengo.”

I saw her eyes go blank and her mouth purse, and though she recovered in a sparkling instant, I felt reasonably convinced that there was no mask, perhaps not even anyone named Larry.

“He seemed to want it.”

“It upset him a little. I mean he knew how terribly acquisitive you had felt about it when you first got it, and he didn’t want to take advantage of your friendship.”

“How silly!” she said. “I was cleaning out my little gallery and I remembered that he seemed to admire it, so I took it over and asked him if he’d like it. My word, had I wanted to keep it, would I have taken it to him?”

“I guess he wanted to be certain it was not just an impulse you’d regret later.”

“When you see him, tell him not to worry his little head. Actually, you know, I was very fair with him. I told him when I took it over there that it was really not as first class as I had thought at first. It’s very primitive, of course, and quite authentic, but it’s just one of those things you tire of seeing every day I suppose because it hasn’t much subtlety.”

“It’s probably more Larry’s sort of thing than yours.”

“Very probably. I sensed that, I suppose.” Transfer accomplished, in good faith. And so Bundy engaged Meyer in amateur archeological talk, saying, fmally, “I just cannot imagine how those priest types could bring the Indian peasants into this terribly inhospitable and certainly waterless countryside and establish a whole culture without losing untold thousands of them.”

And that hooked Saunders into his first conversation of the evening. “From what we know now, the system was to send out a large party of specialists, carrying water supplies, just before the rainy season. If they couldn’t find reliable wells or springs, they would dig giant cisterns deep in the earth, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, like gigantic bottles made of stone and waterproofed with clay. Then around the top of the bottle, they’d make a hard surface, round, fifty or sixty feet across, and sloping toward the mouth of the bottle. The rains would fill the bottle and they’d put a big clay stopper in place to prevent evaporation. Next they would bring in the Indian families with grain and fowl and tools and tell them where to build the village and where to plant the grain.”

Bruce cried that the information fascinated him. How clever those ancient people were! And how clever the ones who were now so carefully reconstructing all that lost marvelous history!

And he kept him going a little while until it was time for dinner. I said we had to leave just to see how much he would protest. And he did, with an earnest vehemence, because it was obvious that if there were just the three of them, he couldn’t focus on David.

So we, with show of reluctance, accepted the warm invitation.

Five

THE FOOD was excellent. Candles flared and flickered in the night breeze. He served a good and heady Greek wine.

A round table. Superb silverware, table linen, glassware, pottery. Muted music from a good tape system somewhere in the house. Bundy had Lady Rebecca at his right, David at his left with me at Becky’s right, and Meyer between me and David.

Rebecca had begun to make an elegant presentation of herself to me, managing in her casual careless way of handling herself, to artfully establish all the sensory awarenesses-of vision, of scent, of apparently inadvertent touch. But more importantly, she knew well that most important ingredient of all charm, all seduction, the art of so listening and responding that she made me feel as if I were the most exciting and rewarding and important man she had met in untold years, that if I had not come along, her life would have continued in its drab and dreary pattern. It requires not only the ability to listen so carefully no word, no nuance, is missed, but also the ability to sense when a contrary opinion will further the growing sense of closeness. I knew what she was doing and knew some of the devices she was using, but that awareness did not prevent my growing feeling that this was, indeed, one hell of a lot of extraordinary woman and nice to be with and worth arranging any further closeness possible.

Bruce Bundy, in another way and on another level, was targeting in on David Saunders. And it was interesting to see how much more masculine Bruce had become, in voice, gesture and opinion. And both Bruce and Becky were using Meyer as that necessary little dilution factor to mask their acquisitive intensity, directing questions and comment to him in much the same way the stage magician makes a great show of letting you look up his sleeves and into his top hat.

Their eyes gleamed in the candlelight, and their faces were smooth and youthful and animated, and their voices were clever, articulate, and amusing. The pretty predators, using their tested skills for the newest stalk.

David Saunders seemed to make, at table, a slightly porcine prey. He would dip his head almost to the plate, shovel in a heaping forkful, chew heavily with rolling bulge of muscle at the jaw corners, and then slosh it down with a gulp of wine, the throat bulging and shifting with the bulky swallow.

So, half in self-defense, half in the interest of moving ahead with the mission, I found a hole in the conversation and ran it off at a new angle. “I’d like to meet and talk to Eva Vitrier. Can you arrange it, Bruce? Becky?”

An instant of wary stillness, such as might happen to the smaller scavengers when they hear the carnivore coming back through the jungle toward the kill.

“Oh, it would have to be Bruce. He seems to get along quite smashingly with the creature. And by the way, dear, her first name rhymes with favor rather than with fever. Shockingly rich, that one. And she doesn’t, as we say, mingle.”

Bundy said, “I really don’t see very much of her. She comes and goes without much warning-I should say with no warning. She’s not a very social animal. Even were she here, Travis, it would be quite a feat to arrange an introduction. But I understand she left right after identifying that ghastly body. I could hardly blame her for wanting a change of scene.”

“Where would she have gone?”

“She’s never given me any other address,” he said.

“But,” said Becky, “it’s rumored she has several of her little fortresses scattered about the world. The woman has this secrecy thing. Absolutely barmy.”

“But she had those two girls at her place as house guests,” I said. “Seems like a sort of friendly sociable act.”

“On the same order, one might say,” said Becky, “as that touching friendliness and sociability in a dinner invitation from the Borgias.”

“Wear the big ring,” said Meyer, in nostalgic tribute to Lenny Bruce. It drew blank looks.

I took a sneak shot at Bundy. “Didn’t you say you had to protect yourself from something Rocko dreamed up?”

He pressed his gray-brown bangs with the palm of his hand. A ring fashioned of gold mesh gleamed in the candlelight.

“Why do you strain so hard to be clever, McGee?” he asked.

“Answer a question with a question,” I said, “and you buy time to sort things out.”

“I used the name Rocko in a generic rather than a particular sense. The Rockos of the world are always scheming, aren’t they? Just as you were when you first arrived. I merely said that I feel. competent to protect myself against the schemes of… the Rockos and the McGees.”

“But you met the girl, didn’t you? Bix Bowie?”

“Should I have?”

“Through Rocko or through Eva Vitrier, one or the other. Why not?”

He smiled. “I went through deep analysis ages ago, my dear man, with a very fashionable New York shrink. He had this quaint trick of trying to stir up guilt by asking questions in exactly that manner. One does lie to one’s psychiatrist, you know. The truth is so utterly rancid sometimes. One wants to look better. But with all that endless talking, it is terribly difficult to remember what one might have said a dozen afternoons ago. No, I did not meet the lass. Nor do I see any reason why I should be expected to have met her, or have any memory of her if I did. What are you really looking for?”

“All the reasons why the girl drove off the mountain in your car, Bruce.”

“I shall never never forgive the little bitch. That was a marvelous little car. Very loyal and dependable.”

David Saunders yawned, belched, reached for the wine bottle.

“See?” Becky cried. “We’re boring poor David. A lovely meal, Bruce. Do you have any of that marvelous brandy? The kind I like? I can’t remember the name. Good! Just a tiny bit, no more than a tablespoon. And can we leave the table? Thank you, darling.”

As we got up, Meyer said, “Mr. Bundy I appreciate your hospitality and your kindness, but I think that I am beginning to feel unwell. The altitude and the wine, I think. The best thing for me would be a walk in the fresh air. I can walk down to the plaza and take a cab back up the hill to the hotel. No, Travis. Don’t bother. I’ll be fine.”

Gracefully and shrewdly done, old friend. After he left the brandy was served, and I noticed that Bruce gave David Saunders the opportunity to pour his own, and a snifter that gave him enough scope to be foolhardy. They went off into the house. Bruce wanted to show David some of the artifacts he had collected.

Becky and I went into a far corner of the patio, sat together on a stone bench near a small, persistent fountain.

“You were very naughty Travis, really.”

“What did I do?”

“Ah! Such innocence. It was a lovely little party and then you made poor Bruce so awfully uncomfortable and nervous. He was terribly upset by that whole Rockland affair. Actually, it’s the last thing he wants to have mentioned.”

“And you know all about it?”

“He talks over his problems with me. He asks my advice. He’s not a bad sort, you know. Sometimes he is quite foolish and impulsive and he encounters… problems that are typical of the world he lives in. I think that because I never condemn him, we’ve been able to become friends.”

“Such good friends you brought him a little gift.”

“A gift?”

“One husky, sunburned young archeologist.”

“Of course, ducks! We are frightfully nasty degenerates who go about handing our discards to our chums. And I imagine that quite puts you off, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know enough about it. Or about you.”

“Me? I am just a wicked old woman with a ravenous appetite for strong young men. They are generally sweet and touching and grateful. But this chap was… out of focus somehow. He fancies himself as some sort of overwhelming stud. But he has that talent for little bits of brutality that betrays him for what he really is. I had begun to suspect him, and then he told me a horrid little story about beating up homosexuals and taking their money when he was at school. Such chaps are usually hiding their own tendencies from themselves. I had decided to cut him loose because he is really dull. He has no sense of fun. But I had described him to Bruce, and Bruce said that were I to bring him around, he could quickly tell me if my suspicion was correct. After ten minutes Bruce knew and let me know. So… it might be rather nice for Bruce after such a fiasco with that Rockland person. Bruce is quite lonely this year. The chap who used to stay with him drowned last year in the surf at Acapulco when they were down visiting friends. It was a terrible shock to Bruce. Do I sound as if I were pleading for forgiveness and understanding? Hardly! After all, I did not exactly bash him upon the head and gift wrap him and put him on the doorstep did I?”

“What did happen with Rockland?”

“My dear, you are very, very nice. But, my word, you are tiresome at times! Here we are, quite alone, both of us with that marvelous knowledge that we would be awfully, awfully good in bed together, and all you seem to want from me is a long tiresome story-far too long to tell here. I know you respond to me. We’re becoming quite deliciously aware of each other. Shouldn’t you be trying to bundle me off into my lonely bed instead of leaving the advances to me? I am quite sick of the young, young men. They are in endless supply, and unlike poor David, they are terribly sweet and earnest and dear. But too sweet. Like endless desserts. They cloy. But one accepts, because the mature ones with any style and presence are usually married. And I have a rule about that. It is too much like theft.”

