Travis McGee 11 - Dress Her In Indigo

Karate, judo, boxing, jiujitsu, wrestling-not one of the formal schools of unarmed combat prepares a man for the special problem of suddenly catching a sack of bricks that has fallen out of a third story window. It was a driving, rolling block coming in from the blind side, and the impact was impressive. It took us both ten yards down that tiled corridor, right to the end of it where it opened up onto the patio. We picked up a small table en route, along with some decorative crockery that had been on it. I rolled up onto my feet, my back toward him, and spun and was bemused and disconcerted to see him bounce up in a springy way and land in the dangerous balance of the expert, hands low and slightly forward. I did not want him to start that business of Hah! and Huh! The table was on the corridor floor between us, the three remaining legs aimed toward me. So I punted it at him, getting a lot of leg into it, and getting a nice lift on it. He got his hands up in time, and as the table fell away, I was right there to pop him with a short overhand right, slightly off target, and correct the error when he came back off the wall. He had been obliging enough to wear a leather thong as a belt for his vermilion stretch slacks, and I yanked it loose, rolled him onto his face and took two fast turns around the wrists and two fast hitches that would hold long enough for me to solve Meyer’s problem, even if Bruce woke up right now, which didn’t seem plausible.

I came upon the Mexican woman standing crouched in terror, wringing her hands. I smiled broadly and told her that it was a game Americans play. Don’t worry, senora. We are all very happy.

Meyer was between the gate and the entrance to the central corridor. He was clumping around in a small circle, taking quick steps to the side now and again to catch his balance. He was shaking his big head and muttering to himself. David Saunders sat spraddled like a chunky little kid. He was swaying from side to side, cradling something against the lower part of his big chest and making a small thin keening sound. He looked like he was rocking a little dolly, and he couldn’t carry a tune in a basket.

I got the gate shut and latched. I caught Meyer as he came around his circle. He stopped and shook his head violently and knuckled his eyes.

“Violence is vulgar,” he said. “It offends me.”

“You won, didn’t you?”

“By giving him a frightful blow on the fist with my forehead. The expression is, ‘I ducked into it.’”

I helped Saunders up and walked him past Bundy into the bright area of the walled court and eased him into a white iron armchair. I pulled the hand away from his chest. It was beginning to puff. Broken hands are unpredictable. There are ten thousand nerve bundles, and if the break doesn’t involve them, you don’t feel a thing until later on. But if the broken bone or bones grind into the right nerves, it is an agony that prevents you from thinking about anything else in the world, and keeps you right on the twilight edge of a faint.

I plucked Brucey off the floor and put him on a purple chaise, rolled him onto his side and neatened the thong. The maid stood staring at us. I smiled at her. Meyer smiled at her. After a few moments she smiled back and scuttled away.

Bruce lifted his head, coming awake all at once. He swung his feet to the floor and sat up. He worked his jaw from side to side and licked his lips and looked at me and said in a totally masculine manner, “You are pretty goddam impressive, McGee. Men your size are supposed to be slower.” He looked at David and frowned. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He broke his hand hitting me on the head,” Meyer said. “Terribly sorry about that.”

“But he’s in agony!” Bruce said. “He’s terribly hurt. He needs medical attention immediately. Look at his poor hand!”

“He’ll get it, after we have a little chat.”

“What in the world do we have in common worth talking about, McGee?”

“The subject of discussion is what makes you so nervous about my asking questions about Walter Rockland and the Bowie girl.”

“Am I nervous?”

“Nervous enough to talk to that redhead earlier tonight and tell her I was trying to make something out of nothing.”

“Aren’t you?”

I kicked a chair closer and sat facing him, about four feet away. “Brucey, the trouble with playing games is that you never know how much the other party knows. Rocko moved in here with you at your invitation, and put the camper in the shed out in back, and tried to hit you for a large loan, and then he tried to make off with a lot of valuable little goodies, but you’d read him right and disabled the truck. Took the rotor, probably. He jumped you and you black-belted him pretty good.”

He tossed his head to throw the bangs back. He turned pale under his golden tan, and the odd brown eyes turned to dingy little slits. At that moment he looked his age.

“I shall never, never, never forgive that treacherous, rotten British bitch.” He continued at some length. He had a truly poisonous mouth.

“All through? So why are you so edgy about it?”

“I can’t afford to get involved in anything.”

“What is there to get involved in, Bruce?”

He hesitated. “What if I happened to know that someone saw Walter Rockland and the Bowie girl together just a week ago? Ah… at the airport, getting on a flight to Acapulco.”

Misdirection. Nice footwork. Toss in a thought that warps the mind. Maybe it was true. So how to test it?

It took me quite a segment of silence to come up with the leverage. “You are a clever man, Bruce. Look at it this way. Nobody knows where Rocko is. It wouldn’t be hard to prove he lived here with you. You are very nervous about the whole thing. I can get the information to Sergeant Martinez that you fought with Rockland. I can tell him that he can find traces of human blood on the stone floor of the shed out behind this place. I can tell him your story about Rockland going to Acapulco, and I guess they could check that out and see if he did. Then I would suggest that they take this place apart looking for a body and take you apart to see what you know about it.”

“You are such a cruel son of a bitch.”

“So?”

“All right! All right! All right! I nearly moved away from here after the first four months. I had a stupid mishap with the car I had then. A drunken old fool on a bicycle ran right into the side of the car. And so I… enjoyed the hospitality of the local prison. My dear friend Freddy, now deceased, tried frantically to get me out, but they managed to hold me there five days. Police the world over seem to have this compulsion to mistreat men of my particular sexual pattern. They treated me with contempt. I did not mind that. I considered the source. The brutality from the jailors could be endured. But each night I was locked into a very large cell with the very dregs of Mexico, who had been informed, of course, of what I was. And so I was used and abused. They degraded me. It put me into a depression that lasted for months. Freddy talked me out of leaving Mexico. He said it would be the same anywhere in the world. That is a valid observation. We have no recourse in the law, really. And Walter Rockland knew that when he tried to make off with some very valuable things. He knew that I would not report the theft, that I would not dare report it for fear they’d think of some pretext for locking me up again. I don’t think I could endure that a second time. If you understand that, Mr. McGee, and understand my absolute terror, then I can tell you what happened.”

He told us that Walter, as he called him, had stayed in bed all day Friday, and had said on Saturday morning that he still felt unwell, but begged to be allowed to leave. Bruce told him to rest. At noon on Saturday while Bruce was in the kitchen fixing something for a light lunch, he had been struck from behind and knocked unconscious. When he regained consciousness, Walter was gone. So were his car keys, a couple of hundred pesos from his wallet, and his yellow English Ford. At first he had been afraid Walter had broken in and taken the valuables which he had locked up after the first atiempt, but they were still there. He had no intention of reporting it as a theft. He still had the truck and camper, and they were worth more than the car Walter had taken.

On Monday, in the middle of the morning, the police had come to see him. They had asked him about his car, asked him where it was. He had thought they had picked Walter up, and he remembered Walter’s hints about needing the money for some illegal act. He could not be tied in with any illegality, so he had invented the fictitious young American named George, and had described him in a way that would fit half the young Americans in Mexico on summer vacation. Only after they had made him go over the story several times did they tell him that an unidentified girl had gone off the mountain road, that his car was a total loss and the girl was dead.

Later that day, before learning that Eva Vitrier had identified the body, Bruce had gone to Becky and told her the whole story and had asked her what she thought he should do. He was frightened that Walter was involved somehow in the girl’s death, and that if they picked up Walter he would manage to involve Bruce somehow.

Becky thought it was logical that Walter Rockland would come back after his truck, and that Bruce should leave the shed unlocked and leave the keys in it, and replace the rotor. Maybe somebody would steal it, or Rocko would retrieve it. And if neither happened, she would help him get rid of it some dark night, follow in her car while he parked it somewhere else in the city; and bring him back. In the small hours of the night, at a little after two o’clock on Tuesday morning, he heard the truck start, heard the backing and filling in the narrow alleyway, heard it speed away, the drone fading into the normal night sounds. And he did not care whether Rocko had taken it or a thief had taken it. He thought he was out of it.

“So weeks later,” he said bitterly, “you show up at my door, telling your lies about insurance. I had to let you in, because I had to be certain Rocko hadn’t sent you on some kind of blackmail project. But you didn’t say the right things because you had no way of knowing.”

“Like I have no way of knowing that all this is true.”

“It is true. And the Bowie girl is dead. Eva telephoned me to say good-by. She said she did not know when she would be back.”

“Where did she go?”

“She never says. I have no idea. I know she was very upset. It was unlike her to… identify the body. I think she had to be certain in her own mind that it was the blond girl, and she was too impatient to wait for them to identify her in some other way. I think it was quite a strong and unusual infatuation for poor Eva.”

“Infatuation?”

“You aren’t as aware as I thought, McGee. It seemed to me that Becky made it obvious last night that Eva and I are opposite sides of a very old coin. But the approach is not the same. She is very rich and quite impersonal about her… requirements. When she arrives here she will usually have a personal maid with her, never the same one. Girls of a certain type. Bovine, Nordic, bursting with health, quite young, tailored drab uniforms, terribly submissive and polite and humble. Northern Europeans. I suppose it is a great deal more efficient and less wearing than forming emotional attachments, and of course she can afford it without pain. I must say I did get a certain dirty satisfaction out of hearing how distressed she was, and realizing she is just as human and vulnerable as the rest of us. My hands are getting awfully numb. And poor David is in misery. And I have told you the whole thing.”

I looked over at Meyer. He had several small purple knuckle-lumps on his forehead. “Do you buy it?” I asked him.

“I buy it.”

“How terribly kind!” Bruce said acidly.

“Meyer, I would not like to untie him and have him start making out like we are pine boards and cinder blocks and going into that yelling and grunting bit. So why don’t you just take that same walk again, and take a cab from the square to the hotel, and if I’m not there by the time you think I should be…”

So I gave him five minutes and then untied Bruce. He flexed his hands and went at once to David, turned and asked me where my car was and would I please bring it to the front.

They sat in the back. I heard Bruce coaching him in what to say at the hospital. Bruce told me the turns to take. They talked in low tones. I heard Bruce say at one point, “But really! Somebody is going to have to wait on you hand and foot, and shouldn’t I have that right? Besides, Davey, it was all settled, wasn’t it? And your things are at my place, aren’t they? Be practical, darling!”

They got out. Bruce said he could manage from there on, thank you. He gave me an absent nod, and walked David slowly toward the ambulance entrance.

I managed to get lost and ended up back in town rather than out on the Mitla Road. I got lost because my mind was too busy trying to make order out of too many fragments. I went up the hotel hill and around past the lobby entrance and down the cobblestone drive to the cottage carport.

Meyer hadn’t left any lights on. I stumbled on the steps to the front porch of the cottage, and I heard the legs of the metal porch chair scrape on the cement as he moved. I groped for the other chair and sat down, feeling a few twinges from the tumble along the tile, and wondering if they would turn into morning aches.

“Hoo, boy,” I said. “Dandy little village they’ve got here. These sweet kindly folk tear me up, they really do. I’m even beginning to wonder about Enelio Fuentes. He’ll probably turn out to be a retired female wrestler going around in drag.”

“Never fear,” said Lady Becky from the neighboring chair. “Enelio is muy hombre. I can so certify.”

“How the hell did you get here?”

“That’s what I like, dearest. A warm welcome.”

“Where is Meyer?”

“He’s really a dear man. Did you know that? Oh, I packed him off. I expect he’s settling down for the night in one of the other cottages. Things are thinning out, you know. We had a nice little visit, and he went puddling off carrying his little kit. He’s marvelously tactful and understanding.”

“And treacherous.”

“I was driving around and about looking for you, darling, and saw him walking toward the zocalo, so I gave him a lift back here. Thought you might spot my car and turn into a ninny and drive away again. So I parked it discreetly. Travis dear, such a lot of nuisance and nonsense for you to hammer poor Bruce about. All you had to do was come to me. I should have told you all the rest of it.”

“If I lived long enough to hear it all.”

“But darling, you’ll want to hear it from me too, to see if it all matches up, won’t you? So doesn’t it come out to the same thing? You do struggle so. One would think I was quite sickeningly ugly or a horrid bore.”

“If you would kindly be ugly or boring, I would be very grateful.”

“But I shall be both soon enough! Any day now one ghastly wrinkle will appear, and all of a sudden I shall be… Doriana Gray? Or like that carriage one of your sentimental poets wrote about. Quite suddenly I shall dwindle into a scruffy little old lady in tennis shoes, peering through bifocals, fussing with her hearing aid, who, in a quavery little old voice, will bore everyone with her memories of lovemaking. I am here because I forgave you.”

“Thank you very much, Lady Rebecca. But you see, I wrote you down in one of the pages of my life, and now the pages have been turned, and we cannot go back and reread them because… because…”

“Because the book is very long and life is very short. Nice try, ducks. But I did the writing, and all I wrote was a preface. I told you. I was being a horrible show offy person. I shan’t be like that at all. Promise. Besides, you would be cheating me dreadfully. I granted myself a few little moments of climax, dear, but then I nipped the poor struggling things in the bud because, should I let one get truly started, it goes on and on and on, quite unendurably. It is so terribly lasting and intense and exhausting that I have to ration myself carefully. Even so, I go dragging about for days, looking quite puffy and done in. It would be wicked at this stage to deprive me.”

I stood up slowly and made a wide circuit of her chair to reach the door. “It may be wicked, Becky. It may be unforgivable. It might even be a shocking lack of courtesy. But I am going to deprive the hell out of both of us, and I am going to get a long night’s sleep, alone. Sorry about your pride and all that. Someday I may think back and kick myself. Sorry. Go drive that bubblegum car home. Good night, Lady Rebecca. Bug off, please.”

I opened the screen door and reached in and found the switches for the room lights and porch lights and clicked everything on. She stood up and turned to face me, eyes sparkling green through the sheepdog ruff, mouth broadened in a delighted bawdy grin.

“You know, I thought you might be stuffy and standoffish and difficult. So one does what one can to make it a fait accompli, what?”

She wore a wine red hotel blanket gathered closely around her. She laughed and said, “It would take you hours to find where I hid my clothing, dearest.”

She dropped the blanket to the porch floor. “What is that quaint Americanism you people use? Peekaboob?”

I flapped a weak and frantic hand at the switches until I hit them back the way they were and we were in darkness. Well, shucks. And puh-shaw, fellas.

“That’s right,” I said, as she found me, locked on, and strained close. “Exactly right. Peekaboob. Very quaint old saying.”

Ten

I SAT out on the cottage porch in the Sundaymorning clang-bang of church bells and rooster announcements. Blue-gray smoke of breakfast fires hazed the morning bowl of the city.

Meyer came tentatively around the corner and looked up at me on the porch. Dopp-kit dangled from one hairy finger.

“Yoo-hoo,” he said.

“Yoo-hoo to you, too, my good man.”

“I didn’t see her car, so I thought… ”

“Come, on up. You live here, Meyer. Remember?”

So he came up onto the porch, started to say something, and changed his mind and went silently into the cottage. He came out in a few minutes and sat in the other chair.

“McGee, I thought that you had gotten back and somehow managed to send her on her way, implausible as that may seem. But I can see from the… the wear and tear… that she stayed for a while.”

“She went tottering out of here about forty minutes ago, Meyer. She claimed she could walk to her car unaided.”

“But… how do you feel?”

“Vibrant, alive, regenerated, recharged.”

“I… I’m sorry I let her talk me into moving out for the night, Travis. But I guess you know you can’t argue with that woman. She doesn’t listen. And after all, it was your personal problem and-”

“Stop apologizing, my good man. No trouble at all. Quite a pleasant night. Active, but pleasant. Now if you would pick me up and take me up to breakfast, we can begin the long day.”

We went back to Los Pajaros trailer park. The office and store were closed and locked. We left the rented car outside the gates and walked in. In the space numbered twenty, a Land Rover was parked under a tree with dusty leaves, near the travel trailer of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Knighton. The Rover was battleship gray, dusty and road-worn, with tools and gas cans strapped abroad.

He was sitting at an old table, typing with two fingers at respectable speed, apparently copying from,ycillow handwritten sheets. She was hanging some khaki shirts on a line to dry. They both stopped working as we approached, staring with an air of expectant caution. They could have been brother and sister, slat-thin young people, deeply sun-weathered, small statured, with colorless eyes, mouse hair, that elusive pinched and underprivilaged look around the mouth that seems typical of slum people, swamp people, coal mine people, and mountain people. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, and she had a plastic clothespin in her mouth. “Good morning!” I said.

He took off the glasses and she took out the clothespin. “Howdy” he said, in a voice more appropriate to a seven foot cowboy. “‘Morning,” she murmured.

“Sorry to bother you. My name is Travis McGee. This is my friend Meyer. The manager said you were acquainted with a man who stayed here for a while, right over there in number seventeen. His name is Rockland.”

“Why do you want to talk to me about him?”

“I thought you might have some information that would help us locate him, Mr. Knighton.”

“Why do you want to find him?”

“To ask him about a girl who came into Mexico with him.”

“Afraid you’re wasting time, Mister McGee, covering ground already covered. I think he should have told you he was already here over two weeks ago.”

“Who was here?”

“That girl’s father. What was his name, hon?”

“McLeen,” she answered softly.

“This isn’t about the McLeen girl. This is the girl we’re asking about.” I moved over to the table and handed him the picture.

He looked at it, tilting his head, squinting one eye. “I don’t want to tell you something that isn’t true. Maybe could you tell me this one’s name?”

“Bowie. Beatrice Bowie. She was called Bix.”

He was quick. “Was called. Then I wouldn’t be breaking news, would I? You know she’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“But you want to ask about her? You related to her?”

“No. Friends of her father. He’s unable to travel. He wants to know what things were like for her down here, before she died. They were out of touch.”

His wife had hung up the shirts. She came over to the table to look at the photograph. “Never knew she’d been such a pretty one,” said Mrs. Knighton.

“We don’t want to interrupt your work.” Meyer said.

Knighton studied us in turn. He shrugged and stood up, hand out. “I’m Ben. This here is Laura. Hon, you want to bring us out some of that coffee?”

“Surely,” she said. “We take it black with a little sugar.” We both nodded acceptance, and she responded with a thin smile and went into the travel trailer. The three of us moved over to the cement picnic table and benches that were, with the fireplace, part of the permanent installation at each site.

“Set,” Ben Knighton said. His wife brought coffee, poured it and sat with us. They were comfortable people. He explained that he was on a sabbatical year from Texas Central University, and it was nearly over, and they had to leave in a few days.

He was obviously fond of young people, and he was also well acquainted with the drug scene on campus. It was natural that they would be curious about the five young people who had arrived in the camper back in April.

“Some of them dabble a little, without knowing the least damn thing about what the direct effects and the side effects might be. And some of them turn into heavy users. So you give them what help you can, what help they’ll take from you. After a while you learn the categories. There’s the predators who get their kicks out of, turning the weaker kids on and taking monetary advantage or sexual advantage of them, or both. And some of the kids are such victims natural born, they seem to be looking for their personal predator. You can tell when a kid is so susceptible he is too far gone before you can manage to get to him. There’s a faculty expression. D.T.O.D. Down The Old Drain. Black humor, but so true. They slip through your fingers. I watched them, those five. Rocko is a predator, and one merciless son of a bitch.”

“Ben!” she said.

He smiled at her. “Honey, I’ve been writing this novel for a year. I have to talk like a novelist, don’t I?”

“But you don’t have to sound like the dean of men.”