“But what about my wife and five kids?”

“You lie, sir! A woman leaves her mark, her scent, her shape upon what is hers, whether it is her furs, her underthings, or her man. You are not married, and I doubt you ever have been. Though I was once, several centuries ago.”

“Here I come again, tiresome as ever. How do I find out about Rockland?”

“Why, I should imagine that you would have to sit down with Bruce and have him tell you, dearie.”

“Correction. How do I find out about Rockland from you?”

“Let me see now. You are asking me to betray a confidence. That means that I would have to have some good reason for breaking faith. I should have to know exactly why you wish to know all this, and understand your motives. And, of course, I would have to believe you. That is the tricky part, because you lie so much. And you lie so well! No woman ever knows a man, or ever really trusts him until they have made love. Then, of course, she often discovers she has trusted some absolute scoundrel. But then it would be too late, would it not?”

“Let me see. You picked me off the sidewalk in front of this place. You have not had enough booze to cloud the mind of a mouse. You are damned attractive, Becky. And I am sitting here on a fag’s patio in lovely Oaxaca letting you put a ring in my nose so you can lead me off to the sack. Such things don’t happen.”

“Such a horrid, suspicious, nasty little mind. You are a towering chap, showing signs of rough use, and I find you monstrously attractive. Your pale eyes and your big hands and the way your lips are made and the way your voice sounds; all these things have just made me terribly randy. So I choose not to blush and simper and flirt, because men are horribly anxious to protect their pride and quite often never make the attempt for fear of failure. And life is awfully short, and each day it is Khorter by one day. And there is something else about me which I might or might not tell you later. It depends.”

“All right. Such things happen.”

“But in case you feel overwhelmed or anything, we don’t have to make it definite, not at this moment. I can provide a nightcap and we can cast ballots or something. But let’s find those two dear boys and say goodnight.”

When we were halfway across the patio, David and Bruce appeared in the corridor, walking toward us. Bruce had hold of David’s arm. David Saunders was staggering, mumbling, making sweeping gestures, tripping on the irregularities of the tiles. “Whas’m never’n standa menshunenny.”

He peered at us, feet planted wide, and wrenched his arm out of Bruce’s grasp. He started to say something incomprehensible and made another big gesture which swung him off balance. He melted down onto the tile and sagged over onto his back and began to snore.

“I think he drank a little too much,” Bruce said. “Would it be too much of an imposition for you to put him up for the night, dear?”

“Gracious, no!”

“Want me to help you with him?” I asked.

“Thanks, I can manage. Becky, the gate is on the latch. When you shut it, give it a try to be sure it’s locked, will you?”

“Of course,” she said. We thanked him for the dinner. He acknowledged it in absentminded fashion. He sat on his heels, worked one arm under David’s shoulders, another under his thighs, poised for a moment, and then came up smartly with the slack meaty burden. The head lolled and an arm swung limply. In sleep the sullenness was gone. David was a large dreaming child. His burned features looked more delicate. Bruce’s feat had been impressive and I suspected it had been done for my benefit. He could indeed feel quite able to take care of himself.

We went in her Lotus. She said my rented car would be quite safe where it was parked. She drove through the dark streets alertly and competently, sitting tall, chin up, hands solid on the wheel, through the rush of wind, past dark buildings.

She said her place was in La Colonia. Wider streets. High walls. Gates. She swung in and stopped, the headlights shining on an iron gate. She gave me the keys, indicating the one for the gate. I unlocked it and swung it open. She drove in and waited while I closed and locked the gate. Then along a curving drive paved with white gravel. Night lights on in the house. Left the car in front. Went through large formal rooms and out into a walled area in back. She turned on lights, little spots and floods and the lights below the water level of a large curved pool.

“I know,” she said. “It left rather a bad taste. But Brucey will not be sordid about it. He’ll undress poor David and tuck him into a big bed and leave him quite alone. In the morning he’ll be tearful and terribly upset and accuse poor David of all manner of amorous aggression, and claim he is going to register a bitter complaint with me. Poor David will he beside himself with shock and fright and shame. And sometime tomorrow they will kiss and forgive, and I expect that after the weekend David will be moving in, and in a few months he will have rather a pretty little lisp. He might become a much nicer person, actually. Just stop looking so broody and accusing about it, darling. Open that cupboard door and you’ll find ice and all kinds of liquor. Cheer up, dammit!”

So I made my drink. She refused one. She sat be side me for some silent moments, then got up from the chaise and walked to the far end of the pool. Without posing, posturing, or artifice, she kicked her shoes off, pulled the mini-dress off, floated a wisp of brassiere onto the pile, stepped out of sheer pants, hooked her bare toes over the curbing. Her figure was riper than I would have guessed, but solid, smooth and firm as that of a circus girl, tumbler, or ballerina.

“Goes with the nightcap or not,” she called to me. “Whatever you choose, my good man.”

And in she went, in a flat sleek slapping racing dive.

Well, you came down here, fella, to find out about Bix Bowie. And, by God, no sacrifice is too great once a fella gives his solemn word, right? And the way you get to know a country is by getting to know the people, right? And even though there’s a pretty good size to that pool, what with the pool lights and all, you ought to be able to catch her sooner or later. So I think the answer ought to be that if it really goes with the nightcap, then…

But I discovered I was already trying to pull the trousers off with the shoes still on, so I sat down again and untied the shoes, thus solving that problem with hardly any trouble at all.

She clung, sweat-misted, still breathing deeply, and ground the scratchy ruff of her tawn-crisp hair into the side of my laboring throat; she gave her small crow-caw of delighted laughter.

“You do have to say something, you know,” said Lady Becky. “Some observation. Some passing comment. I rather like to remember the better ones.”

“Okay. Passing comment: Quote. Holy Mackerel. Close quote.”

She rolled up onto an elbow. “I think you are very nice; McGee. I think I will tell you what you just enjoyed.”

“I wouldn’t want to try to describe it myself.”

“I have to confess how ancient I am, darling. I am terribly old. I was married before the Battle of Britain. I was in London for the whole bit. Dreadfully earnest and devoted and valiant. Family tradition. All heroes. Volunteer nursing service. Stiff upper lip. So my beloved husband was in Spits, and they pranged him early on. And the others went, bit by bit. The chums and brothers, the family, and the sister. Stiff upper lip, lass. Strive on. So it ended, you know. And peace came, and two days later some damned delayed action thing went off, and it was my last duty call. Collapsed a row of flats and they burned. And I held two screaming tots, one after the other, on my lap, charred little things, trying to pop morphine into them before they died. Managed with one and didn’t with the other. Dreadful stench. Total pointlessness. Walked all night, said odd things. They put me off to rest. I was expected to pick up the loose ends of my life and start over, somehow. Do good works. But there were no loose ends, lamb. And I had a bellyful of good works.

“So one makes an accounting of sorts. I had, God knows, money enough, and time, and a strong body. And I was in a world that charred tots, and I wanted no more of it. What I had most adored with Robin was all the lovely free marital fornication. Never could get enough. He used to say I had great natural talent. So I vowed solemnly, ducks, to be come the jolly best piece of Anglo-Saxon ass in all Christendom. It is sad and remarkable that people really know so little about it. They sort of fumble about and trust to luck. I knew ‘that all I had to work with was my body. I had to keep it as enticing as possible, because one must arouse intense desire, or the game is lost before it is begun, what? I haven’t changed an inch or a pound in twenty years, my dear. I stay on the most strict routine of diet and exercise. And I go twice a year to a Swiss clinic for hormone balance, and there is a clever little Japanese doctor in California who does clever little operations when they’re needed. To know how to use the body, one must go to Yoga. God, how I labored, and then suddenly it fell into place. I have absolute and independent control now of every muscle in my body, even all those reactions that are supposed to be involuntary responses to erotic stimulus. And all this time, my dear, I was studying all the books on the arts of love that I could find. Hindu, Arabic, Ancient Egyptian. I am now a repository of all that learning and skill. And I know some astonishing things, luv. It is a responsibility, actually. I had to learn a great deal about anatomy, neurology, glandular functions, all that. So you see what’s in store, my good man? You’ve had a taste. And now I shall destroy you, bit by delicious bit. Because you shall respond again and again after you are quite certain you are finished. I need merely do some odd thing like… this?”

And as I was tumbled back into my role of awed participant in the second strenuous, virtuoso performance, I realized I had come upon a prime example of that uniquely English- phenomenon, the true eccentric. Some of them build cathedrals out of bits of matchstick., Some of them count the number of stalks of hay in the average haystack. Some write a hundred letters a week to the London Times. Some catalogue all the birds in fifty meadows. They are all quite mad, but do not know that they are mad, since they find a socially acceptable outlet for their monomania. This woman had been driven mad in a mad war, and had retained one little ledge of sanity and built the rest of the structure of her life upon it. But I could not carry my realizations any further, because something hitherto unknown had begun to happen, and it felt as if my head were starting to fry at the hair roots. I thought I heard her laughing, but then all I could hear in some far corner of the most primitive part of my mind, was myself roaring, atavistic and lonely.

There was another time of respite when, halfheartedly, I asked about Bruce Bundy and Rockland. She told me that they had met on the veranda of the Marques del Valle many weeks ago, and that Bruce knew Rockland had let himself be picked up. Bruce had told her that Rockland was not exactly inexperienced. He had then begun to ask Bruce to lend him money. Some large amount. Ten or fifteen thousand. It was to be some sort of investment scheme. Rockland had hinted that it was illegal but quite safe. He would double Bruce’s money. He then got very surly when Bruce said he would not cash in perfectly good securities in order to lend money to an animal off the streets. Then apparently Rocko had to leave the trailer park. Bruce let him bring the truck and camper and put it in the shed beyond his wall where Bruce garaged his little English Ford. There was room for both. He had moved into Bruce’s house on an apparently permanent basis. But he had spent Thursday, the last day of July, away from the house all day and a good part of the evening. When he came back he had asked Bruce to lend him a smaller amount. Three thousand or even two. When Bruce refused, Rockland had accepted it too calmly. In the small hours of Friday morning, Bruce had heard the distant sound of Rocko trying to start his truck. Bruce put his robe on and hurried out. She said Bruce had taken something out of the motor and hidden it. Rocko got out of the truck and tried to hit Bruce. But Bruce had won some sort of belt for some sort of way of fighting, and he kept in splendid shape, and so he had hit Rocko and knocked him unconscious, but when he fell he had hit his nose on the stone floor and bled, and it had made Bruce ill. When Rocko could walk, feeling very weak and shaky, Bruce had helped him into the house and into bed, and then he had gone back and searched the truck and found his little Picasso bronzes, and the solid gold amulets from Yucatan, and the prints and drawings by famous Mexican artists, and some of his better silverware.

Out of an increasingly hazy state, I interrupted her at this point in her narrative to ask her what she was doing.

“Dearest, don’t tighten up like that. Trust your Becky. There. Turn just a little bit more this way. That’s a dear. This will rest and relax you. It’s something Japanese women used to know, thousands of years ago. Just don’t think about me. Don’t think about anything. Just let your mind drift.”

So, though curious, it was restful, relaxing, soothing. It was indeed. For quite a while. And then it began to have quite another effect. And when that effect was sufficiently and unmistakably evident, Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison swung triumphantly and exuberantly aboard, with spurs, whip, checkrein, and posted tirelessly and happily across the endless moors.

I lay dead, yet managed to say, “Then what happened?”

“Weren’t you paying attention?”

“I mean to Bruce and Rockland.”

“No, dear, I’ve told you too much. No more for now. I shouldn’t have told you a bloody thing, you know.”

“Then I think I am going to sleep.”

“Really? Really?… Really?”

“Cut it out, Becky. Whatever ancient rite that happens to be, cut it out. Because it is not going to do any good. Look. I am not ashamed to admit I’m finished. All done. I haven’t got any desire at all to set any records. And I don’t feel any childish urge to prove anything to anybody. Okay? I have to go to sleep, Becky.”

“Yes, darling. I agree. Utterly. I’ve quite finished you off, poor darling.”

“Then stop.”

“Don’t writhe away from me like that. It is awfully impolite. Travis, darling, let me just prove to both of us that we are both absolutely correct, that there is nothing more you can possibly contribute to the evening.”

“It’s been proven.”

So she hummed to herself. She kept busy. Adjust spark and coil. Hop out and run around to the radiator and try the hand crank. Thumb out of the way in case of backfire. Back to spark, coil, mixture. Prime carburetor. Crank again. What the hell is she humming? For God’s sake, Roll Out the Barrel.

Should be humming Bless ‘em All. Ancient engine catches, sputters, stops, catches again. And then, by God, settles into a deep-gutted roar. Hop behind the wheel, kick it into gear. And I once again enwrapped all that hot limber skill, endured her delighted chuckling, romped her onto her spring-steel spine, and tried in my endless, mindless, idiot frenzy to hammer her down through the damn silk sheets, down through the foam and springs, down through the carpeting and the tile and the beams and down into the deep black Mexican soil under the lovely and formal old house, where I could be buried without fanfare and sleep forever and ever and ever.

Six

MEYER WAS gone when I woke up at ten o’clock Saturday morning. When I came out of the shower he was sitting on his bed with a bright red flower tucked behind his ear, beaming at me.

“I heard you come in,” he said. “Just after daylight. I think I should say I heard you come tottering in. I never heard so much heavy sighing. You sounded like a leaky truck tire.”

I pulled my shorts up and turned and said, “I never noticed what really nasty little blue eyes you have, pal.”

“What happened after I left?”

“Poor David passed out and was promoted to the status of houseguest.”

“Make a note that I am not astonished.”

“And I went to Lady Rebecca’s house with her for a nightcap.”

“Again, no surprise. And then?”

I sat on my bed to rest up a little. “I gathered a few bits of information about Rockland which I shall shortly impart to you, Meyer. I do not make a practice of discussing a lady. I just wish to tell you that the few bits of information were earned.”

Bland astonishment. “Really, old chap? Why, to look at the lady, I should have thought her a jolly amusing romp, what? All slap and tickle. Good earthy sport, what?”

“If I had the strength, I swear, I would reach over and hit you right in the mouth, dear friend.”

He faked sudden comprehension. “Aha! Oh! Like that, eh? It wasn’t because it was distasteful, eh? You mean that she was tasteful and somewhat on the demanding side, old man?”

“Meyer, believe me, I will never try to explain it to you or describe it to you. I do not want to think about it. Here is what you do for me. Some day, two or three years from now, hire the most luscious, unprincipled, hot-blooded wench you can find. Have her strip down and sneak aboard the Flush and climb into the master’s bunk with the sleeping master. Then you wait outside. If you hear an ungodly thump, it will be her girlish rump bouncing off the deck after I kick her out of bed. When you hear that thump, take the girl away, wait a year, and try again.”

“Is this the McGee talking?”

“McGee, the misogynist. From now on, buddy, every broad in the world is going to look as enticing as a rubber duck. I would rather have one handful of cold mashed potato than two handsful of warm young mammalian overdevelopment.”

“Did you get too much sun yesterday.?”

“Just help me through the day, Meyer. Help me and shut up. Catch me when I start to wobble. Keep me out of drafts. Order me good nourishing food and get me to bed early. Now get me up that hill to the dining room.”

At breakfast I told him about the Rocko-Brucey affair, as much as I knew of it. We agreed it fit with Bruce Bundy’s asking us in when I used Rockland’s name on him. He had to know if Rockland had devised some way to make him unhappy and-had sent us around to set him up.

Meyer worried at it, hairy dog with an old meatless bone. “Then we go another step. Bundy had to believe Rocko could make trouble.”

“It begins to look,” I said, “as if Rockland knew just how to make trouble for people. I think the hotel covered up the ugly truth with those hints about theft. I think he was scavenging the older lonely ones. Hustling them. Setting them up with pot, hustling them with sex, male and female, and then putting the squeeze on.”

“So a type like that comes to Mexico in a truck and camper? Roughing it?”

“Bix drew out part of the money before they left. She drew out the balance from Mexico. Twenty Isn’t a bad score.”

“If he knew she had it,” Meyer said.

“And he could lever it out of her easier out of the country. But we have to find one of the others to find out what went on, dammit. Either Rockland himself or the musician or the sculptor or the other girl.”

At this stage of the game it seemed to be a good Idea to split up. Meyer acquires people as easily as a hairy dog picks up burrs. He smiles and listens carefully, and the little blue eyes gleam with good humor and personal interest. He says the right things at the right time, and surprisingly often the random stranger tells him things he wouldn’t tell a blood relative or a psychiatrist. No bore, no matter how classic, ever manages to bore Meyer. It is a great talent, to be forever interested in everyone.

We agreed that the best thing to do would be for me to drop Meyer downtown and then go off and see what I could learn at Eva Vitrier’s place. I got lost twice in the Colonia district before I located Avenida de las Mariposas. A man driving a delivery truck helped me locate the home of Eva Vitrier.

It was an estate, enclosed by a high stone wall. The morning sun shone through the shards of glass of the ten thousand broken bottles cemented into the top of the wall. I found a vehicle gate, double-chained and locked. I rattled the gate and hollered, to no effect. I could look through the bars at a curve of driveway paved with brick, disappearing into the trees and plantings, but I could see no part of any building inside the compound. I located the main pedestrian entrance, a solid and massive door of ancient wood, iron-studded. There was a bell button set into the recessed stone beside the door. No one answered.

Around the corner, on a narrower street, I found a smaller wooden door and, beyond it, a double door which could open wide enough for* a goodsized truck. I pushed another bell button by the smaller door and heard a distant ringing. As I was trying it for the third and last time, a hinged square set into the door swung open and a broad, bronze, impassive Indio face looked out at me.

I asked for the senora. He said she was not there. I asked when she would be back. He said he could not know. Tomorrow? Oh, no. Maybe many weeks, many months, maybe a year. Where is she, then? One does not know. Who does know? One must ask el Senor Gaona. Who is he? He is the lawyer of the senora. Where is he? In his office, doubtless. Where is his office? It is in the city. In this city? Where else? On what street is his office? It is on Avenida Independencia. What number? One cannot say. It is near the corner of Avenida Cinco de Mayo.

As I started to thank him, he slammed the little opening. It startled me. A rude Mexican is a great rarity.

I had to wait fifteen minutes before Senor Alfredo Gaona y Navares could see me. I waited on a rump polished wooden bench in a musty ten-by-ten office dominated by a large old lady at a large old typing desk, operating a machine that looked as if Mark Twain had invented it. At last two women in black came out of the inner office, arms around each other, sobbing soffly. I was directed to go in.

Senor Gaona was elderly. He had a small pale face and an expression of weary distaste. He did not get up or extend a hand. Complex aluminum crutches leaned against the wall behind him.

“What is your reason for wishing to see Senora Vitrier?” The English was precise, unaccented, with a delivery that sounded like a programmed computer.

“I wanted to talk to her about the two American girls who were staying with her as her guests.”

“With what purpose?”

“Senor Gaona, I am doing a personal favor for the Bowie girl’s father. He was injured in an automobile accident, or he would be here himself. He was out of touch with his daughter for seven months. He is curious about how she lived here, where she lived, what kind of life it was for her.”

“Senora Vitrier would not care to discuss it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

He hesitated. “I do not have to explain; but I will. Out of her generous heart she offered the two young women lodging when they had no place they could go. This was not a wise thing to do. One cannot judge by appearances. The young women might have been of a kind one does not want in the home. After they quarreled and one departed, the other one was killed, as you must know, in an accident in the mountains. Senora Vitrier appeared and performed the duty of identifying the dead young woman, and turned over her possessions to the police. It was a very ugly experience for her. I am quite certain she would not care to be reminded of it, or to discuss it.”

“Couldn’t you let her decide that? Where can I get in touch with her?”

“She is a very, very wealthy woman. The house she maintains here is one of several in various parts of the world. I am retained by her to keep her from being approached by strangers, and also to keep her house here in good order so that she can return, unannounced, and begin living here at any time.”