“Rocko seemed clean as far as I could tell. He hit the bottle sometimes, which is a good indication he was clean. And he is one mean drunk. Jerry, the one with the black beard, I’d label a semi-predator. He was on something, and getting closer to getting hooked on it every week. That’s the way the predators turn into victims. The guitar player, Carl, was already way down the old drain. The blond girl, Bix, didn’t look much like her picture any more. She wasn’t too many steps behind Carl. The McLeen girl seemed to be on stimulants of some kind. She was burning herself up.”

Mrs. Knighton shuddered. “That Carl used to sit over there under that tree and think he was playing the guitar. But there weren’t any strings on it. And when the wind was from that direction, you could hear his long dirty fingernails rattling on the wood where the strings should have been.”

“Cats tire of crippled mice that can’t scamper any more,” Ben said. “Sessions left, and then one day the girls were gone. But there was a fresh supply available in town and they used to bring them back. They’d stay three or four days sometimes and then they’d leave. Rocko and Jerry weren’t a pair anybody’d want a permanent home with. Rocko was mostly bluff though. See those two tanks fastened there to the yoke of our house trailer? Gas tanks. Cooking gas. Twenty gallons each. That camper had been jacked off the truck and was on blocks. One day after Jerry had left, too, and Rocko was there alone, he drove back from town and found out somebody had pried open a little locked hatch in the back of the camper and stolen his bottled gas. He went storming around to all the sites, fussing about whether anybody saw the theft. He came over here, ugly, loud and mean. I was adjusting the fan belt on the Rover. I kept working and told him I didn’t know a thing about it. I guess he thought I should stand at attention when spoken to. So he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up and spun me around, and I came right around with the lug wrench I was using, and rang it off the top of his skull.”

“Ben doesn’t like people grabbing hold of him,” Mrs. Knighton explained with a little air of pride.

“He walked back on his heels with his hands clapped on top of his head. Then he shook himself like a wet dog, and I knew from his eyes he was going to make a try for me, so I walked into him while he was getting organized and popped him again the same way but harder. He went down onto one knee and I told him to stay off my site from then on. I could tell from his color it had made him sick to his stomach. He looked at me and knew I meant it. He went away and I went back to tightening the nuts under the hood. Then he pulled out about two weeks later because Tomas wouldn’t rent to him for another month.”

“How bad off was the Bowie girl?” Meyer asked him.

“Bad. Passive, dirty, confused. Disoriented.” Laura Knighton said, “She seemed withdrawn and dull and listless. Stringy hair and a puffy face and bad color. I’d say she looked fifteen years older than that picture you’ve got. One of the retired couples hitched up and moved out because of her. She had… a habit they didn’t take to.”

“Don’t get so fastidious, darling, nobody knows what you’re trying to say. If that girl was walking slowly across that site over there and had an urge to pee, she’d pull up her skirt and squat wherever she was, unconscious as a dog in a cemetery.”

“Then,” said Laura, “there was that one day she had a blouse on and forgot her skirt or pants or whatever she was going to wear. And the little dark girl came running out and got her by the hand and tugged her back and got her inside and got her dressed the rest of the way. The poor lost thing is dead now, and I can’t help saying it. I think it’s for the best, just as I think the guitar player is better off dead, no matter what sorrow his folks may be feeling for him. They’d have no way of knowing how bad off he got toward the end.”

I said, “It would be a help if you knew how we could locate any of the others, Rocko or Jerry or Miss McLeen.”

“I wish we could help you,” Ben said.

“I did see that truck and the camper that day, dear,” she said.

“You maybe saw a blue truck with an aluminum camper body.”

“That is exactly what I saw!”

He went into the trailer and brought out a large map of the State of Oaxaca, and also brought along his work journal to pin down the date. In one part of the historical novel he was finishing, a young Mixtec priest from Mitla flees all the way down the long slope of the Sierra Madre del Sur to the Pacific coast a hundred and fifty miles away. He had decided the imaginary priest would follow the dry bed of the Rio Miahuatlan, and so on Tuesday, August 5th, over three weeks ago, they had driven the Rover south along the road to Puerto Angel as far as Ocotlan, and then headed east on a road that was barely more than a dusty trace. Where it was blocked by a rock fall, they had gone ahead on foot. They had climbed a ledge and surveyed the country to the east with a pair of seven power binoculars. When he had gone wandering off, she had picked up a dust swirl far to the east, appearing and disappearing across rolling country. She had steadied the glasses and identified it as a blue truck with an aluminum truck body or camper on it.

“I was terribly curious about it because it was goIng so fast,” she explained earnestly. “Mexicans will drive like maniacs on paved roads, but when they get onto dirt roads they positively creep, because if they break springs or anything in the holes or on the rocks it is so terribly expensive to replace them. And tourists in this country drive very carefully when they get off the paved roads. And anyway, what would there be over there to attract a tourist. I mean it was just so unusual I was interested and I wondered about it. I decided the driver was drunk or it was some terrible emergency.”

He showed us on the map where the road had to be, but there was not even a dotted line on the map. It had been headed south, Mrs. Iznighton said. It had to be some road that turned south of 190 somewhere beyond Mitla, maybe as far as the village of Totolapan. Distances, he said, were very deceptive in the dry, high air. “But the chance of it being Rockland?” He shrugged.

We thanked them for the good coffee and the talk. He talked a little bit about his book. We wished him luck.

As we walked out, Tomas, the manager, was unlocking the store and the office. He was delighted to serve us by looking up the date he had copied from the vehicle papers on Rockland’s truck. Yes indeed, the permit had been issued at Nogales on April 10th, and was thus good for yet another month and a half.

As we drove away Meyer made listless agreement with my observation that the Knightons seemed like nice people. He seemed dejected. I knew what was wrong with him. The picture they had given us of Bix Bowie had been vivid, ugly, and depressing. I could not get him to talk. He did not feel like going to Mitla to look for Jerry Nesta. He seemed to want to go back to the cottage at the Victoria, so I skirted the center of town, drove up there. He plumped himself into a porch chair, sighing. I put on swim pants and walked up through the noon sun and swam slow lengths of the big handsome pool, staying out of the way of the young’uns who came squealing down off the diving tower. I dried off in the sun on a towel spread on the fitted stones of the poolside paving. The high altitude sun had a deep stinging bite to it that went all the way down through all the old layers of Gulfstream tan.

I opened small gates and let the immediate sensory memories of Becky flow into my mind. By rights I should have felt even more surfeited and exhausted than before. But though this weariness was deep, it seemed more gentle, with a spice of male arrogance, of satisfaction, of knowledge of satisfaction given in full measure.

She had been simpler, softer, more feminine somehow. She had been involved more with herself and her own reactions and timings. Before, we had used me, and this time we had used her, first in partial- measures and at last in a final full measure which had been, she said, more than she had wanted to spend.

Later we had talked in a sleepy way of half sentences, and the sound of her shower had awakened me. I slept again, and was awakened by the kiss that was good morning and good-by, sat up to see her standing tall and smiling nicely, dressed in orange linen, white leather hatbox in her hand.

“You were very wicked, darling. I am utter ruin. It will take a week to mend my puffy old face. But I feel buttery delicious. And you are very dear. Afterward, remember, we chuckled together at nothing. Just at feeling nice. That is rare and very nice.”

“And now you turn the page, Becky?”

“Yes. But I shall turn the corner down. One of the special pages that I go back and look at sometimes. Take good care, lamb.”

When she got to the door I said, “You are…”

She turned, waiting for the rest of it. “Yes?”

But how to tell her she had achieved her aim in life? And wouldn’t she be aware of it anyway? “You are completely Becky.”

“Hmm. Rather nice that. Some are totally barmy. And I am completely Becky. Really no other way to say it, is there? Keep well, luv.” She waggled her fingers at me, slammed the door smartly, and soon thereafter rammed the Lotus up the slope with thunderous verve.

I walked back to the cottage. Meyer said, “Would it be possible for you to stop smirking?”

“You have a foul manner today, Meyer.”

“Let’s give up on the whole thing, Trav. What the hell good are we doing? We can’t tell Harl any of this. She was on a gay adventure, full of plans and excitement and fun. Until the tragic accident. Let’s rehearse it. I don’t want to know any more about it. I knew that girl. She was a quiet, calm, decent kid. So she tripped and fell into this damned septic tank, and we don’t have to follow her any further into it, do we?”

“Can I tell you one thing I want to know?”

“You get compulsive about these things.”

“The sergeant found a boy who saw a man that afternoon back up in those mountains with Bix. Everything we’ve learned thus far tells us she was in no shape to drive down a six-lane highway across Kansas at high noon. But somebody let her bring a car down that mountain, or try to, at dusk. Is it any different than pushing her off a bridge? And with Harl, which would fester the longest, pure accident, self-destruction, or contrived murder? I think it’s something we ought to know before we leave this place.”

I watched him work it out. Finally he grunted and rubbed his eyes.

“So, I won’t get off just yet. I’ll ride to the next stop. But I don’t think I’ll like it any better than the whole ride up till now.”

Eleven

AFTER A hotel lunch, a few miles out of the city on the Mitla road we came upon El Tule, and Meyer said that he wanted to be a tourist for a few minutes, and look at the biggest tree in the world.

It was not far from the highway, a hundred yards perhaps. It dwarfed the old church nearby. I was astonished to see how rich and vital and green it was. Seemed to be of the banyan family. Elephant-gray bark. Glossy dark leaves. There was a low iron fence all the way around it. The trunk was maybe a hundred and fifty feet in circumference. It made better than an acre of shade.

Meyer stood absolutely still, staring up into the cool green shadowy places beyond the giant lower limbs. When he turned smiling toward me, I knew that the tree had restored his nerves and composure.

“At the time of Christ,” he said, “nobody was giving this tree a second look. It was just an ordinary little tree.”

“It looks as if it has decided to stay around awhile.”

“And I am going to come back here,” he said, “and I am going to paint myself blue, and I am going to live up there in the top of that tree forever.”

“Come on, Meyer. Ya vamonos.”

The knowledge of the huge black beard on Jerome Nesta simplified the search.

“El americano con una barba negra y grande. Un escultor. ”

Ah, yes. I have seen him. Yes, he goes often to the ruins. Also to the Museo de Arte Zapoteca, near the plaza and central market. No, I do not know where he lives.

We found an American student at the small museum. He was an archeology major from the University of New Mexico, an exchange student working on the continuing excavation and restoration program at the Mitla ruins. His name was Burt Koontz, and he was out in the rear courtyard, carefully washing and brushing the fragile shards of an old broken vase. He was burned to the rough red shade of roof tiles. He wore a white T-shirt, khaki shorts, and G.I. boots.

“I know Jerry. I mean as much as I guess you can get to know him. They let him come in and make sketches. He’s been sketching some of the old stone heads. I haven’t seen him around the last few days though. Maybe even a week. I couldn’t say for sure.”

He told us, as he worked, that he had been curious about Nesta. He was big and he moved carefully, as if he were convalescing from a serious illness. A Mexican girl always came with him. Young, but not pretty. One of those broad, stocky ones with the same kind of Indio face you see in the old carvings. She would sit with infinite patience under one of the trees and wait for him, then get up when he came out, and follow him, a few steps behind, usually carrying one of those baskets they take to the market.

He had the impression that Nesta was living over toward the south side of town, up one of those steep dirt streets to the left of the main road as you come in.

So Meyer and I trudged up and down a lot of steep little streets, and met with varying degrees of suspicion, indifference, and secret amusement. But with the help of pesos and persistence, we finally found the place, on Calle Alivera, halfway up the hill. There was a pink house that seemed to be crumbling away. There was a walled courtyard with a broken gate. In the courtyard were mounds of litter, a couple of dozen small noisy children, and some women squatting around a pump, several of them nursing the future members of the gang.

We had a twelve-year-old businessman who led us across to a room in a far corner with a door that opened onto the roofed gallery that extended along the side of the courtyard. It was a dark little room. There was a cement and plaster fireplace-stove built into one corner. There was a raised platform along the opposite wall, where pallets could be placed for sleeping. The little room was entirely empty. I could not get it through the boy’s head that I wanted him to speak slowly and clearly. So I had to make him repeat everything over and over until I thought I had the general idea.

The wife of the Americano was Luz. They had lived here many weeks. Then they had gone away. Three days ago. Four. Maybe they were married, maybe not. It was the same. They were poor. For marriage the priests and the government charge too much money, so one waits. The Americano had little Spanish. Luz had been married to a baker and had three sons. The baker and the three sons had died of enormous pain in the belly. Luz had the pain but had not died. The Americano seemed often sick. The room was five pesos a week. Maybe the Americano had sold his… I could not understand what it was that Nesta was supposed to have sold. He said it so many times he was getting discouraged and angry before I caught on. It was a gigantic head made of wood, taller than a man. The senor worked on it each day. It was a very curious thing. It was very ugly.

As near as I could tell, the giant head had been carried away by the senor and another big Americano, with great difficulty. And the tools and the cooking pots and the clothing and the beds. They all went away in a heap-di-row. In a what? Heap-di-row. What? Heap-di-row! Again, please? Heap-dirow! Heap-di-row!

He was close to tears with frustration. So I brightened his face with pesos. Once again as we crossed the courtyard the children fell silent, stopped all movement, and stared at us. The women pulled the edges of serapes together to hide the sleepy suck of small mouths.

And then, twenty-four miles back to Oaxaca, feeling glazed and unreal. When you stack into one day the biggest oldest tree in the world, a gigantic ugly wooden head, a magical disappearance in a heap-di-row, and a page with the corner turned down in the Book of Becky, it is time to start searching the hedgerows for Alice and that well-known rabbit.

I had been counting on a therapeutic Sunday siesta, one which might have lasted right through to Monday breakfast. But when we got back to the hotel, there was a message to call Enelio Fuentes and a number where he could be reached. He was at a party at something that sounded less than interesting, called the Commercial Club. I tried to beg off but he insisted. It was atop a great big new farm equipment agency building set back off the Oaxaca Puebla highway a mile or so beyond the city limits. He had said to drive around in back and go up the stairs in back. The cars were varied and impressive, parked back there.

When we walked out onto the gigantic roof, I saw why he had insisted. That part of it was called the Beach Club. There was a gigantic swimming pool with some kind of infernal device that created pretty good waves which broke on a realistic slope of sand beach. The high wall beyond the pool was painted to resemble a seascape. There were areas of lawn, small trees, fountains, cement sculpture, big bright beach umbrellas. There were several bars, and there were waiters in red coats, and there was a good trio working hard in the waning day. There were tennis courts and badminton courts, and the whole happy busy place was aswarm with jolly tanned Mexican businessmen with the same stamp of success as Enelio, but generally smaller and heavier, and the entire scene was bubbling and dancing with platoons of the vivid young girls that Enelio variously described as either cheeklets or crumpets. There seemed to be a difference, but I could not identify it.

“Just a simple, warm, primitive people,” Meyer muttered.

Enelio found us and took us to his table. He had been playing tennis. Pretty soon he would change. He recommended the tall sour rum drink he was having. He said, “An old friend, Ramon, he put up this dull building here, and one day we realize here is this hell of a big roof, and we can have the storage floor underneath too. So we made the initiation big, and big dues, because where else can they go, and we brought down a crazy man from Mexico City, told him to go ahead, make a place to have fun. Three million pesos! By God, you find out everybody uses the club to get back the fun for the money. Hey now, over here, you pollitas. These soaking wet crumpets, they are here on vacation from Guadalajara. This one, she is Lita, short for Carmelita, and has very little English so she is with me, okay? And these two here in pink they are the sisters del Vega, the tall one Elena, the not so tall one Margarita. Darlings, this big ogly one is Senor Travis McGee, and this round hairy one is Meyer. They are my friends, so they are evil dangerous fellows, eh? Now we sit. Elena, you are to be with this McGee, and Margarita, here, dear, between me and Meyer. Now smile and greet my friends.”

Elena was spectacular. “Yam ver‘ please to knowing you, Meester McGee,” she said with a five hundred watt smile.

“You will have one little drink with us now, and then you will run away and play in the pool, while we make man talk, and we will summon you when we want you back. Waiter! And you will not make friends with any sly fellows or never, never, never again will Enelio Fuentes fly his little airplane to Guadalajara and bring you here for such a nice vacation from that insurance company office.”

They had their drink and they giggled, and then they went trotting off in their little sopping bikinis back to the artificial waves breaking on the artificial beach.

So we gave Enelio the full report of our activities. Meyer and I took turns filling him in on the details. He was particularly interested in the information about the truck being seen by Mrs. Knighton, heading south on a distant road at high speed.

“Yes, it fits the time,” he said. “It is taken from Bundy’s place before dawn on the fifth, that same day. Tuesday. I know those little roads. I used to hunt there. I used to kill small things in that burned country. One day I said, Who are you, Fuentes, killing things that breathe the same air, walk the same earth? What gives you the right? Who said you are more important, and other life is just for your sport? So I stopped. No matter. Those roads do not go to anyplace. Interesting. I think it would be nice, we go down there in my jeep. Not tomorrow. Some damn engineers are coming in to spoil my day. Tuesday, eh? Maybe in the morning. I will phone to you. Now I am wondering what things can be true and maybe not so true in the story Bundy tells you. I think you were great fools to do what you did, but it worked, eh? A man like that, it is easy for him to twist things a little, change things a little, the way a woman can do.”

I said, “It’s exactly the same story he told Lady Becky.”

He looked puzzled. “But, my friend, I do not understand: You talked with Becky before you got all the story from Bruce.”

“Well… I talked to her last night again.”

“You are some kind of man to go visiting Becky again.

“Well… she visited me. By the time I got back from the hospital, she was at the cottage and Meyer was gone. Nice fellow when you get to know him, this Meyer.”

He shook his head slowly and then he began to grin. “Oh boy. And how did you feel when you meet Elena, eh? Strong, young, handsome girl, eh? Look I am not the kind of man who hands you out a sure-thing cheeklet, man. Just only a nice girl who if she decides she likes you, and if you make the struggle to be nice to her, then there she is, without teasing. Oh boy. One time in California on television I saw a contest, many men at tables eating apple pies as fast as they could. An ogly scene, truly. The winner, I don’t know, eight or nine whole pies maybe. He walks careful. When he is getting the prize, the poor fellow looks sick. So here you are, McGee. You win the contest. So here I come with your prize, eh? Know what it is? Piece of apple pie. This is very, very fonny.”

“Look at McGee chortling,” Meyer said.

“Pretty girls are nice to be with,” I said. “You are a very considerate man, Enelio. We will have drinks and we will have dinner, and they will brighten the table and the hours. And I will make excuses and slip away and you two can work things out.”

“Just a minute!” Meyer said. “That girl is just a child!”

Enelio and I agreed she looked grown up. We reconfirmed the Tuesday date. Enelio went to shower and change, and when he came back the Guadalajara girls were with us, and Margarita was studying Meyer’s palm and telling his fortune, and Meyer, so help me, was blushing.

So off went the girls from Guadalajara and they came back in their vivid little shifts and high-heeled sandals and with their big handbags and funsparkle eyes, all golden sun-glowing in the blue dusk under the festive lights strung across the roofed dining areas and umbrellaed bar areas. The trio had become a quartet with the addition of a muted trumpet of great clarity and passion, and they played a lot of Augustin Larra’s romantic ballads. Meyer was the light-footed tireless dancing bear, and Enelio Fuentes was the good and amusing host. The world of Bundy, of Rockland, of Carl’s stringless guitar, of plane tickets to Oklahoma City that Meyer had arranged in the early morning all were far from the elegant roof where they had stopped the wavemaking machine and the colors of the lights striped the still water of the giant pool.

I, too, had my fortune told. Elena studied for a long time, biting at her lip, and then looked at me, head cocked to the side, unexpectedly solemn.

“I do not know how to say. Bad things happening. You are smile but you are sad. It is a… a evil time for you in your lifetime, Trrrravis.”