“What would happen if I were to write her a letter?”

“It would come here to this office and I would open it and read it and decide if it is a matter which she would wish to know about. If I so de cided, I would mail it to her bank in Zurich and they would forward it to whatever address she is using at the time.”

“What would you do if her house here burned down?”

“So advise Zurich.”

“And my letter would not get past you?”

“Assuredly not, sir. She gave explicit instructions to me that she did not want to hear any more of this affair, not even if the surviving young lady attempted to reach her by letter.”

“And has she tried?”

“No.”

“Has anyone else tried, I mean in relation to the death of the girl?”

“I have explained the situation to you, sir, in more detail than is my habit. There is no way you can approach Senora Vitrier, no way whatsoever. So we must consider the matter closed. Good day.”

And indeed it was good day. The old lady had entered behind me, unheard, and she startled me when she said, “Theees way ow.” I was on the sidewalk nine seconds later. And ten minutes after that I was in a briskly modern office where mini-skirted darlings came beaming in and out, emptying the “out” baskets and putting documents in the “in” baskets, and I was shaking hands with Ron Townsend’s friend in the local power structure, Enelio Fuentes. A glass panel in a wall overlooked, from about a thirty-foot height, about two acres of concrete shop space where bug-swarms of Volkswagens were being tuned, inspected, and repaired.

Enelio was thirty, or a little over, ruggedly handsome, with a yard of shoulders, a contrived casual lock of black hair across the forehead, a narrow waist, a big friendly grin, a massive and powerful handshake.

“Ol‘ Ron phoned me about you. Hey, sit down. How you like our town? How about that bird Ron has got himself? You meet her? That big Miranda. Fonny goddam thing. Ron spend half his life running like hell every time any bird looks at him with that marriage look. This big Miranda, she doesn’t want not any part of it, and he wants it so bad he can’t breathe deep. That one is some batch of girl, I tell you. Hey, you want a bloody mary? Good. Hey you, Esperanza, go make bloody marys for Mister Travis McGee, here, and me, and stop making the hot eye at him and waving that little butt around. Mr. McGee isn’t interested in short, ogly little girls.” She was a lovely little thing, and she went running out, giggling. “Soch a one that is,” he said fondly. “Can’t type, can’t file, can’t run the switchboard. But she can make any drink you ever heard of, man. My old man says, ’Nelio, why the hell did I waste my money sending you to the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, all you do is hire pretty girls all the hell over the place?‘ Me, I don’t say a word, just give him the quarterly breakdown, show the profit we’re turning, ask him if he’d rather give it back to his brother, my oncle, hired women looked like dogmeat, worked their ass off on overtime, and sometimes didn’t even break even. Now my oncle is crapping around with the little feeder airline we bought las’ year, Aeronaves Fuentes, and from the way the books look, I got to pretty soon go shake things up over there. Hey, here she is. Try that, Travis McGee. Delicious? Don’ stand around bugging the boss fellas, girl. Go file something in the wrong place so nobody ever finds it again.” He looked out through the glass wall and suddenly stiffened, the smile gone. He pressed the bar on a call box and bent toward it, and the Spanish was much too fast for me to follow. I looked out at the shop area and suddenly saw a man in a white jacket heading at a half run toward a couple standing helplessly beside an old black Volkswagen.

Enelio grinned and stretched. “Chrissake, tell them five million times anybody comes in, you find out what the hell they want right away. Quick. Then you tell them how long it takes and how much it costs. And you do it in the time you say, and you charge what you say, and get them out on the street fast.” I saw something I had overlooked. The big grin did not change the eyes. They remained cool and shrewd and appraising.

A tall solemn girl came in with letters for signature. He nodded and motioned her closer. He read the letters swiftly, scrawled his big signature on each and handed them to the girl, then slapped her smartly across the seat of her skirt as she turned. She yelped and jumped, and he said something in swift, slurred Spanish. She spoke in tones of protest. He spoke again. She smiled and flushed and walked swiftly out.

“That one.” he explained, “that Rosita, she had the unhoppy love affair and now she has the long face. I told her I wanted to see if there was any feeling left in the back side. She told me I should have more respect. Then I said something it doesn’t translate. But it made her face hot and it made the smile, no? Hey, anything you want, just say what it is. Okay?”

I briefed him on the situation, and on what we were trying to do, and showed him Bix’s photo. He caught on quickly. He understood the father’s need to have all the blanks filled in.

He looked in the phone book and gave his switchboard a number to call. In a few moments his desk phone rang. He picked it up and, after a few minutes wait, got through to somebody he called Roberto. I could make out a word here, a phrase there. He asked some questions and then thanked the man and hung up.

“The sergeant who did the investigation has no English at all. Nada. Here is how it will go. At two o’clock today he will come over to the Marques del Valle. We close this place at noon today. I will come over in my car. You and your friend and the sergeant, we will go up into the mountains and he will show us the place and I will tell you what he says.”

“I don’t want to put you to-”

“Silencio, gringo! How do you know it doesn’t give me the chance to get out of something I didn’t want to do, eh?”

“Okay. Next problem. How do I get to talk to Mrs. Eva Vitrier?”

“That one is one rich lady. I remember it was maybe eight, nine years ago, that place was sold. Nearly two million pesos. And then a lot more to fix it up. All the other ricos out in the Colonia, they can’t wait to find out who the owner is. They think there will be entertaining. They want to see how the house has been fixed. All of a sudden they find out the owner is there, this Frenchwoman. They go calling. She will not see them. They leave cards. Nothing. Oh, she has guests come in sometimes, very few, from far away. Sometimes she is seen in the city. She shops, and has servants with her to carry packages to the car, and a man to drive the car. People say crazy things. Maybe she is the mistress of a king. Maybe she is a political refugee. Maybe it is stolen money. I think it is easy, man. I think the lady wants to be left the hell alone.”

“What does she look like? Have you seen her?”

He leaned back eyes half closed, a gentle smile on his lips. “She has no age. She could be thirty. She could be fifty. No difference. She looks like that queen of Egypt, you know. The one with the nose.”

“Nefertiti?”

“That one. Very proud. Head high. Very hot eye. One day, three or four years past, I walked behind her from one jewelry store to her car. Black hair. Cool day. Had on a dark red wool dress. She walked slow, like music, man. Long narrow back, narrow little shoulders. Not much in front, but one truly fantastic ass. Firm, round, heavy but not too heavy. Wide but not too wide. It moved just right when she walked. Nothing under that dress, man. She had some great kind of perfume. It came floating back. You know; she got in that car and it drove away, and what I wanted to do, I wanted to lean against a building and pant like a dog. Hell, I tried to meet her. She was worth a good try. Twenty good tries. I never got to first base. First base! I never found the road to the ball park. I tell you, one long look at her, and that Miranda bird of Ron’s looks like somebody’s brother.”

“So there’s no friend of hers here who could put me in direct touch?”

“She has some friends, I think. I don’t know exactly. Those friends would not be my friends. People I think who tuck their lives behind walls here, like she does. Because here they are left alone, and it is a freedom for them. I know that Gaona won’t help you. That is one tough old man. Long ago there was an election when there were strong feelings. He wanted to be a politico. Somebody shot him in the spine. He dragged himself home in the night. Four miles. Took him all night. Wore his hands to ribbons. Would not say who shot him. If I had to trust a secret to any lawyer in the world, it would be Alfredo Gaona.”

“About Mrs. Vitrier’s friends. One of them would be Bruce Bundy?”

He looked startled, then impressed. “Yes, it was his car. He loaned it to someone who loaned it to the Bowie girl. I know Bundy by sight. Three or four years he’s been here. There’s a little group of them here. Nobody pays much attention, if they stay out of trouble. But if one of them starts taking little boys from the public market home, then the police will make their life very ogly. To find out so soon that Bundy and the French lady are friends, something I did not know, means you are very quick with these things, eh?”

“I tend to go in like a bull, Enelio. Or like a kid busting into a room full of slot machines. I pull levers and kick things and usually end up with pure lemons. So I found that Bundy is a friend of Eva Vitrier, and Bundy is a friend of Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison, and Lady Becky doesn’t like Eva worth a damn.”

He looked at me with a speculative appraisal, head cocked slightly, and then a slow grin came and widened and then he threw his head back and laughed and slammed the desk top with a big hand.

When he caught his breath, he said, “So! You do not always have those black circles under the eyes, amigo! And that mark on your neck is not a strawberry birthmark. And maybe your hands do not always tremble a little, eh? My God, you are a rare one, McGee! You and me, we are members of one club now. Goddam, there are plenty members, and I joined-let me see-fifteen years ago, and she looked exactly, I swear, the way she looks today. She had a beautiful car and she asked me if I would like to drive it. I was young. I could conquer anything. Car or woman. Perhaps it is good to learn humility when young. Four days I was not a part of the world. Four days and nights, and then ejected, blinking, weak as a new kitten, dazed, damn near destroyed. Ah, that one is legend, my friend. Muy guapa. As much woman as there can be. Too much woman. The club is big, but she selects with great care, believe me. One cannot ask to be a member. One must be invited. Some day, McGee, we will be wheeled into the sunshine with the blanket over our knees, and we will have that memory, and we will smile a nice and dirty-old-man smile. There is an old saying among the Oaxacanos: The most bitter remorse is for the sins one did not commit. She is quite mad, of course. But it is an agreeable madness, no?”

“If I recover, I’ll let you know.”

“One always recovers. I even wished to see if it had all happened as I remembered, or if I had dreamed portions of it. But she patted my face and she said, ‘Nelio, you are a dear boy and I am very fond of you, but I have turned the page you were written on. It is a very long book, and I do not have time in my life to reread any part of it if I am to finish it.’ For a time I was hurt and angry. Then later I understood. She was written in my book too, and by then I was writing a new chapter.

“About Bundy being friends with such total female creatures as Becky and Madame Vitrier, I think it is a common thing among women who do not have tea-party friendships with other women, to have a Bruce Bundy to make girl talk with. And I think he helps them with decorating things in their homes. Look maybe it is like this. Can Becky have a close friend who is a normal man or normal woman? Bundy is, for her, neutral ground. A relaxinent? Bad English. A… relaxation. I do not pry. How is it now with Becky? Not ended, I would think.”