Twelve

MONDAY wws hiatus. A quiet day, useful as a compress on an ugly bruise. Meyer was up early by prearrangement and braved the traffic in our rental to go down to the Hotel Marques del Valle and pick up Lita, Elena, and Margarita, who were staying there, and take them all the way out to visit the ruins at Mitla, stopping on the way to admire, once again, the great tree in which he had vowed he would one day live.

I slept so deeply that when I awoke I had that rare and strange feeling of not only being unable to figure out where I was, or what month and year it was, but even who I was. The dregs of dreams were all of childhood, and in the morning mirror I looked at the raw, gaunt, knobbly stranger, at the weals and the pits and the white tracks of scar tissue across the deepwater brown of the leathery useful body, and marveled that childhood should turn into this-into the pale-eyed, scruff-headed, bony stranger who looked so lazily competent, yet, on the inside, felt such frequent waves of Weltschmerz, of lingering nostalgia for the lives he had never lived.

After long showering, I went up the hill and sat out on the high deck of the hotel und ate enough breakfast for any three people, then sat in delightful digestive stupor, making the pots of coffee last. When I began to wonder how the waiters would.react if I went over and did a handstand on the wide cement railing, I realized that I felt very, very good indeed, felt better than I deserved to feel, felt as if I had a sudden dividend of youth, available for the misspending. Then I decided, for like the ten thousandth time, that I was one rotten contradictory fellow, that my talent of dissipation should have long since turned me into a slack, wheezing, puffy ruin, had it not been combined with that iron Calvinistic conscience which, upon noting too much progressive decay, would drive me into the kind of training the decathlon boys seem to enjoy, punishing myself back into the kind of fitness that makes you feel as if no maniac could dent you with a sledge hammer.

Meyer arrived at one-thirty with the three crumpets, complete with swim togs. While they changed in our cottage, he explained to me that a crumpet was a cheeklet with a warm muffiny heart, whereas a cheeklet was a crumpet with a talent for creating special problems. I told him that was worth knowing, certainly. He told me his tree was fine, and he had driven with raceway verve, and he could understand why the Mixtecs took Mitla away from the Zapotecs. He said that he had checked with the girl at the hotel, and that the redhead had picked up the two tickets and had made the flight.

We lolled the long afternoon, with sunshine, hamburgers, beers, and pleasant, sidelong, inconspicuous admiration of the tender textures of the maidens of Guadalajara. Enelio arrived at rum-time, full of such fury at the arrogance and ignorance of visiting engineers that he had to swim a dozen thrashing laps before he could get the scowl off his forehead. Before he left, taking Lita with him, he brought a map from his car to the lighted cottage and spread it out and showed me, by drawing a pencil line, the road which the Chevy truck had probably been on when Laura Knighton had seen it.

On Tuesday morning at a little before eleven, Meyer and I were standing out in front of the lobby entrance to the Victoria when Enelio, in a yellow jeep, came roaring in low gear up the steep hotel driveway. It was the earliest he could get away from the agency. Enelio looked very elegant and dashing in his white-hunter hat. He came to a flashing grinning stop within a few feet of us. The jeep had those special fat low-pressure tires useful for traversing open country full of stone and sand.

As we clambered in, two little Mexican boys who had been vigorously rubbing a tourist sedan with greasy rags came trotting over to examine the vehicle with their quick, bright obsidian eyes. They looked at the gas can racks and the power takeoff winch and the big spotlight.

One asked the other one a question, and got the authoritative answer, in the slightly contemptuous tone of all authority, “Es un heep especial, seguro.” Enelio spun it in a tight turn and went charging down the hill. He stopped at the bottom to wait for truck traffic on the highway. The word had been echoing in my head.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Please wait right here a minute.”

Enelio turned and looked back at me. “Forget something?”

“Remember something. Any ‘j’ is pronounced like an ‘h.’ Jalisco. Jugar. And so, by God, we are riding in a heep.”

“Very fonny joke. But very old,” Enelio said.

“I know what he’s getting at,” Meyer said. “That kid at Mitla. You couldn’t understand that thing he was saying.”

“Heap-di-row. Jeep de rojo. Jeep de color rojo.”

“Yes indeed,” said Enelio. “A red jeep. And this is a yellow one. Is the game over?”

Meyer had hitched almost all the way around so as to look directly at me. “A painter and a sculptor. Why not? What’s Mike’s last name? Barrington?”

“And Della Davis.”

“Too much sun at this altitude,” Enelio said, “and the brain gets cooked and people don’t make sense.”

“Enelio, what’s the name of the road toward the airport?”

“The Coyotepec Road.”

“And about a mile out, is there some kind of a tourist place that burned?”

“I know the place. It burned a long time ago.”

“Can we go out there?” I asked. “I want to check something out.”

I leaned forward and hollered the explanations over the wind roar and tire whine as Enelio pushed the jeep hard.

The place had been surrounded by a thick high adobe wall, enclosing about an acre of land. There were shade trees inside and outside the wall, but the land around it was bare and flat, and planted with parched and scraggly corn. Over the wall, which began back about a hundred yards from the highway, I could see the broken and sooty stone walls of the structure, open to the sky, with an angle of charred, leaning beam that had rank green vines clinging to it. The old red jeep was parked close to the wall over at the left, under the shade trees. Several little groups of people sat and squatted in the shade, at respectful distances, looking toward the wall. Two police cars were parked with their noses toward the red jeep, and at an angle to each other, as though snuffing it.

“Something bad is going on here,” Enelio said. “Those are people who have stopped working the fields to come and wait and watch. They don’t do that for a small thing. Something very bad, I think.”

Both doors of the entrance gate in the side wall stood open. A very shiny black Mercedes sedan was parked inside the compound. An adobe cottage was built into the corner of the compound, so that the encircling wall formed two walls of the cottage. Two wooden sheds had been attached to it, one on either side, braced against the wall.

A big young man sat in the sunlight on a scarred wooden bench. He was hunched forward, elbows on his knees, face in his hands, shoulders thrust high. He wore dirty gray denim work pants and a clean white shirt. He was barefoot. The fringe of a huge glossy black beard curled inward around the edges of the hands he held against his face. A bald man in a black suit was standing in front of him. Three uniformed policemen stood off to one side.

Our acquaintance, Sergeant Martinez, in civilian clothes, stood a couple of paces behind the bald man.

All except the man on the bench looked toward us as we came through the open gate. I saw a startled look cross the sergeant’s face, immediately replaced by that cop look I had seen before, but this time considerably reinforced by this new coincidence.

The bald man said, “Enelio! Using you for speaking here, maybe?”

He came several steps to meet us. Enelio introduced us to Doctor Francisco Martel and then the doctor launched into such rapid Spanish I gave up trying to catch the meaning of any part of it. He did much gesturing and pointing, and spoke with dramatic emphasis. The sergeant joined them and there was discussion for a time, then Enelio came and told us what had happened.

An hour ago a man had run out and waved a city-bound bus down and told the driver people were dying behind the wall. The driver stopped at the first telephone and reported it. The police sedan had arrived just before the ambulance. The young black girl was just inside the gate, sprawled in the dust, killed with a single blow that had apparently come from behind, and had so ruined her skull that brain tissue had made a spatter pattern in the dust. The big blond bearded American youth had been over beyond the shed, the whole upper left side of his forehead smashed inward. There was a heartbeat but it had stopped before they could load him into the ambulance. Near him lay the Mexican woman, dead of a similar single stupendous blow over the left ear, eyes bulged and staring by the force of the hydraulic pressure created within the brain case. And the black-bearded one was sitting on the ground with her head in his lap, weeping. He claimed he had arrived minutes before the police, and found them like that.

“Have they identified him?”

The sergeant brought the tourist card over. It was sweat-stained and dog-eared. The ink on the signature had run. He was Jerome Nesta. Enelio said, “Martinez knows he’s guilty of being in Mexico illegally. The card has run out. Guilty of one thing, guilty of everything. That’s how the official mind works, eh? So I have the permission to ask some questions. Come listen. Maybe you two think of some, help me out a little.”

Enelio sat on his heels in front of Nesta. “Jerry?” he said softly. “Hey, you. Jerry!”

The head lifted from the hands. The eyes did not match the virility and vitality of the great black beard. They were gray-blue, hesitant, uncertain. And reddened by tears.

“How you making it, boy?” Enelio asked.

“All… all three of them. Jesus! All three of them. I just can’t… can’t start to believe it’s true.”

“Who did it, Jerry?”

“I don’t know! There wasn’t anybody here. I didn’t see anybody. I came in, calling Della on account of I wanted to know where to put the stuff.”

“What Stuff?”

‘The stuff I brought back from town. It was my turn to go in. Nobody felt like coming along. Luz was doing washing, and Mike was going good on a painting, and Della had a headache.“

“You drove the jeep to town?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What time did you leave here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a little before ten. I bought fruit and radishes and beans, and a kilo of masa for Luz to make tortillas. I guess I was gone most of an hour probably.”

“How soon after you got back did the police come?”

“I don’t know. Like two minutes.”

“Jerry, can you think of any way we could pin it down, what time you got back here, man?”

“I don’t know how I can.”

Enelio got up and went over and spoke to the doctor for a little while. They walked over near one of the sheds and the doctor indicated a dark stain on the dust and stones. Enelio came back and sat on the bench beside Nesta. “Did you see anything unusual or hear anything unusual on your way out of town or on the highway?”

“I can’t remember anything.”

“Nothing interesting at all?”

“Oh, wait a minute. There was something. Right near the edge of town, where the railroad tracks are, there was an old truck pulled over and the engine was on fire, and people were running around yelling, and they were throwing dirt on it and a man was beating at it with a blanket.”

Enelio said, “You are one lucky fellow. The cops saw it too and stopped for a minute. They were just putting the fire out. So they were, like you said, a minute or two behind you.”

“What difference does it make?”

“This wasn’t robbers, Jerry. Nobody touched a pocket or a purse. From the blood over there, it had to have happened at least twenty minutes before the police got here, according to the doctor here.”

Jerry stared at Enelio. “Would these damn fools think I’d kill my friends?”

“That’s what most people kill. Their family or their friends. Very few people kill strangers. I got to tell what you said to the sergeant.”

I sat where Enelio had been. “How come you and Luz moved in here with Mike and Della?”

He looked at me, puzzled. “Who are you?”

“My name is McGee. I’ve been trying to locate you. I found where you had been living, out at Mitla.”

“Why have you been looking for me?”

“Just to see what you might know about Bix Bowie.”

“Bix got killed in an accident.”

“I know. And Carl Sessions died of an overdose. So the only ones left to talk to are you and Minda and Rocko.”

“Why should anybody know anything about Bix? Minda, maybe. It happened after everybody had split.”

“A girl named Gillian saw you in Mitla and told a friend. Gillian talked to you and she said you weren’t very friendly. She asked you where Rocko was and you said you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t and I don’t. I was the last one to split. I had to get the hell away from Rocko. I got pretty sick there. I had to try to get clean. I’m not in real good shape yet. I get this ringing in my ears, and I get shaky, and my eyes blur sometimes. I have real bad nightmares, but I don’t hallucinate any more. Luz took care of me when I was real, real bad. I don’t even know how I got to Mitla. It was all part of a bad trip. She pulled me out of a ditch and got some friends to help her get me under a roof. I had the idea Rocko was trying to kill me, you know, like paranoia, and I had to cut out. Jesus! Why would anybody kill Luz? You know she had a beautiful smile? When she smiled… I tell you it was something else.”

“Was it better here than it was in Mitla?”

“Oh sure. I ran into Mike out at the ruins and we started talking, and I took him back to the place and showed him the big timber head I’ve been working on. So he came out to see it and he liked it. I mean there are too many people around just talking about doing something. I told him I was trying like hell to work, because it had been too long. I leveled with him. I said I had been on things that didn’t do me much good, but now I was clean and I was going to stay clean. I said it was lonely, me not being able to talk much of Luz’s language, and he told me about his free place, and how there was room, and Della might like having another woman around to share the scut work. So why not? We got a guy to help and we loaded the big head on his jeep and packed and came here. Luz was pretty weird about Della for a little while, until she got used to her. Then they started to get along. But… they haven’t… didn’t have much time to get acquainted. Oh goddammit all anyway! It’s such a lousy waste. Della was pregnant. That’s why she was having headaches.”

Enelio sauntered back and said, “Jerry, they want to investigate further, but because the time you got back checks out and because they can’t find any kind of a weapon, you ought to be okay.”

“One of them was looking at one of my sculptor’s mallets.”

“And he would like to cry because it was such a nice thing for somebody to use, but there would have to be blood. Blood and skin and hair. And fantastic strength. But they have to take you in anyway.”

“Why?”

“Your tourist card is no good. Got money to get home?”

“Hell no.”

“So they hold you and ask the American Embassy to make arrangements.”

“Look, I forgot the card ran out! I didn’t even think about it. I don’t want to sit in any Mexican jail.”

“Nobody sitting in one wants to be there.”

I took Enelio aside. “I want to talk to this kid, alone and in the right relaxing surroundings. Any way to keep him out?”

“Want to pay for his trip to the States?”

“If it’ll help.”

“Want to give a little gift to the police welfare fund?”

“Like?”

“Five hundred pesos?”

“Sure.”

“Then let them keep him overnight and we’ll see what we can do tomorrow. Tomorrow they are maybe going to be happy to get rid of any little problems. Newspaper people will be here today from Mexico City. This will be one big stink. The Tourist Bureau will be very ogly about it. This is supposed to be such a nice safe country, eh? But always there are damn fools going off into primitive places where los Indios are still damn savage. No Spanish at all. Cruel land and cruel people. Canoe trips. Hiking. Go see the interesting Indios and get your interested throat cut, and get thrown naked into an interesting river, man. So that is one thing, and that is something else. One and a half million cars cross the border and stay for a time. God knows how many more go over into border towns for the day. It is a big industry. Come to beautiful Oaxaca and get a big hit on the head. Travis, my friend, to get this bearded boy with the sad eyes loose, I must make some little kind of guarantee all will be well. You think everything will go well?”

“I’ll know better after I talk to him. If I don’t like the vibrations, he better go back in.”

Meyer came over to us and said, “Come take a look at something.” He took us over to a space against the adobe wall beyond a wooden shed. The wooden sculpture stood there. A head five feet high, carved and gouged and scraped out of old gray beams that had been bolted together. It was the same sort of Zapotecan face of the ancient carvings in stone. It had the same cruel, brooding look of lost centuries and forgotten myths. It was the size and weight and texture of the old timbers that gave it impact. There was no neck. It sat solidly on the great hard width of jaw. It could have been just a kind of self-conscious trick, but somehow he had given it a presence that made you want to speak softly.

“Son of a bitch,” Enelio said slowly.

Jerry Nesta came up behind us, a man in uniform with him. He said, “I had to find hunks of metal and make the tools. I kept them sharp by rubbing them on stone. I kept thinking of the whole 1 figure, and the way he would stand, so the head would carry the look of the whole figure. I thought of it as being something that would stand at the corner of an old temple, looking out. Not a priest or a soldier, but one of the laborers that built all these ruins and died building them. Like maybe the priests decided those unknown people should have a statue, but not out of stone. Mike thought it was… said it was…”

He turned away. Pretty soon they put him in a car and took him in. They left a car and two men to keep watch over the place. As we drove away, the silent people were still under trees, looking toward the place of murder.

Thirteen

THE HOURS spent on the Coyotepec Road had taken too big a piece out of Enelio Fuentes’ available time, and he said we would have to delay the exploration of the unmarked road until later.

He drove us into the center of town. The girls from Guadalajara had planned to spend the morning shopping and have a late lunch on the veranda at the Marques, where we were to join them if we got back in time. Otherwise we would see them after the siesta time. But it was too early for lunch. Enelio said he might as well clean off another square foot of his desk and see us later. We let Meyer off near the big camera store on Hidalgo and Enelio took me around the zocalo to drop me in front of the hotel. There was, by some freak of chance, a parking space available, so he braked and swung in.

“Momentito, my friend.” He sat with his big hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead, frowning.

“One thing I did not know. I did not know I would be so busy, so many things would happen to keep me busy. So what. I have done, I have made you two hombres into tourist guides and taxi drivers for the three little crumpets. I had been telling my conscience, why not? What man could not have pleasure to be with the tiny little flock of bright birds? But I forget. You are here on a sad and serious kind of business, eh? My God, that blood on that dusty ground is enough to wake me up. What I am saying, if they are a burden, arrangements can be made.”

“No burden, amigo. They are a good contrast.”

“You are certain? Good!” He grinned and winked. “I tell you, those sisters they are ver‘ pozzled by you two. I am old and good friends with Lita a long time. They tell her the pozzlement and she whispers it to me. These girl on vacations, McGee, they are having a beautiful time. But what soch pretty ones want on a vacation is the chance to say yes or say no. They do not know what it will be. Much depends on the asking, eh? But they look back on a vacation, they can say, well, I am sorry or I am glad I said yes, or I am sorry or I am glad I said no. Margarita thinks Meyer is one of the great men of our time, and Elena is beginning to think maybe she is ogly, or she is using the wrong toothpowder. I tell you one thing, with these girl, if you do not know the new Mexican working girl, maybe you are afraid they are wanting a permanent thing, hunting for keeps. Forget it. This is a vacation. They take care of themself pretty good, and they were upset with me I should find dates with Americans before they met you, because the Americans they meet, they are too much interested in one thing only. Do as you please. I just say they are pozzled. But if you ask, if they say yes, I tell you it will be one hell of a distraction from this serious matter you are doing here. No, I do not want answers or conversation, please. See you later on, my friend.”

And he went swinging out, putting the fear of the hereafter into a bevy of bicycles and motor scooters. I claimed a table for four on the hotel porch. Though it was nearing the busiest time of day, it was not as crowded as usual. There were far fewer of the college young. It was time to head home, sort the gear, and head back to school. I could overhear the tourist conversations, and quite a few of them were exchanging very lurid and distorted versions of sudden death on the Coyotepec Road. One beflowered matron was explaining loudly to her friends as she walked by that some hippie had shoved a knife into five fellow drug addicts and had been killed resisting arrest.

Suddenly Wally McLeen scurried up and plopped into one of the empty chairs. “Remember me, Travis? Wally McLeen? God, wasn’t that a terrible thing that happened! Did you hear about it? Two wonderful kids were killed this morning…”

“Mike Barrington and Della Davis. And a Mexican girl.”

“Their skulls were crushed. Absolutely crushed. I knew those two kids. Not well, of course, because they didn’t come into town often. They knew my Minda, just casually. They were very nice to me, actually, because they knew I was tying sincerely and honestly to keep from making any emotional judgments about a white boy and a black girl living together. I mean it is rough enough for any young couple to make it, even when they have the same heritage, isn’t it? But you have to respect genuine emotion wherever you find it, I say. No one could be with them without seeing that they were in love and were so terribly anxious to make it work. Now the difference in race doesn’t seem important at all, does it? Dying is the same for everyone. I understand that they think a boy named Jerry Nesta did it while deranged by narcotics. Do you remember when either you or Meyer asked me about Jerry Nesta and Carl Sessions? I since found out that they were in the same little group that came down together, that my Minda was in! Did you know the Sessions boy died?”

“We heard about it.”

“From drugs, I understand. Well, if they were using drugs, I’m certain that’s the reason Minda left the group the first good chance she had. Even if we couldn’t communicate, I know she Tespected her body too much to abuse it with narcotics, but I will have to accept the very real possibility that she uses marijuana and probably LSD. I’ve been trying them from time to time, without really very much effect. But I have had some periods of a new kind of selfawareness, a sort of spiritual feeling of kinship with all living things and all of history. Knowing the effects gives me a better chance to relate to Minda when she comes back here, I think. I thought that Jerry Nesta might have known when she was coming back or where to get in touch with her, so I’d been looking everywhere for him. Do you know, I rode my Honda right past that place twice this morning, where it happened, once on my way to the airport- and once on the way back!” His eyes looked goggly behind the thick lenses.

“Wally, Wally. A Honda yet.”

“I got one, a rental, as soon as I got here. It was pretty hairy for a while, those trucks and buses, but now I’m getting quite confident with it.”

“And those beads, Wally?”

“Well… they’re from the market. They’re made of the vertebrae from the backbones of little fish, stained with vegetable coloring.”

“And that is, or will be, a goatee?”

He laughed unhappily and felt his chin. “Guilty. I don’t know what the boys would say back home. But it’s like… a protective coloration, Trav These kids, if they peg you as a square, they are absolutely cruel and merciless. That’s the part I don’t understand yet, the cruelty. The very first evening I was here a boy made an absolute ass of me, just for sport, I guess. I’d been up and down this veranda all day and all over the zocalo and the market, asking every kid I saw if they knew Minda McLeen. I had just flown down from Mexico City that morning, a Thursday morning. And this young man asked me if I was the one looking for Minda, and he took me back into that bar lounge there, to one of those circular booths. The place was absolutely empty. He was very mysterious about it and very cautious. He said he might know Minda and he might know where she was, and she might be in some kind of a jam, and so what was it worth to me to have him see what he could do to get her out of the mess she was in and turn her over to me. I must say I was suspicious. We finally made a deal that if he’d bring me some proof, like a note from her, I would give him five thousand dollars, and then give him five thousand more when he brought Minda to me. But he just never showed up again. It was a game, a story to tell about how he blew my mind. It’s hard to forgive him, but I think I can.”

“So the beads and the Honda and the goatee are just a disguise, so they won’t try so hard to put you on?”

“Oh no! It’s more sincere than that. I mean they’d see through that in a minute. Why, last night there must have been thirty or forty kids milling around this porch at midnight having a good-by party. Most of them went out this morning. And I was genuinely part of it, Trav. They talked to me freely. They knew I was trying to find Jerry Nesta, and one girl told me that he was in bad shape and living in some Mexican hovel in Mitla, hitting up the tourists for money to live on. But I thought he might have some crumb of information about where my Minda is and what day she planned to come back here. Do you think they would let me talk to him at the jail?”

“Why not?”

“But isn’t he in isolation or anything?”

“No. He was able to prove he was here in town when it happened. He came back in the jeep and found the three of them dead.”

“Then why would he be in jail? Answer that, will you?”

“Because his tourist card ran out and he’s an indigent, Wally.”

“Oh. Then what everybody is saying about him-”

“Is inaccurate.”

“How do you know so much about it, McGee?”

“I dropped in. A social visit, but I got there too late.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose I better try to see Nesta then. Well… thanks again.” He got up. “And if you happen to hear anything about my Minda, anything at all, I’m right here in the hotel. Room twelve. You can leave a note in my box. I would appreciate it so much.”

He’d been gone maybe two minutes when Meyer, with a straw bag full of little gift-wrapped items, sat down at the table and said, “Guess who nearly ran me down?”

“Wally McLeen on his Honda.”

“If I didn’t like you, McGee, I’d find it very easy to hate you. So you saw him. Okay, what struck me about him? What item?”

I tried the beads, then the goatee, but he smugly said no. “The best thing, the unforgettable thing was what I saw as he thundered by, jaw clamped. They glittered in the sun. Old-fashioned bicycle clips, by God, with his trousers neatly furled and held in place thereby.”

“I envy you that vision,” I said. I reported our conversation. I found that Meyer wanted to know more than I thought worth telling. He made me go back twice to the fellow who had conned Wally with the wild tale about Minda, and try to tell it in Wally’s words.

“Whoa! Let me up, or at least tell me what you’re after.”

He gave me his most infuriatingly smug Buddha smile. “I would hate to think that a certain lady of noble blood romped you into permanent semiconsciousness, old friend. Nor would I like to believe that yesterday’s lazy sun cooked the protein in your head. So why don’t you take it from the top all by yourself, with one little clue. Just imagine that the fellow who wanted to peddle Minda to her father was named Rockland.” And when he spoke again, several minutes later, he said, “Your face is all aglow with a look of rudimentary intelligence. Now try it out loud.”

“McLeen said he’d been here since the first. So he could have arrived on the last day of July. That was a Thursday. It was the day that Rockland stayed away from the little nest on Calle las Artes all day long and part of the evening, and came back and asked for a loan of three thousand and made Bruce Bundy suspicious by not being sour about being turned down. So all of Rockland’s troops had deserted him, and he had been tossed out of the trailer park, and he was trying to hustle a sizable piece of money anywhere he could find it. So maybe he spent a lot of time that same Thursday trying to establish contact with Minda McLeen. He would know where she was, but that house is a fortress, the Vitrier house. And neither girl would be very anxious to see Rockland for any reason, I’d assume. But let’s say he did get in touch, or find out how he could get in touch later.”

“You’re recovering nicely.” Meyer said.

“So Rockland had written off Bruce Bundy, at least as far as any willing donation is concerned. So he decides to leave with the things that look most valuable, going on the basis that the Bundys of this world seldom blow the whistle. They would rather write off the loss than make it police business. But Bundy was too cute. And when Rockland tried to jump him, Bundy was too rough. Rockland got black-belted all to hell. It probably made him pretty sick. But he had to get out of there on Saturday to meet Minda.”

“What would he be most worried about?” Meyer asked.

“I guess he would realize that if Wally McLeen located his daughter, that would end any chance of selling the information and delivering the girl to him for a price.”

“So we have a gap in the sequence. Better than twenty-four hours, and we have Bix and an American up on that mountain Sunday afternoon, parked and both out of the car and talking. Because it was Bundy’s yellow car, we can assume it was Walter Rockland with Bix. He had to have a way to get down off the mountain. He could walk it after dark. But it would be full daylight before he could get down to the valley floor.”

“Or somebody picked him up, by arrangement.”

“He’d run out of people,” Meyer said. “And if it was by arrangement, then there would have to be the assumption that he knew she would take off with the car and wouldn’t make it all the way down. How could he be sure she wouldn’t? What would the motive be?”

“Then there’s the next gap until Tuesday morning, when he took the camper out of Bundy’s shed.” Meyer shook his head. “It doesn’t fit together: None of it. We just don’t have enough of the missing pieces to even be able to guess how many other pieces are missing. Unless Jerome Nesta is willing to talk freely, we might as well go home. And maybe even if he does talk it won’t be helpful.”

Just then the Guadalajara sisters came clattering and squealing down upon us, laden with purchases, and there was much arrangement of girls and packages. They were still avid with the lust and fury of shopping, and they made expensive burlesques of total exhaustion, then dived into the bags and bundles to open the small ones for the reassur ance of our admiration, and pluck open the corners of the big ones to show the pattern and texture of bright fabric.

And where is Lita? Ah, there was someone here in this city she had to call, an odd couple who were friends of her mother, and she had been putting it off, so at last she called and they had asked her to come to have lunch with them, and it seemed as good a time as any, so she had phoned Enelio and informed him and had gone to meet the old couple. So Enelio would not join us either.

The sisters were both thirsty and famished, so as soon as a drink came they ordered lunch, and then went chattering on up to their little hotel suite to drop their purchases and freshen up.

They had made crackling inquisition of the waiter, and so we had ordered what they had ordered. It was very, very good indeed, and not at all heavy.

After lunch Margarita, the one with the best command of English, said, “Meyer, I wish to ask of you one great favor, a very selfish thing, a very dull thing for you. I am silly. You can say no, please.”

“I say yes. Okay.”

“Without knowing, even! You remember at the place coming into Mitla at the right side, how I saw the mos’ lovely color shawl and cried out to all to look? There is no such color in the market here. I must have, Meyer. I must go and buy it in Mitla or it will be gone forever and never, never will I see another one.”

“So we will all go to Mitla. Right, Travis? No problem, ladies.”

“Please, wissout Elena,” said Elena. She put the back of her fist in front of a gigantic yawn. “You three are going. I am sitting and then up above sleeping, I think.”

“Okay,” I said. “Wissout McGee too, if you don’t mind.”

They didn’t mind. They took a cab up the hill to the hotel after I told Meyer to look for the Falcon keys on my bureau. We watched the people, few and slow-moving in the time of siesta.

“Asking one favor too? Okay?”

“Sure, Elena.”

“Maybe one little swimming in the so beautiful pool as before we were?”

I agreed. She went up and came down quickly with a little blue airline bag. We strolled over to the cab row on the post-office street and took a cab up to the hotel. She changed first in our cottage named Alicia, and came out in a narrow bikini that was a froth of rows of crisp horizontal white ruffles, and by the time I got up to the pool she was swimming, wearing a swim cap covered with vivid plastic daisies. People were baking in the sun, and except for some children in the shallow end, we had the pool to ourselves. She was an unskilled and earnest swimmer, rolling and thrashing too much, expending too much effort and trying to hold her head too high. I told her a few things that would help, and swam beside her. She learned quickly and was very pleased with herself and kept at it until she was winded and gasping. We climbed out and she pulled the cap off and said, “Now enough I think. Okay?”

We walked back down to Alicia, among the cottages below and beyond the pool, and I unlocked the door for her and sat on the porch while she went in to change. I heard the clatter as she closed the blinds.

“Tuh… rrrravis? Por favor, ayudarme? Thees dombo theeng is es-stock.”

So if something is es-stock, one must go in and un-ea-stock it for the lady. She was between beds and bath, back toward me, still in bikini, and she looked over her shoulder and indicated the snap or fastening or whatever at the back of the bikini top was es-stock.

So I went to her. She pulled her long dark hair forward and stood with head bowed. She held the bikini top against her breasts with her hands. There were two snaps hidden by ruffles. I put a thumbnail under one and it popped. I put a thumbnail under the other and it popped and the two straps fell, dangling down the side of her rib cage. She stood without moving. It was a lithe and lovely back. Droplets of water stood on her back and shoulders. Crease down the soft brown back. Pale down, paler than her skin, heaviest near the vertical furrow. The bikini bottom came around her just a little above the widest part of her hips, leaving bare that lovely duplicated tender concavity of the girl-waist, leaving bare two dimples in the sunhoneyed brown, half a handspan apart, below the base of her spine.

So the response is an acceptance, a dedication, a tenderness expressed by very slowly, very precisely, very carefully placing the male hands upon the slenderest part of the waist, thumbs resting against the back, aimed upward, parallel to the center division of the back, edges of the hands resting against that soft shelf where the hips begin to bloom. She shivered at the touch, then lifted her head and leaned back against me. I bent and kissed the top of her shoulder, close to her throat, felt the dampness of some tendrils of hair which the swim cap had not completely protected. She was breathing very steadily, audibly, deeply, and her eyes were heavy and almost closed when I turned her around and kissed her on the mouth.

“But… they might come back here,” I said. She gave a little shake of her head and spoke through soft blurred lips. “No, no. She will taking Meyer to the Marques to see dresses she bought. She trying them on for him, no hurry. Ah, she bought one hell of a lot of dresses, that sister mine.” So you go over and bolt the door, and the room is golden with the sun through the tiny cracks of the closed slats. She wants to be looked at, yet is at the same time shy. She is avid and timorous. She is experienced to a small degree, yet unsure. There is a musky-sweet, pungent scent of herself in her heat, distinctively her own. She has a secret inward smile when the pleasure is good for her. She has a long strong belly and rubbery-powerful hips and thighs, yet there are no feats of astonishing muscle control, no researched ancient trickeries, and that is a sweet and simple relief. Approaching climax her body heats and her breasts swell and her mouth sags. She deepens her strong and heavy beat and her eyes roll wild in the dim room, as if in panic, and she rolls her head from side to side and has the look of listening; and of being afraid of what is rolling up out of the depths of her, and then she is into all of it, making a very small and very sweet whimpering, and holding tight, like a child on a high scary place.

Siesta is sweet when the light is gold, and when the vivid young face on the pillow looks into yours, beside her, inches away, and smiles the woman-smile older than time, her exhalations warm against your mouth, as with slow fingers she traces your brows, lips, and the shape of cheek and jaw. There is nothing more es-stock. It has all been unfastened, all turned loose, with a guile that was so sweetly planned it could not be denied, even had there been any thought of denying it. Elena, you are the Mexican afternoons forever.

Fourteen

AT ELEVEN On Wednesday morning Enelio Fuentes brought Jerome Nesta to our cottage at the Hotel Victoria. Nesta acted sullen, uncommunicative. He wore the same clothes, but otherwise I would not have recognized him.

Enelio said, “They gave him a choice with the big bushy beard. Take it off himself, or they’d strap him down and take it off with a dull knife. The haircut was done by a jailor with no talent, eh?”

“Have your laughs,” Nesta mumbled. The area where the beard had been was blue-white and nicked in a half dozen places. His scalp shone pale through a half inch of black bristle. Without the beard he looked older. I remembered he was twenty-six. He looked thirty. There were deep lines bracketing his mouth. Also, without the beard he looked almost frail. His hands were big and heavily callused from the work with the mallet.

“One thing they forgot,” Enelio said. “Out in the open if you stay upwind from him, it’s not bad. In the car you keep the window open and stay close to it, very important. In this room, this size, he is impossible. It cannot be endured.”

“Screw yourself,” Nesta, muttered, eyes downcast I went into the dressing-room closet and picked some tan slacks I’d never liked much, and the white sports shirt that had been, despite all instructions, starched, and some laundered jockey shorts and socks which had seen dutiful valiant service. I handed him the bundle and said, “Go in and scrub.”

“Screw yourself,” he said again.

“Enelio,” I said, “can you give this thing back to the law, or don’t they want him either?”

“As a favor to me, they’ll give him his same cell back.”

“Then take him along. Thanks for your trouble. I don’t need to talk to him. Not right now. Not this way. When they fly into Miami, I’ll have him picked up there.”

“For what?” Nesta asked.

“We’ll think of something,” I said.

“How about air pollution?” Meyer asked.

“Dade County loans able-bodied prisoners to Collier County for road work,” I said. “Sheriff Doug Hendry’s people give a short course in manners and personal hygiene.”

Nesta looked at me, then at Enelio. It was a quick, flickering glance of appraisal. Without the beard he had the con look, the loser look. He had been there before, and knew he would be back there again, and it didn’t make too much difference whether it was going to be a valid rap. He had the cronkey look, that flavor of upcoming trouble that alerts any cop anywhere. I don’t know what it is. It is a combination of facial expression, posture, gesture-and the experience of the cop who sees the stranger and sees that indefinable thing he has seen so many times before. The animal behavior experts report that something similar exists in those wild animals who have some form of community culture. Certain individuals will be run off by the others, will be killed, or will be left to roam alone.

He picked the clean clothing off the floor and went into the bathroom and slammed the door. Enelio said, “The shock yesterday opened him up. He talked pretty good, remember? So now he closed the doors and locked them. I don’t know if he’ll talk to you. I know damn well he won’t talk if I’m here. The chemistry is not good. I better go. You know, one funny thing. You types from the Estados Unidos, too many talk about dirty Mexicans, right? Okay. Those little huts over there on that hill. Poor people. Carry water a hell of a distance. And take a bath every day, and the women wash that long hair every day. Clean, clean, clean. So we talk about dirty heepies. There is an old dirty heepie in there, showering. But I have had the pleasure of knowing some of your little heepie crumpets, and they have been, my friend, deliciously fresh and sweet and clean. Clean and shining as the beards on some of their boyfriends. So, big conclusion. There are dirty Mexicans and dirty heepies. But it is not a characteristic, hey?”

“Thanks for getting him out.”

“Use your judgment. If there’s a chance he’ll make trouble, we better stick him back inside fast. He looks to me as if he wants to take off.”

“The bathroom window has bars on it too.”

“I noticed. If you decide he’s trouble, take him in yourself and give him to Sergeant Martinez, okay?” We thanked him and he left.

Room service, as a concession to the standard issue American tourist, has hamburgers with everything all day, long. I phoned up for two for Nesta, and a pot of coffee. He showered for a long time. At last he came out. My stuff was big for him, except around the waist. He had to turn the bottoms of the slacks up. He had wadded his old clothes up. Meyer told him to stuff them into the wastebasket and put the wastebasket out on the porch. Nesta looked guarded and selfconscious. Before he had come out, anticipating problems, I had told Meyer we had better go into the good-guy bad-guy routine if he seemed too uncooperative.

“Sit down, Jerry,” I said. “I want you to start at the beginning. How did the five of you get together originally and decide to come to Mexico?”

“Maybe we answered an ad.”

I glanced at Meyer. We’d have to try the routine. The hotel waiter arrived with the tray, and that gave me my opening.

“Did you order this stuff, Meyer? For him?”

“When you walked out with Enelio. Yes.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart? Your motherly instinct? You want gratitude from this dreary bastard?”

“I don’t imagine he got much to eat in jail, Travis.”

“That’s one part of the hotel bill we don’t split down the middle. That little gesture is all yours.” Nesta took a small, tentative bite, and then wolfed the two hamburgers down. He was taking a gulp of the coffee when I asked him the same question again.

“Maybe we had this real great travel agent,” Nesta said.

I waited until he set the cup down, then took a long reach and backhanded him across the chops. It was quick and substantial. It rocked his head and emptied his eyes.

Meyer jumped up and yelled at me. “What are you trying to do? You’ve got no right to do that! Give him a little time. He’ll explain it all.”

“I know he’ll explain it all. Because somewhere along the line the message is going to get through to him. He’s going to talk it all out or I am going to keep bending him until something breaks. And he is going to tell it straight because he doesn’t know how many ways I have to check it all out. I know this slob beat a possession indictment three years ago. I know he was inside the Bowie house at Cricket Bayou on several occasions. I know they all crossed in on the tenth, from Brownsville into Matamoros, and I know exactly when the Bowie girl got the money in Culiacan, and exactly how much. And I know a lot of other things that better match with what he says, and if they don’t match, you’d better take a long walk Meyer, because there are some things you don’t like to watch. They upset your stomach.”

“That’s no way to talk to him!” Meyer said.

“Look at him! Look at the expression. It’s the only way to talk to this pot head.”

“I think you better take the walk McGee,” Meyer said.

“I’ll be right on the porch, because you’re going to need me, my friend.”

I slammed the door. I sat in one of the porch chairs and put my heels up on the brick railing. Meyer would take it as far as he could, and then it would be my turn, and between the two of us we had a chance of whipsawing him.

From the porch I could hear the tone of their voices without being able to hear the words. I heard Meyer mostly, and then I began to hear more and more of Nesta’s voice. It was the Meyer magic at work. I looked through the window. Nesta sat on the end of Meyer’s bed, leaning over on one elbow. Meyer had turned the desk chair around and he sat facing Nesta.

They say that only a small portion of personal communication is verbal, and that the rest of it is posture, expression, gesture, those physical aspects of man which antedate his ability to speak. Meyer constructs somehow a small safe world, a place where anything can be said, anything can be understood, and all can be forgiven. We are all, every one, condemned to believe that if we could ever make another human understand everything that went into any act, we could be forgiven. The act of understanding bestows importance and meaning, encouraging confession.

After a half hour I knew he was going to get all of it, and so I went for the walk. I went up to the hotel and picked up a cold beer at the bar, which had just opened, and carried it out onto the porch overlooking all the cottages and the summer city beyond. The scent of flowers was heavy. Gardeners were working on the green lawns. Sprinkler heads were clicking their big slow circles, and birds hopped and preened in the falling mist. A lithe lass, deeply sunbrowned and wearing a vivid orange bikini, stood alone on the diving tower, using the railing to practice the standard exercise of ballet. She was moist with her efforts, smooth skin gleaming in the sun. Her hair was tucked into a plastic swim cap clustered with plastic daisies.