“She thinks it isn’t. She thinks she told me just enough to keep me on the hook.” I told him about Walter Rockland moving in with Bundy, trying to hit him up for a large loan, and then trying to clean out Bundy’s little store of art treasures and getting a quick education in karate.

I said, “She told me I’d made Brucey very nervous, but there isn’t enough there, in her story, to make him nervous, so the best part is yet to come. So I am supposed to drop in, alone, for drinks and dinner tonight. And be spoon-fed another little fragment. By the time I know it all, she’ll be able to bury me at the foot of her garden, so it will be less wearing to find out what color belt Brucey earned from Brucey himself. Anyway, I’m imposing. I’m taking up too much of your time.”

“No. There are some small things I must do here, then it is enough for this day. Let me say one thing. In the picture you showed me, that is one lovely little chicken. I have respect for what you do, Travis. A father should know more of how such a one came to die. He will never understand why. But to know a little-not too much-will help.”

Seven

MOST OF the tables on the hotel porch were full when I got there. I spotted Meyer at the far end, sitting at a table with a portly man wearing a pale tan suit and a yellow sports shirt.

While the waiter was hustling me a chair, Meyer introduced him as Wally McLeen from Youngstown, Ohio. Mr. McLeen’s handshake was moist and unemphatic. His hazel eyes were magnified by the thick lenses of glasses with thick black frames. There were steel-wool tufts of hair on his sunburned skull.

Meyer said that Wally had sold out his business and had been in Oaxaca since August first, looking for his daughter, Minda.

“It’s more than just looking for her, Mr. McGee. It’s trying to understand more about what the young people are looking for. Way back in January she wrote me that she was going to go to Mexico with some friends. Just like that. Well, I wrote airmail special to the University of Miami asking them if she left any forwarding address or anything like that, and they wrote back that she’d stopped going to classes way back last year, before summer started. She came on home last summer for about ten days and then went back. She told me she was doing extra work over the summer. I sent my little girl money every month. Then I just didn’t know where to send it, or where she was or anything.

“You know, I got to thinking, Mr. McGee. I had four establishments, located real good in nice shopping centers, turning a nice profit. I worked hard all my life. Connie died three years ago. We had one other daughter, older than Minda, but she died in infancy. I got to wondering just what the hell I was working for. My little girl came home and didn’t have much to say. She acted sour, sort of. It was like lying to me, her not telling me she’d already dropped out of college. Once I decided, it took me a long time to make the right deal on the stores. I figured this way. The only thing I’ve got in this world is my daughter, Minda. And if I can’t communicate with her, then there’s no point in anything. If I kept working we’d be in two different worlds. She couldn’t or wouldn’t move into mine, so what I have to do is move into hers. It’s the only way I’ll be able to talk to her when I find her.”

“You expect to find her soon, Mr. McLeen?”

“Wally, please. Yes, I’ve got it pretty well pinned down that sooner or later she’s coming back down here. I’m right in this hotel, right in the center of things. Room number twelve, on the second floor, looking out over the zocalo. When she gets back, I’ll be here.”

“Where is she?”

“Someplace in Mexico City, but there’s six million people in that city… What do people call you?”

“Travis. Trav ”

“Trav, you’re one hell of a lot younger than I am, but you’re older than these kids. I don’t know what you think about them. But I’ve been talking to them now for a long time, and I’ve changed a lot of my ideas, like I was telling Meyer. It used to make me so damned irritated just to look at those young boys with all the long hair and beards and beads. I figured them for fanatics and dope addicts and degenerates. I can’t stand that rock music and those songs about freedom. All right. Some of them are nuts, so far gone on pills and drugs, they’re dirty, dumb, sick, and dangerous as wild animals. But most of them are damned good kids. They care about things. They’ve taken a good long look at our world and they don’t like it. They don’t like the corruption, and the way the power structure takes care of its own, and the way we’re all being hammered down into being a bunch of numbers in a whole country full of computers. They believe that each individual person is getting so insignificant you can’t really change anything by voting for a change. You get the same old crap. So what they want to do is get away from all the machinery that makes Vietnams and makes slums and discrimination and legalized theft and murder. How do you get away? Well, you have to go against the establishment in visible ways, so nobody will have any chance of ever thinking you are part of it. And so you can identify the other people who don’t want any part of it either. You pick ways to dress and act and look that turn the establishment people off. You’re against the idea of accumulating money and things, so you cut life down to the simplest kind of food and shelter you can scrounge. Because establishment morality is a lot of hypocrisy, like Lenny Bruce pointed out, you say and you write the words that shock the establishment, and you turn sex into something simple and natural and easy. The art and the music-everything has to be something the establishment can’t stand. Because, little by little, or maybe in one big fire, you’re going to tear all the false fronts down and start everything over again, in a lot simpler and more decent way, without a lot of hangups about money and race and sex and war. I didn’t see where pot and pills and LSD fitted in for a while, but I think I do now. They want to turn on because they believe every person has the right to do anything to himself that doesn’t harm others. Society makes laws about that because society doesn’t want people to make themselves unusable to the power structure. If everybody turned on every day, what would happen to industry? They’re saying this, Trav. They’re saying, `I don’t want any part of things the way they are, man. So don’t tell me I’m ruining my life because I’m ruining just that part of me that you’d want to use up if you had a chance. The rest of me belongs to me to do what I want with. And what I want is everything you despise. So don’t make a lot of value judgments about a scene you can’t dig. You are all caught in the machinery, and you want everybody else to get caught in it, too. I make you uncomfortable, old man, because I get more out of every week of my life than you ever got out of a whole year of yours.”

“You know, they will talk to me about these things once they find out I’m not just trying to tell them the same old crap they’ve always heard. When they find out I want to learn what this is all about, then they’ll talk about it. And I’ll tell them how I feel about my life. What was so great about my life up till now? Mortgage payments, inventories, worries, sickness… and so damned many things! Color television and the new car every two years, and a lawn mower to ride on. Your friends die and you die, and what’s the point of any of it? Who ever misses you? Yes sir, like I’ve been telling Meyer, when I see my Minda again, I’ll be able to talk to her like I never could before. I talk too much about all this, and I guess I bore people, but I have the idea I want to spread the word about these kids. I want to be a sort of… a messenger.” He looked at me with a goggle-eyed earnestness. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Sure, Wally,” I said, comfortingly. “We dig you.”

He smiled. “Jesus! When I think of how the guys back in Youngstown would take it, I get the idea nobody over twenty-five can understand what I’m trying to say.”

“Wally I understand you’ve been trying to locate Walter Rockland too.”

“To see if he knew anything about Minda. She was with that group for a while. The groups that travel together keep changing. People split and new ones join. I told Meyer that my Minda and the girl that was killed, Bix something, they left at the same time and took a cheap room at the Hotel Ruiz. That’s over there, diagonally across the zocalo on Guerrero. They moved in sometime late in May. I saw the room. It’s on the second floor in the back. There’s a bath down the hall. There’s four kids living in that room right now. But only one was there when Minda and Bix moved in. One from the present group, I mean. He thinks there were six or seven kids there in the room while Minda and Bix were there, and as he remembers it, they left at the end of June or early July when Mrs. Vitrier invited them to stay in her guest house. Such a small room, and pretty beat up. You try to give your girl the best of everything. It hurts to think of her living like that. But what can you do? They just don’t want the things you can give them. Not this new bunch of kids. They’ve turned their backs on the whole thing.” He shook his head slowly. “Maybe it wouldn’t be nice for you men to go back and tell Bix’s father about things like that little room in the Hotel Ruiz. It could give him the same feeling I had, thinking of my daughter there at night, in some dirty sleeping bag in a dark corner, and some boy with a dirty beard laying her, and the others sleeping so close, or hearing it happening. Maybe he should think it is all like the posters and the travel ads… A daughter is not like a son.”

Meyer tried him on the other names. Carl Sessions, musician. Jerry Nesta, sculptor.

Wally McLeen said he might have met them and talked to them, but he didn’t remember those names. He had asked everyone about Minda. He had shown them her picture. And he had added up the little crumbs of information. She had gone alone to Mexico City. She would be back one day. He would wait. If, instead, she showed up in Youngstown, a friend would cable him. He looked at his watch. Some of his new young friends were expecting him. He said he would look us up and let us know if he learned anything interesting, anything that might make that poor girl’s father feel better.

Enelio Fuentes appeared promptly at two, and he had Sergeant Carlos Martinez with him. Martinez, a squat, broad man with very dark skin and several gold teeth, was in civilian uniform. We all got into Enelio’s car, a new Volkswagen squareback sedan, custom-painted a strange metallic purple. Enelio took the wheel. Meyer and the sergeant sat in the back. Siesta traffic was light, and Enelio wasted no time scooting north to Route 190, the Pan American Highway, where he turned right on the road toward Mitla. About a mile beyond the city limits he turned left on State of Oaxaca Route 175, and began streaking across the flats at astonishing speed toward the lift of the high brown mountains.

“I didn’t know these things had so much snap,” I said, speaking loudly over the sound of wind and engine.

“They don’t. We put a Porsche engine in this one, race tuned, man. Heavy duty springs and shocks. Disc brakes. I can make Mexico City from Oaaiaca In five and a half hours. Hey, how do you like it? See? One eighty kilometros which is… a hundred and ten.”

When we hit the first curves and began climbing, I was able to relax. Roaring along the straights proves nothing. On the curves he proved the nice mating of man and machine. He found the right track around every curve. He was showing off and enjoying himself, and it was a pleasure to watch. But it certainly was one hell of a road. It was very narrow asphalt and the climb grew steeper and steeper, with switchbacks, cuts, and no banking on the turns, and not a sign of a guardpost. Ahead I would get glimpses of our road halfway up the next mountain, a little man-made ledge with a rock wall on one side and mountain air on the other. Sometimes I could see where we had been, and it was like an aerial view of a road.

We met two buses hurtling down the mountains, and passed one old truck grinding its way up in low-low-low, radiator steaming. The sergeant told Enelio we were getting very near the place. Enelio slowed down and soon found a place to pull off the road, on the outside of a curve where the car was visible from both directions. We got out and chunked the doors shut. The silence was enormous, the air thin, chilly and very pure:

We followed the sergeant about a hundred and fifty yards further up the road to the next curve. He sat on his heels and pointed at a black rubber skidmark on the asphalt. The mark ran off the asphalt and he pointed to some small bushes with broken branches. The branches dangled and the leaves had turned brown. It was easy to see where the car had come back onto the asphalt. We walked back down the slope and saw where she had gone across into the wrong lane and off the road. He pointed to the yellow paint marks on the rock wall and, a hundred feet further, to some oddly shaped skid marks on the road, like gigantic commas. He made a fast circular gesture with his hand, fingers down, like somebody stirring something in a bowl. Then he made a thrusting gesture with his hand toward the precipice indicating how it had shot out over the edge. Giving me a broad golden grin, he said, “Too fassss!”

Yes indeed. It was vivid. She lost it on a downhill curve to the left, maybe because the curve was sharper than she had anticipated. She fought for control but went across at a long angle and hit the stone cliff, bounced off it into a spin, and shot backwards or forwards-it didn’t matter which-over the edge at maybe a forty-five degree angle, and maybe a hundred feet short of the next curve, also left-hand, where the purple tiger was parked.

The sergeant led me to the brink and pointed down. I could not see what he was pointing at. He spoke to Enelio. Enelio shaded his eyes and looked. “Hey, I see it. Travis, you see those three little bushes that grow out of the edge of shale down here, near that round rock? Okay, now about ten feet to the right of the three bushes, and a little way back up the slope…”

I saw it. A few smears of yellow paint on sharp edges of rock, and a twinkling of broken glass among the rocks, and a gleaming piece of twisted chrome trim. So that’s where it hit first, but the next bounce had to take it out of sight of where we were.

The sergeant walked us down past the purple car, and pointed down at an angle toward the valley floor. From there it was easy to spot the car, or what had been a car. If you took one of those matchbox toy cars and put it on top of the charcoal and cooked steaks for a whole party, then retrieved the little car and stepped on it with your heel, you’d have a pretty good imitation of what was lying in the valley.

“How did they ever get the body?”

“They came down from the other side. There’s our road over there. That’s where the bus was when they saw the flame when she hit. You can see from here it’s not as steep to get down, or as far.”

“How was identification made?”

“By Madame Vitrier.”

“That’s in the report, Enelio. I mean what condition was the body in?”

He questioned the sergeant. Finally he turned back to me and swallowed in a sickly way and said, “She was half in and half out of the car, charred from the waist up, and chopped up pretty bad, man. There was a silver chain on her ankle Madame Vitrier identified, and a red shoe that was hers, fifty feet maybe from where they found the car and the body. Didn’t find the other shoe.”

“Why was she way up in these mountains? Enelio, this damned road must climb four thousand feet in fifteen miles.”

He turned and pointed. Through a notch in the hills we could see the far valley and the smoke misted shimmer of the city. “Five thousand feet above the sea. Up here we are… maybe eight thousand and a half? Yes. Ten, twelve kilometers more and we are at the top. The puerto, like the gate or the pass. At Relon. Ten thousand, two hundred and seven. I remember from the sign. Little houses here and there. Mountain people. Very sweet. Very cruel. Ah, this is one evil road, Travis. Every year two, three, four vehicles go over. Most of the time everyone dead. Six years ago a bus with eighteen persons. Why would she come up here? Maybe for the same reasons when I was… seventeen? Yes. On an English motorcycle. Early, early in the morning, I went down this crazy road, man. I was yelling. It was a great excitement. It was speed and death and terror. It was a rhythm, Travis McGee. Lean into one curve, lean into the other. Fantastico! Like when it is the very best of sex, like the mountains are all part of the body of a great brooding woman. Way down, near the bottom, somehow the wind got under the goggles, blew them crooked, one eye covered, one eye in the wind, so the tears were running. I think there was a little stone I did not see. Zam! I am turning in the air. Smash into trees. Fall. Broke this wrist. See? It is never quite straight again. Blood running out of my hair. Hey I walked down the road, holding this broken wrist like so. I walked with a big grin and I was singing, and they came out of the huts and dtared at the crazy fellow. I had been to visit death, my friend, and had a taste of it and I was alive and I would live forever, and finally see death again and say, ‘Remember me! You had me once, old woman, and you let me go!’” He grinned, picked up a stone, threw it over the edge. A truck came grinding and popping and grunting by us, and he waited until it went up around the corner Bix had missed and he could be heard again. “I think it was something like that for the girl. When you are young you drive up the mountains and you drive back down again.”

He turned and questioned the sergeant, listened and then interpreted. I had caught about half of it. “He went on up the road and asked the people about the yellow car. He found a boy who would talk about it. The boy was herding two burros back to the little farm. He’d been in the woods that Sunday, cutting wood and making two big loads for the burros. The yellow car was parked off the road in the late afternoon, about a kilometer this side of Guelatao. The pavement stops there. Beyond that it Is gravel and stone all the way to Papaloapan, and from there paved again until it ends on Route 140, the Gulf of Mexico, south of Veracruz. It can be driven in a Rover or a Jeep or a good truck. No matter. The boy said a big foreigner was leaning against the yellow car, and a young foreign woman was sitting on a stone. He said they spoke greetings and he replied. Because of what the boy said, the sergeant came back with a dozen men and they searched every inch of the slope to be certain the man had not been with her and been thrown clear. They looked in the tops of trees to see if he was wedged there. There was no sign of him.”

“Ask him if he got any description of the man from the boy.”

After the sergeant replied, Enelio shrugged and said, “The boy told him that all foreign people looked exactly the same to him, as identical as kernels of dried corn.”

“Did anybody else see them?”

“Perhaps. Who knows? These mountain people. They say very little to anyone from the valley, and they say nothing to the police. Look over there. See that place where the top of the smaller mountain seems to be flattened?”

“What is it?”

“In this light you can see faint lines running across, below the flat part, like terraces. If we went up there, Travis, and dug where those lines are we would find old, old walls. We would find shards of Zapotecan pottery, maybe splinters of obsidian. Under the soil of the flat top will be stone paving. There could be tombs there, but if there are they will be broken open, because that site is easy to spot. It overlooks the valley. Maybe it was an outpost for soldiers, maybe a place of the priests. There are maybe twenty thousand archeological sites in Mexico. Some say fifty thousand. Maybe five hundred have been investigated by the professionals. Here is how it was. Five, six, seven hundred years ago, these mountain people, who had been led into this place by the priests and the soldiers, they climbed to that place you see, and they made offerings of food, and they worshipped. They built the temples, dug the well, carried the stones, made the pottery, cut the thatch. But the priests got too far away from the people. They thought they owned the people forever. They lost common understandIng. So one day the people went up to the high places and killed the priests and killed the guards and pulled down the temples and never went back. They did not talk about it. They did not have elections. They just got tired of slave life, of catering to the demands of the priests for food and women and children to train, and tired of work that became more meaningless to them. They went up and killed them and put an end to it, and did not talk about it, or make legends, or write about the revolution. These are hard, enduring people. I am proud to have this Indian blood in me. Do you know the kind of men who come out of these valleys? Benito Juarez! Porfirio Diaz! This small place of Oaxaca breeds great men who dream big dreams and then act on them. Hey! Sorry I’m not teaching school here. But listen to the silences here! They never shout, these mountain people. The greeting is adios, said so softly city ears can hardly hear it. Shall we go?”

And so we went back down that insane road, with Enelio driving conservatively, automatically, far away somewhere in thought and memory. Down to the flats and across to the intersection of the main road. There was a small industry on the right, where men baked adobe brick in rough ovens, then stacked them in the sun, in shades ranging from brown-orange to yellow gold.

“Ask him if the American students cause him many problems,” Meyer said. The sergeant talked at considerable length.

Enelio translated. “Martinez says that as a group they are like all people. Most of them create no problems. But there are always the very few who get drunk and break things, and there are the ones who live foolishly and become sick and require help. Some go into the wrong places with valuable things and become the victims of thieves. Some take drugs and act irrationally. Some act in a very improper way, which upsets the simple people.”

“Improper how?” Meyer asked.

“A boy standing in the zocalo, fondling and kissing a half-dressed girl in front of a hundred Mexicans who have come in from the villages for a market day upsets them. But suppose you take some bearded, ragged, dirty kid, loaded with pot, digging the village scene, just floating and smiling, the village people will treat him with great gentleness and courtesy and consideration. Know why? It is tradition to be very nice to all madmen. The ancient gods have put a spell on them, and to be mad is to have been touched by the gods.”

“Does he get requests to find specific students?” Meyer asked.

“He says that the American Embassy makes the request of the Federal Police, and then the information is sent down here. Then the registration list at every hotel and motel and trailer court is checked. If the student is found, he is told to get in touch with the Embassy in Mexico City. If he is not found, then that is reported.”

“Do they keep a list?”

I congratulated Meyer for clear thinking. In the city. Sergeant Martinez brought a stack of papers out to the car. It was not a list, but rather a sheaf of faintly imprinted carbon copies of the Embassy requests, about forty of them.

“He says it is for all of this year up until now,” Enelio explained.

Meyer went through them swiftly, with minor pauses, and then stopped at one and showed it to me. Request to locate Carl Sessions, age 22, five foot eleven, one hundred and forty pounds, fair complexion, blond hair. Request contact Mr. Lord at the American Embassy, Extension 818. It was dated the ninth of June. There were some notations and numbers written on it in red ink. Enelio asked the sergeant to explain the notations, then interpreted for us.

“They couldn’t find this boy and they made a routine report. Okay, on July seventh, on a Monday morning, the boy is found dead in a doorway on Acrteaga Street, in a bad section over beyond the public market. There wasn’t anything left in his pockets, probably taken by kids who thought he was drunk. If his clothes hadn’t been so ragged and dirty, they would have taken those too. A doctor took a blood sample. There were needle marks on his arms and thighs. Some were infected. He was hadly undernourished. The cause of death was an overdose of an opiate. They found out he had been sleeping in a little place he had made out of cardboard boxes in the back of one of the market stalls. The owner of the stall had locked some of the boy’s stuff up for safekeeping. There was a guitar case with a guitar and some personal papers in it. They found his name from the papers.”