The cold dark beer stopped halfway to my lips, and even before I could make the mental association-yes, that is the kind of swim cap Elena wore yesterday-there was such a violent surge of desire for the girl from Guadalajara that it startled me. Becky diminished need. Elena compounded it. Elena had, with a splendid earthiness spiced with innocent wonder, so emphatically superimposed herself on the memories of Becky, I would have to carry those memories into a bright light to see who the hell they were about. After those dedicated decades striving to become the very best, thinking she had attained it, it would have crushed her to find out a sweet Latin amateur was, in the light of memory, by far the better of the two, more stirring, more fulfilling, and far more sensuous.

So make a note, McGee. There are some things which practice does not enhance: Thunderstorms never practice. Surf does not take graduate lessons in hydraulics. Deer and rabbits do not measure how high they have jumped and go back and try again. Violinists must work at it and study. And ballerinas. And goalies and shortstops and wingbacks and acrobats. But that business of acquiring expertise in screwing turns it into something it wasn’t meant to be.

Beer finished, I went back to the cottage to see how Meyer was doing. I was amused at Meyer and at myself. We were very formal with each other today. Remote, thoughtful, and formal. I had bought Elena a late dinner the night before at the hotel and sent her home in a cab-at her insistence on not being a nuisance. Meyer had arrived as I was getting ready for bed. Yes, he had eaten in town. Not had, actually. Car had run fine. Margarita had found the shawl. Sleep well. Good night.

I looked through the window. Nesta had a hand over his eyes. Meyer waved me away.

Back up the hill. Drifted around. Watched the happy vacationers at play. Kept out of the line of people taking happy pictures of each other. Admired shrubbery clipped into the shapes of animals. Elephant. Ostrich. Donkey. Tried to remember the name for that particular art form. Couldn’t.

Sat on a stone bench and tried to bring back some specific memory of Bix Bowie the day Meyer brought her aboard the Flush. Couldn’t. Brain apparently failing along with everything else. Premature instant senility. But Meyer had the vivid memories of the girl. Vivid and now painful. And some more painful images to put on top of the heap.

Finally went back. Meyer was on the porch, sitting in a kind of slack, dumpy solemnity. I looked through the window. Nesta was sprawled on Meyer’s bed, with a blanket over him.

I sat down beside Meyer. “So?”

“I feel sick.”

“That bad?”

“Bad. Yes. And… pointless. Wasteful.”

“Did you get all of it?”

“I don’t see how there could be anything more. He’s exhausted, physically and emotionally. And he’s not alone.”

“How did the group get together?”

“Bix had some friends at the University of Miami, kids she went to public school with in Miami. After her mother died, she looked them up. She met Carl Sessions at a party. They started going around together. Carl knew Jerry Nesta. Jerry was Carl’s connection for marijuana. Jerry was living with Minda McLeen. And he also made deliveries out to the Beach, to Walter Rockland, as a go-between. He and Rockland talked about some way to make a big score someday. The four of them, Carl, Bix, Jerry and Minda began running around together. Rockland found out Bix had some money from her mother’s will. Rockland talked Nesta into helping him promote the Mexico trip. Sessions had already turned Bix on to pot, and she obviously took to it all too well, as some will. Rockland claimed to have a good contact in Mexico where they could buy pure heroin at Mexican wholesale prices. The idea was to get Bix down there, talk her into financing it, smuggle it across the line and peddle it to a wholesaler in Los Angeles. So Nesta helped Rocko develop some enthusiasm among the other three to take a Mexican vacation. Bix was willing to buy the camper and the supplies and pay expenses. She did not seem to care about the money one way or another, or really care much whether she went or stayed. So when Rocko was fired, they moved the timetable up and got ready and left, and there was absolutely nothing Harl Bowie could do about stopping her.”

“But she didn’t know the real reason.”

“Not until later. And by then I guess you could say it was too late for her to do anything about it. You see, Rockland was the only one of the five who was not a user of anything at all. In fact, not even liquor except very rarely and then too much. No cigarettes. A physical culture type. But he had a couple of mimeographed sheets he’d paid five dollars for in Miami. They give the trade and generic name of a list of pharmaceuticals available in the States on prescription only, but available over the counter in Mexico. Opposite each was the Spanish name and the phonetic pronunciation. They bought good strong pot the minute they were over the border, and at Monterrey they loaded up with items off the list. Rockland was in charge, ostensibly to keep peohle from taking too much when they were too stoned to know what they were taking. He kept the drugs locked in the tool compartment of the truck, but the pot was available at any time. Rocko set a slow pace across Mexico. It was the cold season. He and Nesta shared the driving. When they found a good place to camp, they would stay two or three days. They went from Monterrey to Torreon to Du rango to Mazatlan. Nesta doesn’t know how long it took. He said it could have been a year or a week. He said it was all pretty blurred. Rockland would dole them out a mixed bag of opiates and stimulants, barbiturates and mescaline, and he said you didn’t know what kind of a high you were going into until you were there, and some of them were bad.”

“It’s a wonder he didn’t kill somebody.”

“I know. In the beginning Bix was paired off with Carl Sessions, and Minda McLeen with Jerry Nesta. Those relationships fragmented. It didn’t turn into some kind of orgy, even though repeating what he told me makes it sound that way. Apparently the first deviation was when Rocko made love to Bix. Carl was angry and upset about it at first, but he got over it when Minda slept with him because she felt sorry for him. Then Jerry Nesta fought with Minda, and then got even with her by sleeping with Bix. Except for the tension in the beginning, it seemed to all iron out into a kind of casual and, except for Rocko, infrequent thing. Nesta told me that Bix was totally placid and submissive. It didn’t matter to her which of the three had her. She seemed to accept and endure, with no evidence of either pleasure or displeasure. Once when Carl was still reasonably lucid Nesta asked him if Bix had ever been passionate with him, and Carl said no. By then Minda was taking care of Bix. Unless prodded and helped she wouldn’t wash, brush her teeth, blow her nose, change her clothing. It was a process of disintegration for all of them. Except Rocko. Each was hooked in his or her own way. Rocko was the ground control. Sessions apparently became ever more hopelessly addicted to methadone, moving in a fumbling, stumbling, hazy dream, losing all sexual drive. Nesta was on pot and mescaline. Minda McLeen was on stimulants, amphetamine and dexedrine compounds, getting ever more shaky and thin and nervous, and becoming ever more physically dependent on Rockland. Do you see the pattern, Travis?”

“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And a five way split is a lot of ways to split it.”

“But Nesta apparently didn’t suspect. As they neared Culiacan, Rocko took Bix’s indispensible pot away from her, and so she behaved exactly as directed, sent for the money, cashed the draft, turned the money over to Rocko, and was rewarded with a half-dozen joints and swiftly sucked her way back into her waking dream. Rockland’s contact had been reliable. They got pure heroin in hill quantity. Rocko, working alone, transferred it Into small sacks made of thick transparent plastic tied with nylon cord, and took an inside panel off the camper and stowed it in the shallow space between the inside and outside skin. He was nervous on the way up to Nogales. Sessions got on his nerves, playing the same chords over and over and over on the guitar, until one evening Rocko took the tin snips out of the tool box and cut the strings off. But Sessions kept playing as if nothing had happened. All they could hear were his fingernails on the frets and the box. Ten miles out of Nogales, Rocko decided that it had all been too easy. He decided to make a dry run. So he tied all the little bags up in a raincoat and buried it in the dirt near a flowering bush. He took Bix with him to the border, taking her off pot for a full day first. He left the three others with the supply of pills and pot in a cheap motel, with orders to wait until they crossed back in. They came back four days later. He had new papers on the truck and camper, and new tourist cards for himself and Bix. But Rocko was savagely angry. The sellers had apparently tipped the customs people: The total search took fifteen hours, and they had to reassemble the truck and camper when it was over. The border people knew the names of the five of them, said they knew they had made a large buy, and said that no matter how they tried to bring it back across, they would be nailed, all together, or one at a time.”

“Very thorough.”

“They went back down Route Fifteen and recovered the heroin. Rocko concealed it in the camper. They made camp well off the road by a dry stream bed another ten or twenty miles down the road. Rocko was in a foul mood. Minda, humming and burning with energy, was doing the cooking, washing, laundry, mending, housekeeping, and taking care of Bix, her hair and her person. During the second day at that place, she began complaining to Rocko that they were neariy out of cooking gas, that the gauge was way down. When would he get it filled? She was sick of having to make fires with sticks when they were out of gas. He paid no attention. And then she said that at least the border people hadn’t let the gas out of the tank, and she should be grateful for that much. He jumped up and ran and examined the tank. The fill valve and the outlet valve were part of the brass assembly that was- fastened onto the top of the tank. They drove south and at Hermosillo he bought two small pipe wrenches and got the whole assembly off. The orifice was just large enough so that by rolling the plastic bags between his palms he could make them small enough to drop into the tank. He put one in the tank and had it refilled at Hermosillo. Three days later he let the gas escape and, with some difficulty apparently, got the bag out. It looked and tasted fresh and unharmed, so he loaded the bags into the tank and got it filled again. Nesta thought he would start for the border right away. But Rocko was unexpectedly relaxed and unhurried. There was a pretty good piece of Bix’s money left. They might as well see the country. He became very charming.”

“Life of the party.”

“Sure. He even had a special little treat for Carl Sessions. On the way south in Ciudad Obregon he picked up a hypo and some distilled water, some cotton swabs and some alcohol, and he fixed his good friend Sessions a nice little pop and injected it under the skin on the underside of his forearm. Sessions got very sick from it. But Rocko kept helping him out until finally Carl could inject himself and feel very good. Then when he had worked up to injecting it directly into the blood stream and felt very, very good, Rocko talked him into sharing his new talent with Bix.”

“I know why you said you feel sick.”

“That Walter Rockland is a real charmer. All heart. So our little caravan came wandering through the mountains on down here to Oaxaca. And the flavor changed, or, I might say, the alignment. Minda got sick. Nesta was appointed by Rocko to look after Bix. When he refused, Rocko beat the hell out of him. He said he got to sort of like it after a while, scrubbing her and washing her hair. But he’d lost any physical desire for her. She and Carl Sessions had gone off into some country of their own, nodding and popping. Minda, scared by being sick, was stubbornly taking herself off the stimulants. I suppose as they are habituating rather than addicting, a person with enough will could do it. And she apparently, as if compensating, became ever more infatuated with Rocko in a purely physical way. After they were here a while, Rocko started to cut off the supply to Carl and Bix. He would let them get sick before he would dole out a very small amount. One day Nesta took Bix off somewhere on some errand. He had wanted to get out of Rocko’s way because Rocko was on one of his rare drunks, when he was inclined to get violent and nasty. When he came back, Carl wasn’t there. Rocko was asleep, snoring loudly. Minda was in some kind of shock. For a long time Nesta couldn’t find out what happened. Then he learned that Carl had come pleading and begging to Rocko. Rocko, in Minda’s presence, had asked Carl if he would do anything in the world for a fix. Carl said he would. And after he had stripped down, as Rocko asked, Rocko boosted him up into. the double bed over the cab and climbed up in there with him, and Minda went running out. She heard Carl crying. That apparently finished it for Minda. A few days later she left and took Bix with her. Nesta said Rocko seemed perfectly content to have them gone for good, all three of them. Nesta stayed on. But he began to have the feeling that Rocko was watching him and planning how to kill him. It could have been an induced paranoid hallucination. But he took off, by then in very bad shape, and gradually came out of it in Mifla, with the woman Luz taking care of him just the way he had taken care of Bix.”

“So now we know,” I said, “why Rocko reacted the way he did to having somebody pry that little door open and take that tank of gas. He knew it had to be taken by somebody who knew what was hidden in it. The first guess would be Sessions. So he would go looking for him.”

Meyer nodded. “Let’s say he didn’t find him. Sessions was found dead on the morning of the seventh. He could have stolen it, emptied it, hidden the stuff away, and died of an overdose.”

“Or once he found him, maybe he was satisfied Carl knew nothing about it. And it would be fair to assume Rocko had enough left on hand to stick much too much into Sessions.”

Meyer thought that over. Then he shook his head. “I can’t buy that, Travis. I can’t buy the idea that Rocko would kill anybody. Not then. Not at that time. Maybe now. Maybe he has been coming closer and closer. I think he gave it a lot of thought after he discovered a hiding place the border search had overlooked on the dry run. He knew that if he tried to cross with the whole group, five minutes of interrogation would crack any one of the other four, and the five of them would be busted. So they camped out, in wild areas. He knew that alone he could make it. Maybe he had plans of marketing it at ten times his cost, hiding the cash in the same place, crossing back with it, and running another batch over again, for the big final score. I think he must have thought of the obvious way out. Chunk them on the head and bury them out in the wastelands. It’s so completely efficient, he had to think about it. And if he didn’t do it, it is because he couldn’t bring himself to do it.”

“Because he is such a nice guy.”

“Because he decided they would destroy themselves if he nudged them in the right direction. And check his track record so far. Carl and Bix are gone. We don’t know about Minda McLeen. We know he’s batting five hundred. It could be seven fifty.”

“So who stole the little gas tank, Meyer?”

“You force me to guess? I would say that Carl Sessions talked about the Americano with a fortune in junk in the bottled gas tank, and I would guess that his addiction would put him into contact with some very rough local types, and it would be natural for them to check it out. And easy enough. So then Rocko would be compelled to pick up another stake, so he could go make another buy, hide it in another tank, and take it across alone. So he went cruising, and he let Bruce Bundy pick him up, but it didn’t work out the way he planned it. When he saw he wasn’t going to con any cash out of Bundy, he went cruising again, and came up with Minda’s father, Wally McLeen. So he would have heard by then that Bix and Minda were guests of Eva Vitrier.”

We were both silent, trying to appraise the possibilities. I said, “Remember? The girls quarreled. Minda left for Mexico Gity. So Rocko couldn’t contact her. Assume that when he took the Bundy car, he went right to the Vitrier place in La Colonia. And the next thing we know, it’s Sunday afternoon and he and Bix and the yellow car are way the hell up in those mountains.”

“It would be nice to talk to Eva Vitrier,” Meyer said.

“It would indeed. A total recluse, using a hell of a lot of money to buy total privacy, to build big walls. And she’s gone. Try and find out where.”

“Somebody could get into her place and look around.”

“Like me?”

“Well, any large, curious, agile fellow, let’s say.”

“And I get slapped into a cell out in that Zimatlan jail.”

Meyer shrugged. “I’ll be there every visitors’ day. Speaking of jail, what about our friend in there?”

“You’re in the best position to decide.”

“I just don’t know. He seems docile. I might take the risk if I had to take the blame, too. But if I make a bad guess, then Enelio is in trouble. It’s just a hunch, my friend. I sense a kind of animal wildness, a potential for unpredictability. Talking to him, even when he wept, was like sitting in a zoo. I didn’t want to make any sudden motions. I would have felt better with bars between us.”

“So, I go with your instinct, Meyer. Your average is too good. We can get in touch with Enelio and find out if he wants us to take the package back to the store.”

We got up. Meyer went through the door first. The blanket was thrown back. The bathroom door was closed. I could hear water running. No reason at all why I shouldn’t accept that obvious conclusion, that Nesta had gotten up, and gone into the bathroom. I did accept it, and in a sudden surge of adrenaline, rejected it a microsecond later, rejected it as I was in motion, going through the doorway. To reverse motion meant vulnerable stasis for too long an instant, so I dived forward, and just as my palms hit Meyer in the middle of the back, knocking him onto and over the nearest double bed, something chunked very solidly and painfully into the meat of my back, just under the right shoulder blade. I used the leverage of Meyer’s solidity to thrust myself to the right, and the momentum took me across the tile floor, scrabbling on all fours for balance, and simultaneously trying to turn so I would be facing the doorway when I came back up. I made it and saw Nesta going by the windows. He was out on the porch and moving fast.

I caught him on the road, about seventy yards up the hill. He was in no shape for uphill running. He turned, gasping and gagging, and swung some kind of dark club at my head so off balance I had time to step back and let it go by. It carried him halfway around. So, in that tiny interval of time when he was almost motionless, trying to reverse direction, I hit him a very nice right hand shot right on the point of the shoulder. It is that ancient and effective torture of schoolyards and playgrounds. The nerves run over the bone of the arm socket right at that point. He dropped the weapon. Something inside a sock. It made a metallic thud. His arm hung slack, dead and useless and he cupped his shoulder in his big left hand and looked at me with the twisted face of a child fighting tears, chest heaving from the effort of running.

“Naughty, naughty!” I said and reached out quickly, caught the end of his nose between thumb and the bent knuckle of the forefinger, and gave a long hard pull downhill, stepping aside and releasing him. He ran a half dozen jolting steps and stopped, his back toward me. I picked up the improvised weapon and gave him a gentle push. It got him in motion and he walked the rest of the way to the cottage, up onto the porch, and into the room, not looking at Meyer as he passed him. Meyer stood outside the door, fingers laced across the nape of his neck, grimacing as he turned his big head from side to side.

“Whiplash, maybe,” he said.

“Officer, he stopped dead right in front. of me.” I spread the opening of the dark sock which belonged to Meyer and peered down into it and said, “Tsk tsk tsk! Little present for you.”

He took it, reached down into it, and pulled out his sturdy little travel alarm. Sturdy no longer. The case had burst open and there were a lot of little loose parts down in the toe of the sock.

He dumped them out on the metal top of the porch table, quite sadly. “McGee, I have to assume you reacted first. It will never cease to make me feel insecure, the way you do that. What alerted you, damn-it?”

“I haven’t any idea. Something subliminal. Something smelled or heard or seen, on an unconscious level.”

“And if I were a more primitive organism, I could perform such feats also?”

“Flattery won’t help.”

We went in. Nesta sat on the foot of Meyer’s bed. His right arm was cradled in his lap and he was looking down at it, slowly flexing the fingers.

“They’ll be interested in knowing you like to pop people on the skull,” I said to him.

He did not raise his eyes. “The law likes to get cases off the books. It takes the heat off them. I thought I better get going before I got elected,” he said.

“You’re going back inside.”

“So?” he said in a toneless voice.

“I can tell them about your little try here, or I can keep it between us.”

It brought a quick and wary glance before the eyes dropped again. “What’ll it take?” he asked.

“Something important that you maybe left out of your confession hour with Meyer. We think there’s a good chance Rockland could have set Bix up to kill herself trying to drive down the mountain alone at dusk.”

“I didn’t even know about that until just the other day, when Mike and Della told me about it. I didn’t even know she was dead.”

“How did you feel when you heard it?”

“I didn’t feel much of anything. A long time ago she was something else. That was one pretty girl and that was one hell of a body. I was willing to trade off Minda for the chance to start balling her. But it was like nothing. Like one of those plastic things in a store window. All you had to do was lead her into the bushes or take her into the camper and she’d lay down on her back. Then a long time later when she’d lost a lot of her looks, and nobody was hacking her any more, I sort of got to like taking care of her. I don’t know why. Making her look a little better, making her eat, making her walk around. But she was gone anyway. She was dead before she was dead. Even pot took her too far out of her tree. When Carl turned her on with horse it was too late to make any difference one way or another. What did I feel? Nothing, I guess. Nothing at all.”

“Would Rockland want her dead?”