He asked Martinez another question, listened, and then said, “A lieutenant called the Embassy in Mexico City and reported it. An embassy employee flew down and took care of the details. The body was sent by air freight to the boy’s sister in Atlanta, Georgia.”

I was suddenly aware of the way I was being studied by Sergeant Carlos Martinez. It was the cop look, flat, narrow, hard, and thoughtful. I didn’t need any translator for that one. We showed an interest in two young travelers, and both of them were dead. Cops do not believe in coincidence. It offends their sense of orderliness. They find it hard to believe, for example, that every DWI they arrest has had exactly two beers.

We all thanked him for his time. Enelio shook his hand in that special way which inconspicuously transfers a folded bill from pocket to hand to hand to pocket.

As we drove away I said I wanted to replace the gift.

“Hey, you are pretty fonny, McGee. What time is it? Five o’clock already! Hey, Meyer and me will leave you off at the car, and by the time you get up to the Hotel Victoria, hombre, you will find us sitting at a shady table by the swimming pool looking at the lovely little birds in their wet little bikinis, and you will be one drink behind.”

Eight

THERE WERE indeed some delicious little morsels making energetic use of the giant pool, getting the last of sun and water and squealing games of tag before the shadows of the mountains moved in and the evening chill began.

The drinks were good, and Enelio was sufficiently well known to get very earnest service. For a time Meyer scribbled on the back of an envelope, pausing to squint into the distance and think. When I asked him what he was doing he said he would show me in a couple of minutes.

Finally he handed it to me and said, “Timetable. If I screwed up anything, let me know.” I held it so Enelio could read it also.

Jan. 10 Five cross into Mexico at Matamoros in camper.

Mar. 25 (approx) $13,000+ sent to Bix in Culiacan, Sinaloa.

Apr. 24 Rocko w/camper checks into Los Pajaros.

May 25 (approx) Bix Minda move from Los Pajaros to room in Hotel Ruiz.

June 9 Official request to locate Sessions.

June 30 (approx) Bix and Minda move to Mrs. Vitrier’s guest house.

July 5 Rocko beats up Mike Barrington.

July 7 Sessions found dead.

July 10 Camper permit tourist cards run out.

July 23 Rocko leaves Los Pajaros, by request, moves in with Bruce Bundy.

July 30 (approx) Bix Minda quarrel Minda goes to Mexico City.

Aug. 1 Before dawn, Bundy stops Rocko from leaving with loot.

Aug. 1 Minda’s father arrives, looking for her.

Aug. 2 Bundy lends his yellow British Ford to unknown person called George.

Aug. 3 Bix killed.

Aug. 4 Mrs. Vitrier identifies body.

I said, “Meyer, it makes it look a lot neater and more orderly than it is.”

Enelio took the envelope and frowned at the timetable, and then said, “No sense to one thing here, men.”

“Such as?”

“He couldn’t have stayed in the trailer park after the permit and cards ran out. You have to show your car papers when you check into any trailer park. They put the date and so forth on their records. The police are very fussy about car permits. They check the books. So then their papers were still good on July twenty-three… which means this first date is wrong, when they came in.”

“No, Enelio. It was pretty well checked.”

“Okay. Then sometime before April twenty-four, they went up to the border and got everything new again. New car papers, new tourist cards. I think… maybe seven days from the border down here to Oaxaca. So the date on everything could be April seventeen, eh? Good until October sixteen. You can look in the office at Los Pajaros. They will have the permit number and the place of entry. It is not so necessary to go to the border to get the tourist card new. It is not supposed to be done, but it can be newed… renewed in Mexico City, if there is a little gift to the right clerk. But not for a vehicle. One must go to the border. Where were they? Culiacan? Shortest way is up to Nogales.” He grinned at us. “And I know why they went there. Pretty stupid thing to do.”

“How could you know?” Meyer asked.

He tapped the side of his head. “Very smart fellow, this Enelio Fuentes. Sessions died from drugs. Okay. Sonora has a lot of poppies growing. The crude opium-it’s called goma-is sold in one ton lots to the little factories where they reduce it to heroin. I think the biggest operations are in Sinaloa. And some very rich men there in fine houses, you believe me. What was stupid was having money sent to Culiac-In. But maybe not. How was it sent?”

“Bank draft.”

“Dumb stupid, man! A few years ago, okay. Now the Mexican Narcotics Bureau is pretty smart. They find out who is making a deal. Then they tip their people on our side of the line. So they get searched and, okay, suppose there’s four kilos of heroin. Tell them they are going to be tossed into a Mexican jail for ninety-nine years. Scare them all to hell. Then take three kilos, and a big bribe to let them keep one, then tip the customs men on your side of the line. They get… what’s the damned word… sawhammered?”

“Whipsawed.”

“So a bank draft is like hanging out a sign. I wonder what the hell happened.”

Meyer said, “I can’t see Bix Bowie as a smuggler of narcotics.”

“So? That sister probably couldn’t see little brother Carl stone cold dead in the market, man, full of old needle holes.”

I asked him, “Could anybody go to Culiacan and buy heroin?”

He shrugged. “For double the going price, and never seeing the face you buy it from. Why not? Double the going price is maybe one tenth the wholesale price in the States. One hondred and thirty thousand dollars, U.S., is… one million, six hondred twenty-five thousand pesos.”

“In a very dirty business,” Meyer said.

Enelio laughed. “Sure. But don’t you know how the whole world thinks about dirty business? Everybody says, ‘Oh, I know it is a bad, bad thing. But it is going to happen anyway. I can’t stop it all by myself. So as long as somebody is going to do it, it might as well be me.’ Meyer, I like you. You could not do bad things. Me, I do terrible things, believe me.”

“Oh, so do I, Enelio. Unspeakable things.”

Enelio made a sad face. “But for me, instead of involving money, always it involves women. That is my burden.”

He looked at his watch. He said he had to go and change and go out. We thanked him for everything. He said he would phone us tomorrow, and maybe we could find something amusing to do.

The pool was shadowed, and most of the birds had flown. A batch of American youngsters in their late teens came whooping down from the hotel, smack-diving into the pool. Brown little girls, rangy boys, firm young flesh.

“You have to understand that all these kids are in revolt against the establishment,” Meyer said in earnest imitation of Wally McLeen.

“Oh for chrissake, Meyer!”

“I found Wally quite touchingly simplistic. And that is a very funny tourist hat he wears.”

I yawned. “And they translate ancient tablets inscribed three thousand years before Christ and find out that way back then the young were disobedient, had no respect for the old ways, and everything was going to hell in a handbasket.”

“Spoken like a true member of the establishment.”

“Old friend, there are people-young and old-that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it’s revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from the scripture by an old one. We are, all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can’t see it all that way bore hell out of me.”

“You’re snarling, McGee. So it is either the effects of the altitude, or postcoital depression. Or nervousness at round two coming up.”

“Or frustration. I want to know where Rocko is. I want to know who was up on that mountain with Bix. I want to find Jerry Nesta. I want to talk to Minda McLeen. I want to talk to Mrs. Vitrier. I can scratch Carl Sessions. Thin blond guitarists shouldn’t live in cardboard boxes and use dirty needles. And I want to bounce the rest of Brucey’s story out of him.”

“And you should be busy prettying yourself up for Lady Rebecca.”

“I keep thinking of all the other people who would have been so happy to come to Mexico with me. You’re getting so nervous about my date, I better make a phone call. Don’t move.”

I walked down and put the call through from our cottage.

“Darling McGee person!” she said, breathy and husky. “God, I feel so overall delicious! I’m humming and tingling and I hardly touch the floor when I walk. I ache for you so terribly I feel hollow. Hurry, hurry, hurry! Please!”

“Becky I’m afraid there has to be a change of plans.”

“You monster! I can’t endure it!”

“A chance has come up to move ahead a little, to get some more questions asked and answered. And I realize it was unfair of me to try to get you to tell me things told you in confidence by a friend. That was the wrong way to go about it. I won’t pester you that way any more.”

After a pause she said, “You are precisely what I need, you know. The young, young men would come to me at a dead run. Maybe that’s what cloys. Having such total control over them. One gets so accustomed to getting exactly what one wants, right on schedule. Darling, I bow to your sense of responsibilьy. I shall wait here very, very patiently, if I must. And when you are finished with your chores, come to me no matter what hour it is.”

“If its possible at all.”

“What are you trying to do to me? Could it be that! was just a bit too mischievous last night? Darling, you were a challenge, you know. What is that silly thing they shout when great trees fall? Timber! Then they stand aside, smiling. Suppose I make a solemn vow not to be aggressive, and even teach you some special ways to absolutely destroy me? Fair is fair. Now will you promise to come here?”

“If I knew exactly what was going to happen, I’d promise. But I don’t know how long it will take me to do the things I have to do.”

“Could another woman be involved in all this work, dear?”

“It might turn out that way.”

“If it does, kindly do not bother to come here. Is that quite clear?”

“From the tone of voice, Becky, abundantly.”

“You’re trying to spoil things. I’m not accustomed to that.”

“All change is beneficial, honey. Take care.”

I heard her start to say something as I hung up; I felt slightly weak in the knee. Say you are driving through on a green light and out of the corner of your eye you see a crazy running the red, about to hit you broadside. So you step on it hard and your car jumps ahead far enough so there is just a little click as he ticks the rear bumper on his way past. So you drive three blocks and park carefully and get out. And the knees feel strange.

So we drove down into the center of the city. The military band was playing marches on the ornate stand in the center of the plaza, and people were walking slowly around and around the perimeter walkways. The traffic sounds, roar of conversations on the veranda, motor scooters, and vendors hawking everything salable overpowered the band, reducing it to an occasional cymbal-clash, an oompah now and then.

It was so crowded we had to take a table at the far end, near the jewelry-store corner. By the time we’d put a drink order in, and I was about to bounce my Bundy-plan off Meyer’s more temperate outlook, the Backspin redhead came out of nowhere and plumped down at Meyer’s left and glowered across the square table at me.

“You put on a great rap, you sneaky bastard!”

“Well, now! All fresh and clean and pretty as a picture. See, Meyer? Her eyes focus and her neck is clean. Carrying a little too much weight, but trim her down and she could cut it at anybody’s convention.”

“Mark was making a joke. That’s all. I want to tell you I didn’t appreciate the floor show you put on.”

I smiled at her. “What were we supposed to do, honey? Sit there and let three heads think that the laughing was a great put-on? Should I have plucked that scarecrow stud out of the chair and booted his scrawny tail out into the traffic? Should we have ignored you and spoiled your fun? Should we have gotten up and walked away? Name it.”

“We had some Mardil caps with a Coke was all.”

“All for Jeanie?”

“That’s something else again.”

“Yes indeed. She is long gone. It looks like barbs to me. What’s she using to come back? Speed? Is she popping it or eating it?”

“She is not long gone. She’ll be okay.”

“Get her when she’s leveled off, kid, halfway between, give her a little kiss, and say good-by.”

“You know so damned much, don’t you?”

“I tried to sweat the whole thing out once upon a time with a very dandy little girl named Mary Catherine. She went onto reds and blues. Tuinal. They used to hate to see her coming, because the ward nurses hate the barbiturate addicts worse than the drunks or the ones on horse. Took her up to North Carolina to a cabin to get her once and for all clean. I’d go in for groceries and come back and find her gone away on some kind of high. Sneaked back and watched through a window. Draining gas out of the lantern, heating it and sniffing it. Lovely sweet faraway smile. Busted in. Tears, promises. Never again. Then she took off. Couldn’t find her. Pretended to look. Pretended I had the broken heart. But you know, Red, that look on her face had killed it. I was the most relieved lover in contemporary history. I have no idea what Jeanie is to you.”

“My best friend. My roommate at school.”

“Take my word. She’ll never make it back. Not from where she is.”

“So what if she, doesn’t? It’s her life, isn’t it?”

“If you want to call it living.”

“Hah! That big act of yours, mister. It so happens I found out you’re nothing but some kind of rotten private fuzz, both of you. Private pigs for the establishment, down here to make trouble for people. That’s some kind of living, isn’t it?”

Meyer hitched around and leaned toward her. “Listen to me, my dear. And believe me. We came here as an act of friendship to find out how a lovely girl died. Just that. Nothing more. It seems like such a waste. Your friend Jeanie seems like a tragic waste to me. And to you too, I think. You are being very defensive and impertinent because you are very troubled. I think more has happened than you can handle. If I can help you, privately, personally, no strings attached, if I can help you in any way, just tell me what you need.”

She shook her head. “Oh, for chrissake. You kill me. Honest to God, me need help from you!” And she began to laugh. Very merry. Very young and jolly. Ha ha ho. Meyer sat looking at her. Very patient. No change in the concerned, benign expression. And the laughter took on a thinner edge, a shrillness that suddenly broke into a sob. She slumped, face in her hands, crying quietly. I opened my mouth to speak. Meyer gave me a warning look, a quick lift of the hand. She was straining for control, trying to smother the crying, trying not to be conspicuous.

“What do you need?” he asked.

She reached blindly, head bowed, chin against her chest. She grasped his bulky forearm with both hands. “Can you… can you get us out of here? Jeanie and me. Please… Tickets. I can… pay you back.”

“Where to, dear?”

“Oklahoma City.”

“Where are your people?”

“In Europe with my youngest brother, traveling.”

“How soon do you want to get out of here?”

“Now! Tomorrowl”

He burrowed a blank sheet from my pocket note book, and put it and his pen in front of her. “Write your names and addresses.”

She hunched over the paper, snuffling. She gave it to Meyer. He said he’d be back in a few minutes. She wiped her eyes with a paper napkin and sat up and sighed deeply and made a wry mouth. “He isn’t kidding?” she asked in a small voice.

“No. Not Meyer.”

“I have run into so many lousy rotten people.”

“Who briefed you on me?”

“Oh, there was a man around like an hour ago, maybe even two hours. Sort of handsome and elegant and faggotty. He was speaking real good Mexican to one of the waiters and he came over to the table with the waiter and the waiter pointed me out. So he asked me to come back to his table for a minute. So what the hell, why not?”

“Brown-gray hair, good tan, bangs, gold mesh ring.”

“Yes, that’s him. He lives here. He described you and, boy, did I ever remember you! He said he found out there was some kind of scene and wanted to know what went on. I asked why, and he said that a girl had died accidentally, the Bowie girl, and I knew about that, of course. Everybody who was here knew about that. And he said you were an investigator trying to turn it into a murder or something so you could make more money off her parents, and you were trying to make trouble for innocent people who live here. So I told him that what happened had nothing to do with anything like that. He wanted to know who else you talked to, and I said you had talked to the big fellow named Mike, with the Jesus beard, the one who paints, and the black girl named Della who’s living with him, but I didn’t know what you talked about to them. And that was all.”

Meyer returned and gave her a pat on the back of her hand and said, “You can pick up two air tickets at the travel desk in the lobby after eleven tomorrow morning, dear. For your protection more than mine, I’m arranging it so they can’t be turned in for cash.”

She nodded. “I think that’s the best way. I… I won’t believe it until I’ve got the tickets in my hand.”

“You leave here at two tomorrow afternoon. You’ll have three hours in Mexico City, so you better stay in the airport.”

She tried, almost successfully, to smile. “Is there anybody you want killed?… Sorry. I guess that isn’t very funny.”

“You might be able to help us with one little problem. We’re looking for three people Bix Bowie traveled with. There were five altogether, but the Sessions boy died. We’d like to find Minda McLeen and Walter Rockland, known as Rocko, and Jerry Nesta.”

“Those last two, Rocko and Jerry, if anybody wants to kill those two, I’ll help. They are rotten human beings, especially Rocko. Look I’m not going into any details about it. A bunch of us went back to that camper with those two, for like a fun party for one evening. So that Rocko gave me something that ran me up the walls. It ended up a girlfriend of mine named Gillian and me, we were there for I think it was three days. It taught me why the blonde and the little dark one split and lived in that crummy hotel room. Mostly that lousy Rocko had me. He is strong as a bull. I mean I knew that if I went there I might end up getting balled, and that it would be taking that risk right? Look, there are things you say you won’t do. You know. Stopping points. But when people keep hurting you and hurting you, then it’s easier to do any sick thing than keep getting hurt. It was all rotten. The kids who should have gotten us away from those two didn’t do a damn thing. They just left us there. Jerry wasn’t so bad. Gillian had the idea he’d be all right if he’d get away from Rocko. Jerry has this fantastic black beard. It’s the biggest, blackest beard I ever saw. All that shows are his eyes and a little bit of cheekbone and the end of his nose. I saw her in the market two or three days ago and she said they’d been out to Mitla and she saw Jerry walking along with a kind of ugly little Mexican woman walking behind him, so she made Ricky stop the car and she went back, but he was very strange. He didn’t want to talk to her at all. He’s living out there someplace, but he wouldn’t say where. I haven’t any idea where Rocko went, and I couldn’t care less. I heard that the dark one, Minda? Yes, Minda. She’s supposed to be up in Mexico City and her father is here waiting for her to come back. So that’s all I know.”

She got up and smiled good-by and said she couldn’t say thank you or she’d start crying again. But she bent over and kissed Meyer in a very quick, shy, small-girl way. And fled.

“How did you know she’d grab at it?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t. But sometimes you can smell despair. Besides, all generosity is selfish. It made me feel good all over.”

Quickly I told him about Bruce Bundy’s quest. It was logical, Meyer agreed, that Bundy would have a good contact among the waiter staff, because it would be useful to know what was going on at all times.

“But,” asked Meyer, “what is he so damned jumpy about?”

“That is what we now go to find out.”

He looked doleful. “A minute ago I felt good all over.”

Nine

So I left the car at the end of the block and once again, this time by night, we walked along Calle las Artes, to the narrow front of number eighty-one.

Hundreds of years of dedicated and diligent theft have made Mexican homes very hard to crack. They grill everything you can reach. They put that busted glass into the tops of their patio walls. And they listen for thieves all the time without knowing they are listening. Thievery is a recognized, though not highly respected, profession. Artists use a limber length of bamboo with a hook at the end to snag the tourist trousers and pull them through the bars of the bedroom window.

There was a light upstairs, and the patio area, seen through the entrance corridor, was lighted. We stood in the shadowed darkness across the narrow street, and I said in a low tone, “I do not think we can talk our way through the gate. He won’t buy a drunk act. He won’t be bluffed, and he won’t be hustled. And it would take a trampoline or a Tarzan act to pop in there uninvited.”

“I’m still afraid you’ll think of something, Travis.” I was afraid I wouldn’t. And then luck took a hand. If you sit still, you don’t give that lady much of a chance to operate-for or against you. But if you moved around, she can get into the act oftener. She sent the tired old clattering cab down the street to pull up in front of Bruce’s house. When the back door opened the dome light went on. Bruce got out. David Saunders was in the back seat. Bruce went a few steps and looked back and then came back to the cab. He leaned in. The rough idle of the motor made it impossible to hear what he was saying. But his expression, seen through smeared glass, was animated, amused, coaxing. He made little shrugs and hand gestures. And at last David hitched himself along the seat. Bruce reached in and lifted a large suitcase out, put it down, paid the driver. The cab drove away. They moved toward the gate, Bruce carrying the suitcase. They talked outside the gate in low tones. Bruce unlocked the gate and swung it open. He began to lead David through the gate, with a quieting, comforting arm across David’s back in such a way that it reminded me of that classic, The Specialty of the House, when the plump customer is being taken into the restaurant kitchens.

So I was on my toes with good knee action, angling across, hoping Meyer was reasonably close behind me. When Bundy spun, hearing the sudden unexpected sound, I was coming through the gate full out, shoulder already dipped, and a tenth of a second from impact.