“Why would he? She didn’t know who the hell she was or where she was or who we were. Her memory was shot. The way she was just… around, like a lump, used to get on Rocko’s nerves. He used to try to get some kind of rise out of her. One time… I don’t know where it was, I think maybe someplace south of Puebla, outside one of those little towns, some Mexicans came around in the evening, mean-looking bastards in those white pajama suits and straw hats, one with a shiny new rifle, and the others with machetes, a dozen I guess. They had eyes for Bix. So Rocko started laughing and grabbed her by the wrist and grabbed a blanket and took her over into the cornfield and peddled her ass for two pesos a trick, and came back with her and told me the banker’s daughter had earned herself thirty-two pesos. He gave me the money and told me to buy her some penicillin in the next town. Why would he kill her? She was less than nothing. Good Christ, by then she looked forty years old.”

“When you left you were giving up your share of the Los Angeles loot?”

“I didn’t even think about it, man. I was hallucinating bad. I could shut my eyes and feel my hands melting and dripping off my wrists. Rats were running around under my clothes, eating me. Hairy red spiders as big as airdales kept jumping out and jumping back in any direction I tried to walk. And Rocko had sicked them on me and he was making my hands melt, and I just had to get the hell out of there. And I did. I wish I could help you with something. But I don’t know anything I didn’t already tell.”

“What would you have done if you’d nailed me with that clock when I came in the door?”

“Hit him next. Take your money and your car keys and get onto one ninety and head southwest, because they’d expect me to head for Mexico City. My best bet would be to try to get to Vera Cruz and stow away aboard some crock heading across the Gulf.”

“And if you hit us hard enough to kill?”

“I start running. It looks like I killed the others, so what difference would it make?”

“It might make a little difference to you,” Meyer said softly.

“To me? Well… yes. A little difference, I guess. But not a hell of a lot.”

I sat on the bed and phoned Enelio. I said, “We don’t want to take any chances with this one. He got cute, and he’ll get cute again.”

Enelio said that Chief Alberto Tielma of the Zimatlan jail would give me a nice official receipt for him. He asked me if we got anything out of Nesta, and I said we got a history of the little Mexican hayride those five took that would gag a weasel, but nothing that helped with the primary problem of how come the girl drove off the mountain.

“So,” he said, “when something pozzles me, I find out anything I can find out, and I still see no reason under God for anybody to drive a camper going like hell down into that lousy country down there, except somebody wants to get rid of a camper, which is a large object. If, God forbid, I wanted to get rid of a large object on wheels, I mean without selling it, which is always possible, no matter what kind of papers you have on it, maybe I would take it down that way.”

“So you’d consider going on another expedition with Meyer and McGee?”

“My trouble is I am impulsive. Also I never make the same mistake once. I think… Yes, if it’s okay with you, I pick you up maybe at the Marques tomorrow afternoon?”

It was agreed. We toted Nesta back to jail. He had the contrived indifference of the born loser. He had not a word to say all the way.

Fifteen

MEYER AND I had just finished a late Wednesday lunch on the veranda of the Marques del Valle when Enelio Fuentes arrived, by prearrangement, in the jeep. As we went out the Mitla road, Meyer and I, taking turns yelling against the wind, filled Enelio in on the little talk with Nesta, and the subsequent problem of talking him out of leaving.

I said that after due deliberation, and weighing of all factors, I had told the police chief, with gestures, about Nesta’s antisocial behavior. I had finked on him.

“Hey, how can an animal like that one,” Enelio roared, “carve that strong glorious wooden head? How is it possible?”

“All great artists lead placid, humble, gentle lives,” Meyer hollered. “They are all celibates and never drunk or violent. You know. Like your own Diego Rivera was.”

Grinning, Enelio took his right hand off the wheel and made that unique and expressive Mexican gesture of consternation, like trying to shake water from the fingertips.

The road he was looking for began about twenty miles beyond Mitla. It was a dirt road that, about four miles from the main road, went through a village, and then continued on, dropping perhaps a thousand feet before reaching dry stony flats. Sometimes he could get up to twenty miles an hour before braking, putting it in low, and lurching through rain gulleys and across a moonscape of potholes. Then the road became straighter and smoother, and he was able to make good time. A long high dust plume was kicked up behind us in the windless hot afternoon.

He slowed and stopped and we got out. He took binoculars out of a case and looked west. He said, “Yes, the smaller road out of Ocotlan runs down through those ridges. When I was small we hunted rabbits over there. But not over here. This is the burned land. Sand, rock, cactus. Only by the dry rivers are trees. See. Deep roots. They drink deep only after the rains. You know, it is maybe a little bit too much, those Texas schoolteachers just being there at the right time and looking way over here and just happening to see what she thinks was the camper, and he thinks was not.”

“But the dust would draw your attention,” Meyer said.

“And, this,” I explained, “is the kind of coincidence-if she did see it that is not a coincidence at all. Because the world is jammed with people, and if you talk to enough of them, you usually find that the unseen things were seen by someone. And if they are a little out of the ordinary, like the vehicle she saw going too fast, they stick to the edge of memory. Had it been going slower, she would never have examined it so carefully through the glasses, and she would have forgotten it by the next day. She claimed she saw blue, and saw glintings that could have been the aluminum camper body. But it is a hell of a way over there.”

“One hell of a way indeed. And the road goes nowhere,” said Enelio. “So what went down it had to come back or still be somewhat ahead. And the wind blows the sand and dust so there are no tracks.”

The road dwindled away to nothing in about six more miles. Enelio told us to hang on. He turned sharply right and soon I realized what he was going to do. He made a big circle around the rocky landscape. It had to be an irregular circle due to the contour. A couple of times he had to back and shorten the diameter of the circle.

When we were two thirds of the way around I tapped Enelio on the shoulder and pointed ahead and to our left, inside the arc of the circle. He drove over and stopped and we got out again. It was a clear and distinct tire track in the lee of an outcropping of red-brown rock. It had run through some kind of crumbled clay, and though some sand had blown into it, it was unmistakable.

Enelio sat on his heels and crumbled the claylike substance between his fingers. “Animalitos. Damn, we call them hormigas. Some are red. They bite. They make little hills.”

“Ants?”

“Yes! The tire went through the middle of this little one and along the edge of this big one. They brought up the dirt from underneath the sand; and it is moist almost.”

He stood up and shaded his eyes. “Back there is the last of the road. So draw a line from there to these tracks…” We turned and looked, and Meyer suggested we fan out a little and walk it, looking for any clue, not taking any route a vehicle could not take.

After a hundred yards my route ended in impossibility. I backtracked and cut over to the other side, beyond Meyer. Then I came to a place where the earth dropped away. It was a deep meandering crack, perhaps twenty feet across and fifty feet deep, with round boulders and brush at the bottom of it. Enelio shouted. We hurried along the brink to where he stood. He was at the edge of a semicircular bite looking down at where the landslide had choked the bottom of the dry wash. There was an uncommon amount of loose brush on top of the barrier.

Enelio widened his nostrils and sniffed the breeze. He crossed himself and said, “Death.” I caught it then, too-the sweet, rotten, sticky smell of decaying meat.

We stumbled and slid down the slant of sandy soil. We pulled the brush away, exposing the upper half of the rear of the camper. It was nose down into the stones, the landslide drifted high around it. The smell was sickeningly strong.

“The McLeen girl?” Meyer asked in church tones.

“Somebody our boy Rocko took a dislike to,” I said.

“You get the dirt off the door while I go get something I know about,” Enelio said. He went plunging up the loose slope and disappeared. I started digging the door out with my cupped palms, and with Meyer helping me. We heard the sound of the jeep overhead. It stopped. After a few minutes Enelio came sliding back down. He had a thin piece of rag tied around his head so that it came across his upper lip. He had another piece for each of us. The center position that came across the lip was damp with raw gasoline.

“One time when we had to go into the mountains after bodies from a plane crash, one of the medical people taught me this thing. Gasoline numbs the smelling. It overpowers everything. There was one trouble. For nearly a year afterward, each time I would smell gasoline, I would start gagging. Also it would a burn on the lip. But it is better than the only other choice, eh?”

The camper body was out of line and the door was jammed. But it was on such a steep angle I could stand on the aluminum beside the door and bend over and take hold of the handle. I yanked it open and let it fall back. There was enough reflected sunlight so that we could see quite clearly into the dark interior. Enelio grunted, spun, jumped down and trotted twenty feet along the bottom of the wash, then bent over and vomited explosively.

“You can move away too,” I told Meyer. “I want to make sure.”

“I should help you.”

“Get going.”

“Thanks, Travis.”

I took a deep breath and clambered down into the camper. He had been wired up with considerable loving care. Extension cord wire. Spread eagled, on his back on the narrow floor, head down, feet up toward the doorway. Wire snugly knotted to each wrist and ankle and angling off to whatever was sturdy enough and handy enough. Dead mouth crammed with something and taped in place. Bulky roll of the sleeping bag under his back, to keep him arched. I tried not to look too closely at him. I found his trousers against the bulkhead up front. The wallet was in the hip pocket. I turned the identification toward the bright light that streamed down, and got my verification. I put the wallet in my pocket and climbed carefully up to where I could hoist myself up and out with one final effort. Then I took that long close look at him, and left in a hurry. I went up that slope like a giant jackrabbit and hit a pretty good stride as I passed the jeep. I stripped the gasoline rag off and dropped it as I ran. I stopped and faced into what little breeze there was and started hyperventilating.

The jeep stopped behind me. Over the motor noise I said, “Make no jokes.”

“There is no intention, senor,” Enelio said.

I knew they would not want to touch the wallet. I turned and held it so they could read the driver’s license through the yellowed plastic.

“Rockland!” Meyer said loudly. “Rockland?”

“The description matches what… what’s left.”

“Was he shot, or what?” Meyer asked.

“I don’t think the question is material. I do not know everything that was done to him. But I think he was tapped on the head and then stripped, spread and wired in place and gagged. Then various things were done to him. The most impressive, perhaps, being a knife line drawn across the belly, then down the tops of the thighs, then across the thighs about six inches above the knees. Then the entire area thus outlined was carefully flayed, skinned like a grouper. I would guess that he was not blinded until a bit later on.”

“I would be very grateful if you would not continue this,” Enelio said.

“I am glad to stop right here.”

I climbed in by going over the back of the jeep, as I sensed they did not want me too close. Meyer said, “Not even Rockland should be…”

“Are you sure of that?” I asked.

Meyer gave it thought. “Not entirely sure. But if we could understand all the formative influences on Walter Rockland-”

“We would learn,” I said, “how come he turned out to be a wicked, contemptible, evil son of a bitch.”

And by then it was too late for more talk. Enelio wanted to be home. He wanted to be there very badly. He was willing to sacrifice our kidneys, our discs, and our silver fillings to that desirable end.

But near Oaxaca, Enelio suddenly braked, swung over to the curb and cut the motor off. He turned in the seat to address me and Meyer simultaneously. “I am a respected citizen of the State of Oaxaca,” he said. “I have a certain amount of influence. I am a happy man. I enjoy my work. I enjoy my friends. I enjoy doing a favor for a friend. McGee, I was glad to welcome you to Oaxaca as a favor to my good American friend Ron Townsend.”

“And I appreciate it.”

“But I am not going to go to the officers of the law and try to explain to them just how we happened to find that body. They look at me strangely already. They look at you even more strangely. I am not a man who has this big thing about killing and bodies and investigation. I am going to be a bad citizen. If you report it, I never heard of this trip today. A dear little crumpet will swear I spent a long, long siesta with her. In fact, it was my plan. In fact I should have been with her. I do not like to throw up. It gives me a severe headache. But you, of course, are at liberty to report it.”

“It would be nice if they knew about it,” Meyer said.

“I think that tomorrow one of our pilots for our little airline will see a gleam in that arroyo and so advise the police.”

“In that case, Don Enelio,” I said, “I too have lost my taste for civic duty. I think that sergeant of yours would like to knock my head a little.”

“He implied as much. He is known for enjoying such small pleasures.”

“What about this wallet?”

“If I had it, I would wipe it off very carefully and put it in the mailbox by the Hotel Marques del Valle.”

“Consider it done, but after I see what’s in it.” He waited. They did not turn around to watch me. Three hundred and sixty-two pesos, which is twenty-eight dollars and ninety-six cents. A Mexican peso, after it goes from hand to hand in the public market a few times, can turn into something that looks like a piece of Kleenex rescued from the bottom of a pot of very stale and very greasy bean soup and then used to patch a manifold in a sloppy garage. Florida driver’s license. Truck registration slip, a couple of months overdue for re-registration. Tourist card. A small squashed notebook with a soiled red plastic cover containing addresses, phone numbers, notes to himself. It seemed to be in the order in which he had written the items down. It was better than half filled. I scanned the last few pages and found Bruce Bundy, with address and phone. What they did not know had been there, they would never miss, and it needed longer and more careful study, so I put it in my pocket. I found a Miami Beach health card certification, with thumb print and picture. The picture confirmed a positive identification of the thing suspended in the tipped camper. I found two keys, obviously vehicle keys, probably spares. I found three folded color Polaroid prints quite ancient and faded, and featuring obscene acts so unique, so improbable, that after an instant of surprise, the performers no longer looked obscene or shocking, but looked instead strangely comic and forlorn. Nobody I knew. All strangers, even the sheep dog. I put them back in the wallet with everything except the red book, thinking that the prints might well end up taped on the inside of the door of some local cop’s locker. Some daring sociologist should someday publish a collection of the art work found on the insides of locker doors of cops, firemen, ballplayers, and resident golf pros.

So we went roaring ahead again, back to the downtown hotel where he had picked us up. The car was parked over beyond the post office. On the way I felt a stupid smile appearing on my stupid face from time to time. Perhaps more rictus than smile. It is one of the many curious phenomena of reaction. There is a dreadful jolly animal hidden inside us all who keeps reminding us we are alive and somebody else is dead. It kept telling me to remember how deeply the wire had eaten into the wrists of Walter Rockland, impacted there by the spasm of powerful muscles reacting to unspeakable pain.

No more hustling towels for the guests around the pool. No more two hundred percent markup on funny cigarettes. No more decisions, boy. All problems are solved forever.

Fuentes double-parked in front of the hotel and signaled the strolling cop that he would be but a moment by holding up thumb and forefinger a half inch apart, and the cop touched his cap in proper deference to the local power structure.

Enelio said firmly, “You are very nice fellows. You are splendid fellows. Lita tells me that the delicious sisters from Guadalajara have dreamy eyes about you two, and say now that it is the best vacation of all. For that the sisters and I am grateful, and my faith and trust is justified. But no more of death, eh? Maybe I am not a true Mexican. I am not enchanted by death. Do not tell me any more you learn. Do not ask my advice on any such matters, eh? In fact, let us not see each other as planned tonight. In exactly… forty minutes I shall be in one big deep hot tub, and pretty soon I will give a big yell and Lita will come scampering in with very, very cold wine because I like it very cold when I am in a hot tub, and she will pour a glass, and when I have drunk it all she will take the big brush and the special soap and scrub my back, and then she will pour me another glass, and soon then maybe I will begin to sing a little. I shall tell her that we are going to stay in, because with a woman in my arms I can stop thinking about death. I know I will live forever. So there is the place at this hotel, and there is the other place at the other hotel, and Lita will stay with me. So I advise you, kind gentlemen, to stay apart, to stay with your loving girls, to lose the stink of death in the sweetness of girls, and have food and drink sent in, which is possible in both places, and make the girls of Guadalajara laugh and also, in time, make them cry, because laughing and crying are very living things. Tomorrow, perhaps, you will hear from me. Adios, amigos.”

So he sped off. It was after five. Meyer grabbed a table. I went inside to the men’s room and scrubbed my hands and face and neck and arms, and looked at myself in the mirror and saw I was still wearing that stupid smile. It is the smile of the survivor. A man walks away from the pile of tinsel junk that was once an airplane, and which for some unknown reason failed to explode and failed to burn, and he wears that smile. I wiped the wallet off and dropped it into the mail box. Meyer had a cold Negro Modelo waiting on the table for me.

“I’m trying not to think,” he said. “I don’t want to do any thinking, please.”

“So don’t.”

“But the stinking wheels go around in my head. I keep remembering that day aboard the Flush, and trying to say something to Bix that would make it easier for her, somehow, to accept Liz’s ugly death, and those beautiful deep blue eyes of hers were absolutely bland and indifferent, no matter what polite thing her mouth was saying. There was a… a challenge there. Something like that. I wanted to try to reach her and get some reaction, some genuine reaction, no matter how. To say or do some… ugly thing, to shock her awake maybe. Travis, I wonder if there are people in this world who are appointed by the gods to be victims, so that they bring out the worst in everybody they touch. And the perfect victim would have to be surpassingly lovely, of course, to be most effective. I keep wondering if she was the catalyst, not Rockland. And maybe, that day, if I hadn’t become irritated at being unable to get any reaction, if I had tried harder.”

“Meyer, Meyer, Meyer.”

“I know. I have this thing, like the disease of kings. A bleeder. The internal wounds do not clot well. All my life is remorse. If I had done this, if I had done this…”

“And if your aunt had wheels she’d have been a tea cart.”

“Where are we, Travis? Just where the hell are we?”

“In Oaxaca. The Chamber of Commerce motto is ‘Stay One More Day in Oaxaca.’ ”

“Perhaps I do not care to.”

“A pity to spoil a nice girl’s vacation just when it is shaping up, Meyer.”

“Now Travis.”

“My God, when you get the shys you look just like Howland Owl.”

“Well… she is quite young, and… and, dammit, McGee, anything that pleasurable has to be shameful, sinful, and wicked. I am a lecherous old man, shaken by remorse. We should go home.”

“So we can go back to Lauderdale, land of the firm and sandy young rump, home of the franchised high-starch diet, and appraise the cost and the seaworthiness of all the playtoys that churn up and down the waterway, and criticize the way they are being handled. And we can wonder who did what to whom and why, and wonder why we didn’t stay just a little bit longer and find out.”

“Or not find out.”

“Somebody wasn’t in it for the money. Somebody wasn’t worried about little incriminating items in the wallet. So Rockland has been dead in that aluminum hot box since August seventh, and I think maybe whoever did it parked the truck on the rim, worked on him for a long, long time, then rolled it over, pried dirt down on it, piled brush on it, and went away. It was a punishment which somebody devised to fit the crime. It was a very sick mind at work. Very sick and very savage.”

“As with Mike Barrington, with Della Davis, with Luz?” Meyer asked. “As with my travel clock which is now junk?”

“Mr. Nesta? You had what we’ll call an exploratory session with him. Do you buy him?”

“No. Not for that. Maybe, without the alibi, for what happened on the Coyotepec Road. Hallucination, violence, amnesia. But not what… was done to Rockland. It’s fallacious to try to assess what any human- being is capable of, naturally.”

“You know, Meyer, my friend, what has put us into cerebral shock is knowing that Rockland was probably capable of doing to others just what was done to him. He was the sweet guy who led Bix Bowie out into the cornfield. He was the charmer who did the one thing that would finally destroy Carl Sessions. And he-possibly-set Bix up to fly off the mountain.”

Meyer shrugged, massively, slowly, expressively. He wore that inexpressibly mournful look of the giant anthropoid, of the ape who knows there is not one more plantain left in the rain forest.

“There’s Bundy.” he said without conviction. “We don’t know if Bundy told us the whole story, and… Forget it. It was a stranger. It was somebody who took a dislike to him, for some strange reason.”

Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison came up behind me and pressed my shoulder affectionately. “Travis darling! How lovely to see you again, dear.” I came to my feet, feeling as clumsy and oppressed as the big-footed kid who has to come into the living room to meet mother’s bridge friends. I mumbled the presentation of Meyer. She had a friend with her, a sunburned youth of sufficient inches over six feet to be able to look me right in the eye. He was rawboned, shy, with cropped blond hair and a face and manner from the midwest farm belt.

“I want you to meet Mark Woodenhaus,” she said. “Isn’t that a precious name?” The boy suddenly looked even more sunburned. “He’s been working out in a primitive village doing some kind of sanitation thing with the… what is the name of it, dear?”

“The Friends’ Service Committee, ma’am.”

“And I found him trudging down the highway all hot and dusty and carrying a monstrous dufflebag because he couldn’t spare bus fare. It’s volunteer work isn’t it, dear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And I truly believe that parasites like myself should take every chance to express their deep gratitude to marvelous young men like Mark, don’t you, Travis?”

“The best is none too good,” I said. I could not see through the dark lenses of her glasses very well, but thought I saw a significant wink. “Would you like to sit with us?” I asked her.

“Oh, thank you so much, but I think not. We have some errands to do, don’t we, Mark darling? Some bits of luxury for those poor young people slaving away out there in. the bush. So nice to see you, really. Do hope you’ll be about for a time, Travis. Come along, Mark.”

She looked, as one might well say, smashing. Vibrant and saucy and a-hum with improbable energies. Happily predatory, she scurried along in her lime yellow slacks beside the gangly, unsuspecting prey, with his plowjockey stride. The solid and shapely behind swung in graceful clench and cadence, and as I watched it disappear down the long aisle between the evening tables, I remembered, out of nowhere, an ancient incident, and remembered the tag line because of its aptness.

I’d been out in the placid Gulf of Mexico off Manasota Key in a small boat with a good and longtime friend named Bill Ward. We were trolling slowly for anything interesting and edible. But there was no action. A gull came winging by, and in the silence, out of boredom, Bill aimed a forefinger at it and said, quietly, “Bang!” At that precise instant the gull, spotting a small meal on the surface, dropped like a stone. Bill, eyes and mouth wide in amazement, turned toward me, inadvertently aiming the lethal finger at me. “Don’t aim that thing at me,” I told him.

“And there you sit,” Meyer said, “steeped in jealous envy.”

“Smiling, the boy fell dead.”

“Well, he has found a Friend. And the magic word is Service. But it will play hell trying to get back to that primitive village, carrying that dufflebag.”

“And on his hands and knees. Where were we? Hell, let’s write a finish for it, Meyer, for a bad movie. Harl Bowie is really not confined to a wheel chair. And that German nurse of his got her basic training in concentration camps. So, as a cover story, he suckered us into coming down here openly. He knew the whole story, snuck into town with the German nurse, and took care of Rockland before ever sending us down here.”

Meyer smiled and then sobered. “Remember my saying that one shouldn’t guess about what people are capable of? I think if Harlan Bowie knew the whole story, he could possibly do that to Rocko.”

“So let’s write the part for Wally McLeen. Minda didn’t make as many bad scenes as Bix, but it wasn’t exactly a fond daddy’s idea of a nice vacation for dear daughter.”

Meyer chuckled. “Poor Wally. What’s the word for what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to get with it. Or maybe that expression is already passe.”

“And for a man devoting his whole time to tracking down his daughter, he isn’t very well organized. He hadn’t even nailed down the names of the original group.”

We sat in our silences, watching the people. Meyer said, “Somebody had a hell of a long and lonely and conspicuous walk back from the place where we found the camper. Unless, of course, they had a rented Honda to offload before running the truck into the dry gulley.”

“Come off it, friend. Wally is trying to establish communication. He is a very earnest little guy. Boring, obvious, comical… but earnest.”

More silence. Then it was my turn. “So he reports a conversation with Rockland. He says he didn’t know it was Rockland. He says the mysterious stranger tried to con him out of money in return for producing darling daughter. It accounts for the two of them being seen together in a public place… how long before Rockland had his little misfortune?”

Meyer half-closed his eyes and turned his computer on. “Wally McLeen claimed they talked on the… we figured out that it had to be the last day of July. Rockland lived five more days. But could that puffy little man immobilize Rockland long enough to wire him and gag him? Unlikely. And could he have done the mischief on the Coyotepec Road? Three of them?”

So I thought that over and finally said, “Item. Let’s say, just for the hell of it, that Wally went into that compound believing that Jerry Nesta was there with the others. He could have taken Mark by surprise, then got the two women before they could run. Then he could have scurried around and found that Jerry wasn’t there. Item. He made a point of telling me he had been out on the Coyotepec Road that morning on his rented bike.”

Meyer shook his head. “No, Travis. We’re playing bad games.”

“Agreed. But he is a common denominator, and so what we do is get him off the books because if we don’t he’ll muddy up the logic of the situation. And we get to throw two stones at one bird, because maybe he knows something useful, without knowing how useful it is.”

“But we will have to listen to the communication lecture again.”

“And admire the progress of the chin whiskers.” Meyer remembered the room number and went and checked and came back and said the key was in the box, so Wally McLeen was out. I took a stroll down the porch and couldn’t spot him. I put a note in his box to call me at the Victoria. By then it was five minutes past the time we had all agreed to meet on the veranda. And the sisters appeared, newly and too elegantly coiffed, high heels, gloves, evening bags, dresses more suited to the night life of Guadalajara or Mexico City than to a September night in Oaxaca.

Their festive smiles and dancing eyes dimmed when they saw that Meyer and I were still in the rough dusty clothes of the expedition to the burned land, and they exchanged a meaningful sisterly glance. They came to the table and were seated. I said that I was sorry that we had not yet had time to change. I said that it had been an evil day, and they would have to forgive us if we seemed solemn and tired. I said that Enelio Fuentes was also tired, and that he and Lita had decided not to join us.

Any affront Elena may have felt was erased immediately by the concern in her eyes as she searched my face. She moved her chair closer, laid her hand on my wrist. In a little while I noticed that Meyer and Margarita were gone. I had not seen them leave. I told Elena, in our special clumsy mixture of English and Spanish, that I was sorry she had taken such care to dress for a dinner party. She said she had dressed to please me, and asked me if she did please me. I said there could be no question of that. She said that whatever I wished-cualquier tu quieres-that would be the evening that would please her. I said that I wished to go up the hill with her, to have a quiet drink with her, to have food together, and then to have love. She said she had planned on love in any case.

The last angle of the sun before it slipped over the mountains found her face with a single shaft of orange light. She looked at me, her eyes moving back and forth, focusing on each of my eyes in turn, and she wore a small, questioning sensuous frown. Black pupils set in deepest brown, whites of her eyes blue-white with superb health, long fringe of wiry. black lashes, long oval face, matte golden skin, microscopic beads of moisture in the down of her upper lip above the broad solid mouth. Then suddenly her eyes looked heavy and her mouth loosened, and her head bowed slightly. She took a deep and shuddering breath and exhaled slowly. Her nostrils flared and the enameled nails bit into my wrist. She smiled and said, “Why we are sitting here so long time, querido?”

I could have reported to Enelio-but I knew I would not-that a back can be effectively scrubbed in a tiled shower stall, and that there is no real need for a special brush and special soap. Also gin over ice is cold and pleasant and goes with a hot shower in a very Sybaritic way. I could have reported that soon I came to believe that I would live forever, and even sang a little.

Good steaks came down the hill from the hotel, and when we were done we put the cart outside at the end of the porch, turned off the lights and sat comfortably and quietly and had coffee and looked at the stars. Wally had the grace to phone at that time, and I went in and took it in the dark, sitting on the turned-down bed.

“Trav? This is Wally. I just found your note in the box a little while ago. What’s it about? Have you… have you heard something about Minda?”

“I wish I had, Wally. No. This is something else.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Meyer and I would like to have a chat with you when it’s convenient, Wally.”

“What about?”

“We think it’s a good idea to pool everything we’ve all learned up to this point. What do you think?”

“Well… I guess it couldn’t do any harm.”

“When would be a good time? Now?”

“Oh, not now. I’m going with a bunch of the kids up to Monte Alban to see the ruins by moonlight again. Say, how about tomorrow morning? Have you ever seen the ruins at Yagul? It’s only about ten miles down the Mitla Road, and there’s a sign where you turn off to it.”

“I saw the sign the last time we were out that way.”

“I’m getting turned on pretty good by these ruins. I mean they are sort of timeless, and your own troubles don’t seem to mean so much. They don’t really know much about Yagul. It’s so quiet there, you can sit and… contemplate things. I was planning to go out early. I’ll be there all morning. Why don’t you and Meyer come out any time tomorrow morning? It will be a good place to talk. I think a place that is very, very old and peaceful and dead is a good place for really talking, don’t you?”

“Sure, Wally. We’ll see you there.”

As I talked I had heard her close the door and click the night lock. I had heard a tock of heels on tile, then felt a dip of the bed as she sat on the other side. Whisk-whisper of nylons, then slap-pad of bare feet. Zipper-purr, rustle of fabric, click of snaps. Dip of bed again. I hung up. Hand on my shoulder to urge me around and pull me down to a mouth that fastened firmly and well, while a hand plucked at the tied belt of the robe I had put on after showering. Voice making a tuneless little contented ummming sound, way back in the strong round throat.

“This you want?” she whispered. “Turn some bad day to good things?”

“This I want.”

“This you have, Tuh-rrrravis.”

“You are fine.”

“Sank you ver‘ motch. You are doing some thing in Mexico… how you say?… peligroso?”

“Dangerous? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”

She held me tightly and made a small growling sound in her throat. “Some person hurting you, Elena will fix. Tear out some eyes. Cut out some tongue. Breaking all bones, verdad?”

Something came flickering in through the back door of my mind, but by then everybody had become too busy to notice, and so the thought sat patiently out there in the back entryway until somebody had time to notice it.

I got around to noticing it when she lay purring into my throat, tickling weight of long heavy dark hair fanned across my chest. I eased the blanket up over her without awakening her. The thought that had come into the back of my mind was a memory of how the primitive warriors of history dreaded being handed over, alive, to the women of the enemy tribe. There had been a very convincing savagery in Elena’s threats about what she would do to whoever harmed me.

Rockland had gone to Eva Vitrier’s estate in La Colonia, and he had managed to take Bix Bowie away in Bundy’s car. Bundy had been wickedly pleased to learn that Eva could become emotionally involved, infatuated, with a girl she saw on the street and contrive to invite the girl and her friend into her home. The two girls had been her guests for a long time. It would seem plausible that they might tell Eva Vitrier some of the rancid highlights of their vacation in Mexico, the same things Nesta had told Meyer.

So sooner or later Mrs. Vitrier would reveal, calculatingly or accidentally, her desire for the Bowie girl. In view of Bix’s passivity about being used in physical ways, perhaps an actual affair had begun. Safe to assume that Minda McLeen would be opposed, and also fair to state there was very little she could do about it. So the note to Harlan Bowie about coming to get Bix may have come from Minda. Perhaps the girls quarreled over Eva’s attentions to Bix, Minda demanding that Bix leave, Bix refusing. So Minda left.

Knowing Rockland’s past abuse of Bix, knowing Rockland was responsible for her addiction, knowing Rockland was responsible for her death that Sunday evening, what would happen to Rockland if he went back to the Vitrier house? She could very well have mutilated him in exactly the ways I had seen. The flaying and blinding could even be said to be a symbolic expression of her attitude toward male sexuality. And perhaps her wealth enabled her to employ muscle she could trust-muscle that could overpower him, truss him up, leave him alone for her savage attentions, and then dispose of truck, camper, and body in one package.

So then Wally McLeen would be a waste of time. But it was set, so we’d lose nothing by going through with it. I thought of a twelve-second system for opening him up, and knew it would draw a wide dazed blank He was one of the nice little people you meet on a Honda.

Elena suddenly began to jerk and twitch and make muffled little yelping sounds. I woke her up, and tenderly and gently quieted her down. She said it had been a terrible, terrible dream. I had been broken into tiny bits, and if she could put them together in time I would live. But the little wet pieces kept crawling away in every direction as she tried to reconstruct me.

Sixteen

THURSDAY was another bright, hot, beautiful morning. I had spent the time after driving Elena to town, sitting at the desk in the room and going through Rockland’s little red notebook. There were Miami and Miami Beach addresses, and addresses all over the country, presumably people who had stayed at the Sultana and who had subscribed to one of Rockland’s services-in one way or another. It would be logical for him to keep such a record.

The notes and reminders were too cryptic to be of any use. Things like “L.2 Sat aft”; “2 doz, suite 20B”; “$100 Reb in 7th.” As they were chronological, I could get enough hints to figure out when notes were made. He didn’t make many. There was a notation of the cost of new tires in pesos and dollars, made before they got to Oaxaca. And just a few addresses after that, Bundy, the Vitrier estate, the hotel where Bix and Minda had stayed, and one that read, “I. V. Rivereta, Fiesta D, Mex City.” All the rest of the pages were completely blank. On the inside back cover was his social security number.

At breakfast I checked out my twelve-second system with Meyer. “If I start edging up on him, he has time to adjust, assuming he’s our nut, which I doubt. So I will drop it on him suddenly and from considerable altitude, and we will watch his throat and his mouth and his eyes like a pair of eagles, and no man living can make a fast enough recovery to hide every part of it, especially when I come on very amiable and kindly and understanding.”

I told him the approach. He approved. He had watched me do it before. He had seen it work and seen it fail.

So we drove out to the turnoff to Yagul. We could see it a couple of miles north of the main road as we turned off, old stone patterns atop a rounded hill which bore faint traces of the old horizontal terracing. I drove across flats and then up the steep winding road to a wide paved parking area. There was an old sedan there with Mexican plates, and the small Honda. That was all.

As we got out, a large Mexican family came down the worn path from the ruins and started getting into the sedan, arguing about who would sit where. We went up the path. A gnarled little man came trudging out of a shady spot to collect the small government fee and give us our handsomely printed tickets. He went back to his place in the shade, his back against raw rock. From there he could look out across the valley, with all the ruins behind him.

The morning sky was a deep rich Kodachrome blue. A buzzard wheeled in the updraft from the hill slope, making sounds very like a pig. Tall clumps of cactus with big red blossoms grew out of the stony soil. It was indeed quiet. Two buses moved along the valley floor toward Oaxaca, stolid, silent beetles.

We came upon the traditional ball court, a long sunken rectangle with sloping sides of carefully fitted stone, with the high place where the priests sat and watched, and the lower places for the other spectators. Tricky bounces off those side walls. Iron rings set into the stone at either end, now long rusted away. Archeologists believe that the captain of the winning team was beheaded. It was some sort of honor to strive for. It meant a permanent place in the record books. It would keep a team from running away with the league. Perhaps the same theory as the cellar team getting first draft choice.

We looked at the front of the long temple, at the altars, at the peak of a distant knoll beyond the edge of the temple front wall, and saw, silhouetted against the sky, along with some twisted little trees, a dumpy figure semaphoring its arms at us, and a faint hail came upwind.

We found the stone steps that would lead us up to the temple level. A lot of it was restored. When they restore, they stick pebbles in the mortar between the new courses of stone. The academic mind saying, “See? This is all fake. We stuck it on the way we think it used to be.”

Behind the temple farade there were small courtyards and unroofed stone walls forming a maze of small rooms and corridors. After we came to two dead ends, I found a toe hold and climbed up and picked out the right route toward Wally’s little hill. We came out the back of the temple complex and went up a narrow and winding footpath, puffing a little in the unaccustomed altitude.

Wally McLeen beamed upon us. “Isn’t it great? See, from up here you look over into the next valley too. Pretty strategic place. These holes here, these were tombs. The big shots got buried at the highest place. They bust into every one they can find because there’s gold jewelry in some of them. Now look back at the whole thing. Gold, sacrifices, underground passages, astronomy, brain surgery, it blows my mind thinking about it.”

He wore a market shirt of coarse unbleached cotton, a pale blue beret acquired from God knows where, burgundy-colored walking shorts cinched around his comfortable tummy by a belt with a lot of silver knobs affixed to the leather, and market sandals. His goatee was coming along nicely. He carried a bag woven of yellow fiber, shaped like a two-handled market bag. He had flip-up sunglasses fastened to his thick eyeglasses, and the cycle was turning his previous angry red to a red-brown, with some pink patches on forehead and nose where the early burns had peeled.

“When Minda comes back, I want to show her all these places, Trav, on account of I know she’ll flip. I remember when she was a little kid, one summer at the lake she found an arrowhead and I read to her all about the Indians, and you’d be surprised how much she remembered, a little kid like that. Just turned five years old. They can bolt another seat on that Honda and we can travel all over this part of Mexico.”

Meyer had moved around into position, so that we were both facing him.

“But that won’t work out so good, Wally,” I told him.

“Sure it will!”

“For a while. But then sooner or later the cops are going to find that village kid that saw you dump the camper into the ravine, and find out what you did to Rocko, and start adding things up and nail you for Mike and Della and the Mexican woman, too. So you better aim that bike for the nearest border crossing, Wally.”

It is like that lousy frog routine I had to do in high school biology lab. You hook up the battery and touch the wires to the right place and that slimy dead leg makes jumping motions.

He stared at me and he stared at Meyer. And his mouth hitched up into a weak little smile and then opened into an O. Not a big O. About twice the size of the one you use to whistle. It went through the same pattern again.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Too long, Wally.” Meyer said sadly. “You took too long finding the right way to play it. Too much was happening in your head. You froze. You had too much to add up.”

“I… I’ve got to wait for Minda! You can understand that. I’ve got to wait for her to come back here!”

It was hard to believe it, looking at him, even though it had come through as clear as a ten page confession.

“Wally,” I said, “I can understand the thing with Rockland, sort of. You’re over the edge. You found out too much. Those three-Sessions, Nesta, Rockland-they turned your little girl on, and they banged her, and they degraded her, and something went wrong then in your head, Wally. This is a hell of a long way from the weekly Kiwanis meeting and the shopping center stores. What you did to Rockland means you’ve been taken sick. It means you’ve got to go into town and tell people about it and get help, because there was Mike Barrington and there was Della Davis and there was Luz.”

“I know. That went wrong. I mean I wouldn’t feel bad about it if I got Nesta too, because I thought it might have to be that way. I went in from the back, over the wall. The jeep was there when I went by, but when I came back to look for him I found it was gone. I should have waited for him to come back. But I got scared. I have to get him, you know. And I will. I made a vow. I’ve been working it all out. Mike and Luz were so close together, I got her before she could take a step, after he went down. But the nigger bitch could run like the wind. If she hadn’t stumbled and fallen, she would have been out the gate and gone.” His voice was small and thoughtful, the words half lost in a small warm wind that gusted and died.

“What did they do to you… or Minda?” Meyer asked.

The shadow of the buzzard angled across the stony earth between us. Silent, awkward tableau. Wally McLeen bent over and picked up a small triangular shard of Zapotecan pottery. He looked at it with care and flipped it aside.

“I like the ones with designs,” he said. “I like to think of them out here, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, scratching little designs in the clay to make the pots prettier. Funny thing about that. This morning, maybe an hour ago, over there down the slope of the hill, I found a piece that reminded me of an ashtray Minda made for me in the first or second grade. She made the same kind of wavy lines in the clay. I’ve got it here in the bag.” He opened it and peered down in, reached in.

My alarm system went off too late. He yanked out some kind of a weapon, swinging it so swiftly I could not see what it was. From where he stood, his first choice was a backhand slap at Meyer. He should not have been able to reach him, but he did. There was the sickening solid thonk of a hard object striking the skull. Meyer went down in a bad way-a boneless sloppy tumble. There was no interval, no half-step, no attempt to break the fall. In a fluid continuation of the same motion, McLeen took a forehand shot at me and I sprang back, leaning back at the same time, and even so felt the wind of it across my upper lip, heard its whistling sound. He stood nicely balanced, slightly crouched as I moved back cautiously. Meyer had rolled over twice, down the slope, slowly, but it took him to a steeper slant and he rolled more rapidly for perhaps fifteen feet before the upper half of his body dropped into one of the small open tombs. He was wedged there then, the legs spraddled, toeing in, the substantial bottom turned toward the blue sky.

The weapon was at rest. I could see what it was. He held a hardwood stick about two feet long, gray with age, greased with much handling. A leather thong, heavy, tightly braided, was fastened to the end of the stick. The end of the thong was fastened to a crude metal ring that had somehow been affixed to a stone, round, polished, irregular, a little smaller than a peach.

He came at me with a little rush of quick light steps, bouncy and balanced. I feinted to run down the slope, then dodged and ran uphill, angling away from him. The feint had been a mistake. He missed my head by an inch. I realized I had seen smallish portly men like Wally McLeen moving very lightly and quickly and well on many dance floors in years past. Long-waisted men like Wally, and with the same short, hefty legs.

“I bought this in a stall in the public market,” he said. “One of the kids told me it was a fake. But it’s just like the soldiers used to use. It’s tricky. You have to practice with it. The handle is limber. See? So all you need is good wrist action. I practiced on trees. You have to get the range right.”

“Let me go help Meyer. Please, Wally.”

“You can’t help him. He’s dead. Or dying.” When again he came bouncing toward me, I spun and ran up the slope all out, thinking to get far enough away from him so that I could circle around and go down toward the temple. But as I started down the other side I took a quick look back and saw that he was only thirty feet behind me, moving too well. There was a crumbling, unrestored wall to my left and I angled toward it, snatched up a chunk of rock and turned and hurled it at him. He scrambled to the side and it gave me enough leeway to pick up another jagged piece and, in too much haste, overthrow him. He backed away quickly.

With more time, I was able to pick up one of better size and heft. I turned it to fit the hand, and took my best shot. He was fifty to sixty feet away. I put it’on a good line, right toward the middle of his face. He moved just his head. He moved it quickly to the side and just as far as was necessary.

A rock fight. Too many years since the last one. I might be able to get away from him, but that wasn’t enough. I had to get to Meyer, and I had to get to him soon. I didn’t like the choices. If I picked some good rocks and charged him, trying to get close enough to chunk him, he was going to have just as good, or better, a chance to bust my skull as he had with the three in the old compound on the Coyotepec Road. He was too good with that thing, and he could make it whistle.

A madman is curiously deadly. When the strictures and restraints of civilization and conscience are wiped away, the animal can move with ancient shrewdness. Man is a predator.

He stood downhill from me, slowly swinging the stone ball from side to side at the end of the stick planning what to do next. Stocky little storekeeper in blue beret and new goatee, and just as calmly intent on killing me as a Bengal tiger would have been.

I squatted by my wall and picked up a rock the size of my head and held it in both hands and arched it at him, like taking a shot from the foul line. He squinted up at it and stepped to his right. It hit, bounced and rolled down through coarse grass and brush toward the temple level below. All the ruins were silent. For perhaps the first time in my life I desperately wanted to see a chattering flock of tourists, festooned with Instamatics, leaving a spoor of yellow boxes.

I knew that if I didn’t come up with something workable, fat Wally would, and I wouldn’t like it. Misdirection is the name of the game. I couldn’t point behind him and yell, “Hey! Tourist!” and hope to bounce a rock off his skull as he turned and stared.

But he had looked up at the big rock, hadn’t he? Indeed he had. So I palmed a couple of good small ones, holding them in place against my palm with ring fingers and little fingers, and picked up another big melon of a rock and gave it as much height and distance as I could, and as he looked up at it, I let fly with the first small stone. He glimpsed my movement and looked at me, moving swiftly to his left along the slope. He ducked away from the first small one, had to check the one in the air again to be sure he was out from under it, and moved forward, taking the second small rock high on the forehead and going ass over teacup into a backward somersault as I came bounding down the slope. He peered up at me, on hands and knees, a bright rush of blood on his face. He had lost the ancient fake weapon and the blue beret and his glasses. But he reached and grabbed the weapon and took a blind full-arm swing and got me on the outside of the left thigh, just below the hip bone. It felt to me as if he had smashed the hip. I fell and rolled and got up, surprised to be able to get up. He wiped blood out of his eye and started toward me and I made ready for him, telling myself I would catch that damned rock, catch it in my teeth if I had to, and take it away from him and feed it to him. He hesitated and ran down the slope. I saw him fall and roll and get up and disappear into the maze of walls behind the temple faCade. I was trembling with reaction. I picked up the sweaty beret and the eyeglasses with the tilt-shades attached, and saw that one lens was shattered.

I went hobbling on my broken, ground-glass hip to the opened tombs and heard myself saying, “Sorry Sorry, Meyer. Sorry.”

I got him by the belt and pulled him out of the tomb. He seemed very heavy. I rolled him onto his back. He was very loose and sloppy. He had a lump over his ear the size of half an apple. His cheeks and forehead were scratched and torn from rolling down the slope. I put my ear against his chest, and the mighty old heart of Meyer said, reassuringly, “Whup tump, whup tump, whup tump.”

So I thumbed an eyelid up, and a blank sightless, and bright blue eye stared out, stared through and beyond me.

The other one opened, unaided, and slowly the focus came back from ten thousand miles in space, down through all the layers with fancy names, and stared at me. Tongue came out and licked dusty lips. Rusty voice said, “So? So hello.”

“Are you dying?”

“The point is debatable. What happened? I saw McLeen way up on the hill. We started up. Here I am. I fell?”

“You got hit on the head with a rock.”

A slow hand came up and the fingers touched the lump. “This is part of my head? Way out there?”

“Do you want to sit up?”

“I would like to think about it. We economists have very thick skulls. It is a characteristic. Everybody knows that. But we are happy people with a great sense of rhythm.”

“You are talking a lot.”

“It keeps my mind off my head. So let’s try this sitting up part.”

He sat up and spent a little time moaning. And then he stood up, and we started down the slope, very slowly.

“Why are you limping?” he asked.

“I, too, got hit with a rock.”

“What do you have there in your hand?”

“A blue beret and a pair of broken glasses. Shut up, Meyer.”

“Ask a stupid question and you get…”

“Shut up, Meyer.”

“Sit up, Meyer. Stand up, Meyer. Walk, Meyer. Shut up, Meyer.”

I had been listening for the snoring sound of the Honda heading down the hill, and I hadn’t heard it yet. It made me thoughtful. So I made Meyer sit on a short, wide, restored wall, and hold the beret and glasses. I went over to the side and climbed up onto a high wall. I could see a portion of the parking lot. I could see the Falcon and the cycle. I looked around. I could see the pattern of the maze, but not down into the rooms and corridors.

I dropped down from the wall, and managed not to scream out loud. Just silently, in the brain. I listened for a long time. I moved a few feet and listened again.

With an explosive grunt of effort he came scuttling out of a doorway, blinking and swinging, forgetting that part about the wrist action, and forgetting how tall I am. I stepped inside the arc, so well inside it that the lethal rock which I had expected might wrap around me and splinter a rib, smacked the wall behind me instead. I got one paw on the stick and the flat of my other hand against his chest, pushed and yanked and took away the toy. He ran backward, kept his balance, turned, and kept running. I went after him with no hope of catching him-not on a leg that felt as if I were wearing it backwards-but to see where he was headed, and if there was anyone interested in stopping him.

He came out onto the wide stone plaza that ran along the front of the temple faqade. By the time I got to the end of the unroofed corridor and made the turn, he was scooting along toward the nearest set of big steep stone stairs leading down to the lower courtyard level, to the same level as the ball court a hundred yards away.

As I came hitching and galumphing along, I saw him make his turn and slow to go down the stone steps. He tried to take the steps in stride, but he had not slowed quite enough, probably because perceptions of depth and distance were flawed without the thick lenses. So momentum carried him to the outside edge of the stairs. There was no railing. And he flailed his arms to recover balance but momentum took him over, leaning further and further, his feet trying to stay on the edge of the steep stone.

He dropped out of my sight. I heard a single cry which could have been “Oh!” and which could have been “No!” The sound ended with a whacking, dusty thud. I went down the steps and around and back to where he lay, half in white sunlight, half in black shadow. He lay on his right side in white dust, using a rock for a pillow, left arm curled around the pillow.

I went down onto one knee with some difficulty, and as I placed the pads of three fingers against the big artery in the side of his throat, I could see into his half-open mouth, see the neat gleam of a reasonably new filling. The dentist probably belonged to the same luncheon clubs and called him Wally, told him jokes and told him when to spit. The artery throbbed once, and in about three seconds throbbed again with half the vigor, and then did not ever move again. Escaping air rattled in his throat. All my life I had heard about the death rattle. Thought it was a myth. Now it was confirmed. A classic sample. A collector’s item.

I stood up and walked beyond the steps. No tourists. A thousand years worth of silence. Baked rocks. Shards. Dust. A lot of Indio blood had soaked into the soil of Yagul, enough to chill the back of my neck. And I had to go up and get Meyer and did not relish the climb.

But Meyer was sitting up on the stone plaza, his feet on the top stair. His color was pasty.

“I told you to stay put.”

“I came to tell you I feel very dizzy. And… in all truth, a little bit frightened.”

I got up those stairs and got him down them, taking a lot of his weight. I then put the blue beret next to the stone pillow, and tucked one bow of the broken glasses under Wally’s cheek. I had shoved the wooden handle of the weapon down inside my belt, above the right hand pants pocket, and put the stone ball in the pocket, so that only the braided leather showed.

Walked by the ball court, out along the path. No new visitors. Tourists go to Monte Alban, to Mitla, not often to Yagul. I shouted the gnarled little tickettaker out of his shady nest, and pointed back in agitation, and then at the Honda, saying in my pidgin Mexican that the man had fallen, the man was hurt. He looked absolutely blank, and then there was sudden comprehension and concern. I said I would have the ambulancia come, the Cruz Roja, los doctores. He went trotting to find the dead daddy of the dear daughter, and I wedged Meyer into the Falcon and took off. Before we got to the main highway, he toppled over against the door on his side.

The large modern hospital was on the fringe of La Colonia, toward the city. I was glad I had taken Brucey and Davey there. I left rented rubber on every turn, using one hand to hold Meyer in place when I made turns to the right.

A birdlike little nurse came hurrying out of the emergency entrance. She ignored my linguistics. She looked at Meyer, sucked air audibly as she saw the lump on his head. She directed the attendants who lifted him onto the stretcher and rolled him in. I refused to understand their instructions to get my car out of the way, knowing it was perhaps the quickest way to contact somebody who could speak English.

A big brown man in a white smock appeared and said, “Would you please move your car out of the ambulance gate, sir. You can park it in back.”

“My friend and I saw a man fall from in front of the temple at Yagul. While we were hurrying to tell the man who sells the tickets, my friend fell and struck his head. The man who fell was an American tourist, and I think the fall may have killed him, Doctor. What about my friend?”

“He is being examined right now. If you will move your car and then go to the office and help with the admission papers…”

“Is he in bad shape?”

“Please move your car.” And so I did. Then a large, billowly, benevolent lady in the office helped me interpret their form and put Meyer’s name, rank, and serial number in the right spaces. I caught Enelio Fuentes just as he was leaving the agency. I was using the phone on her desk. Enelio came through with that clout and speed that only a certified member of the local establishment can provide. A Doctor Elvara arrived twenty minutes later to be a consultant on the case. He was young, brisk, authoritative, and emotionless. After fifteen minutes he came back to the waiting room and made his report.

“There is no fracture. The patient regained consciousness and seemed rational, and then lapsed again into a comatose condition. It is obvious there is a severe concussion. The question of tissue damage cannot be resolved as yet. Pulse, respiration and pressure are good. It is safe to say there is no major area of hemorrhage in the brain, according to present symptoms. There could be a slow seepage from small blood vessels and torn capillaries. If so, the indication will be a deterioration in pressure, respiration, and pulse. We have no mechanized intensive care installation, and so the procedure here is to use student nurses on one hour shifts, constantly taking the pulse rate and the blood pressure and the rate of respiration and marking them on a special chart form which carries a column for cumulative change. If percentage change exceeds specified limits, she will immediately alert surgery. I will be on call and be here by the time the patient is prepared. The chief resident in surgery will assist me. In almost every instance the seepage in subdural, evident; and readily accessible, with a favorable prognosis. When a deeper area is traumatized, the problem becomes more grave.”

“Do you think you’ll have to operate?”

“I do not make guesses.”

I knew he would make his guess if I could word the question correctly. “Doctor Elvara, if you had ten patients with exactly the same test results as my friend, the same lump on the head, how many do you think would require surgery?”

“Hmmm. Ten is too small a sample. Make it a hundred. At least twenty would require surgery, perhaps as many as forty.”

“Out of a hundred operations, given the same conditions thus far, how many wouldn’t respond?”

“Perhaps five, perhaps four.”

“How long does it usually take before you know whether you have to operate?”

“There will be a deterioration in the first twelve hours. But we would keep close watch for eighteen to be safe, then two more days of observation before the patient would be discharged.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“You are most welcome.” He stopped outside the door and turned and looked in at me. “You… ask very nice questions,” he said. It was probably his compliment for the whole calendar year.

So then, three chances out of ten they’ll have to open your skull, Meyer, and, if they do, it’s twenty to one in your favor. Your friendly neighborhood oddsmaker can thus put up fifty bucks against the dollar you don’t make it, and still have a twenty percent edge in his favor. But with your pants showing above the edge of the tomb, you didn’t look all that good.

But nothing in the world could keep it from being a very very long twelve hours.

Seventeen

AT ELEVEN On Thursday night the twelve hours were up. Enelio, Margarita, and I got in to see him. Small room. Hospital gown. Side bars on the bed up. Blue beard on Meyer’s jaws. White compress on the head lump. A squatty little girl in gray and white, skin color like old pennies, was pumping the bulb on the blood pressure gadget and reading the levels.

“Well, well, well,” said Meyer.

Fuentes said, “Meyer, if you were a gentlemen, you would tell the young lady there is a beetle crawling right across that little nurse cap.” When she did not move, Enelio smiled and said, “No English.”

“Some day,” said Meyer, “kindly tell me what happened. Memory stopped. Travis, you are not limping as much.”

“They stuck something in there that works like novocaine.”

The girl posted her chart and started taking his pulse, moving her lips as she watched the sweep second on the gold watch pinned to her uniform.

“Meyer,” I said, “it now appears that they do not have to open your skull and examine the contents.”

His eyes went wide. “They were thinking of it?”

“All day long.”

“Too bad,” he said, “to deprive them of the chance. Better luck next time.”

“Now we’re going to the Victoria and celebrate. We’ll order drinks for you too and take turns drinking yours.”

“Salud, and happy days.”

Margarita, however, was not going. She had pulled a chair close to the far side of the bed. The squatty student nurse made querulous objection. Margarita blazed up and exploded several packages of Spanish firecrackers around the girl’s head. It backed her up and shut her up, and she soon resumed her testing.

Margarita looked content as a cat on a warm hearth. She held Meyer’s hand, and with her free hand, she gave that odd little Mexican good-by wave, which looks more like a summoning than a dismissal.

Meyer gave us an inordinately fatuous smile. I told him I’d be back in the morning. He told me not to put myself out. Elena was waiting in the Falcon. She did not seem at all surprised that her sister had stayed with Meyer. I got the feeling it would have astonished her if Margarita had not stayed. Enelio followed us back to the Victoria. I left Elena off at the main building and told her to wait for me in the lounge. I parked the car there, and concealed the weapon once more, and walked down to the cottage with Enelio. Inside the cottage, with the blinds and draperies closed, Enelio stood and held the handle and let the stone ball swing from side to side, then swung it a few times, cautiously.

“Hey, one hell of a thing. I have seen the autenticos, in collections. Very much the same thing. Any weapon, they keep changing it, changing it, until it is as dangerous as they can make it. I think you better throw this thing away, my friend.”

“I have that feeling about it too.”

“By God, they were a bloody people. A thing like this, there’s no halfway. What it does is kill.”

I took it and put it in the closet on a shelf. I got out a bottle of genuine bottled-in-Guadalajara House of Lords gin, and phoned up for ice for both of us, and some mix for Senor Fuentes.

“What about the camper?”

“Fonny thing. One of our pilots saw something shiny in that arroyo and reported it to the Federales. Maybe they went out today. Maybe in the morning. No talk about it yet. I tell you, Martinez and Tielma are getting damn sick and tired of dead American tourists. Telephone calls come from Mexico City. ‘What are you trying to do down there, you estupidos! Ruin business?’ But I think the little fat man is no problem. Mexico is full of pyramids and temples and they are all of stone, and Mexico is full of tourists, and some of them are feeble and some are careless and some are dronk, and some have bad hearts, and faint and fall, so it is not something special, one more little. man with a sack full of pieces of pots, eh?”

“If anybody else had shown up, it would have been a different ball game.”

“Not so many go to Yagul. Some days probably nobody. Maybe two or three days, nobody.”

The ice and mix came. We fixed our own. He gave a little lift of his glass and gave that Spanish toast that covers everything there is. “Health, money, love, and time to enjoy them.” I’ve never been able to think of anything it doesn’t cover.

“So,” said Enelio, “your friend will be all right, and now it is finished, and now you go home and you tell nice pretty little lies to the father, eh?”

“Is it finished? All day I’ve been worrying about Meyer with half my mind and using the other half to list the questions I would have asked Wally McLeen but didn’t get a chance to.”

“What do you need to know from some fat little madman?”

“I wanted to know who crazed him. Somebody had to give him enough sordid and factual information to actually arm him like a bomb, to turn him into a deadly weapon.”

“You told me he talked to that Rocko?”

“Yes. Apparently on the first night he was here. So he came here knowing who to look for. So I think it’s fair to say that somewhere along the line Minda dropped him a letter or a postcard, telling who she was with and their destination. Otherwise, he and Rockland got together too fast. Too big a coincidence. I can see how Rocko would see it as a way to come up with some quick money. That would be his style, to sell a man his own daughter. But there wouldn’t be any point in Rocko talking about what shape the girl was in, or talking about what kind of a trip they’d had, or telling him his daughter was hooked on speed.”

“Speed?”

“Stimulants. Amphetamines. Dexedrine. People develop a physical tolerance but not a mental tolerance, so they hit it heavier and heavier and they can get pretty nervous and erratic. If they get so dead for sleep they try to balance it off with barbiturates, then the real trouble starts. Look, Enelio, Wally McLeen came here to find his daughter. He went looking for Rockland and found him. So Rockland said that, for a fee, he might be able to produce her. He knew the girls were guests of Eva Vitrier, and we can assume he knew her place is like a fortress. What he would have to do is get to Minda, con her into writing a note to her father, peddle the note for half the money with the balance on delivery of the girl. But according to what Mrs. Vitrier told the police when she identified the body of the Bowie girl, Minda and Bix had quarreled, and Minda had gone to Mexico City a few days earlier. So Rockland went back to Bruce Bundy’s house and tried to leave in the middle of the night, but Bundy had different ideas. So he didn’t get to leave until Saturday, a little past noon. That leaves the rest of Thursday evening, and all day Friday, and half of Saturday, for Wally McLeen to find out where his daughter might be. I think he could have managed it. I think he could have gotten to the Vitrier estate without any help from Rockland. That’s as far as I can take it. It’s a point of focus, for Wally McLeen, Minda, Rockland and Bix. So the Frenchwoman must know something that will make sense out of it. What’s the name of that little lawyer again, on the crutches?”

“Alfredo Gaona y Navares.”

“And I can’t get past him to locate Eva Vitrier. Can you?”

“I would think no.”

“But he does communicate important things to her.”

‘Maybe not direct. Anyway, I have told you-I don’t want to play very much of these games of yours, McGee.“